Creating a strategy

A national charity needs the help of its staff and volunteers to develop a new strategic plan.

Canadian Cancer Society CEO Martin Kabat was in Thunder Bay Wednesday and said with more than 65,000 volunteers across Ontario, contacting all of the people involved in the society is a challenge. Despite the difficulty of the process, he said they all deserve to be part of the process.

"We’re trying to find a way to include the entire organization in the process of building a plan," Kabat said. "In the end it’s the volunteers who will execute that plan."

The society uses money it raises for research and prevention programs. But it also has a job to provide people with information. Kabat said one campaign from the society is teaching people about the dangers of tanning beds and lobbying the government to regulate that industry. People, especially youth, increase their chance of skin cancer by using tanning beds he said.

"Tanning beds today have the same carcinogenic impact, they’re classed exactly like cigarettes," he said. "That’s how dangerous they are and yet there is no regulation whatsoever"

Research is another major component of the society’s mandate. It spent $48 million last year researching new treatments for cancer patients.

Kabat added that the goal is to find treatment options that kill the cancer and not the patient.

"We’re looking at a whole vast range of new treatments that will do this," Kabat said.
A vital component for the north is the society’s peer-to-peer support programs, especially transportation. Without support from the society, Kabat said he has heard from people in the north that they need that support.

"We’ve been told by people that if not for transportation they would sit home and die" he said.

The new strategic plan will also include ways to work together with other charities instead of competing with them for the limited dollars.

"We’re going to return that money to the community. It’s not going to go into some black hole in Toronto that no one can define, it’s going to come right back here to meet the needs of Thunder bay and other communities in the province," he said.