Relay for St. Jude 2025
Every year at this time1, my pals at the Relay podcast network raise money for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital as a part of Childhood Cancer Awareness Month.
I’m happy to announce that I’ll once again be participating in the live 12-hour Podcastathon from St. Jude’s campus in Memphis on September 19 at noon Eastern. Yep. 12 hours. Circle a large space on your calendar for that. It will be fun and wacky and I hope we raise an awful lot of money for St. Jude while we’re on the air.
I’ve been to St. Jude several times over the last few years, not just for the Podcastathon but for some other events. This spring, most of the hosts of this year’s Podcastathon attended a special St. Jude event for fundraisers and the Relay crew was given the special honor of being taken into an area with patients, which post-COVID has been a lot less common.
After years of raising funds for St. Jude and seeing all those kids on the videos they produce, let me just tell you that it hit a lot harder to see actual cancer patients being rolled around in strollers and wheelchairs and red wagons (really!) in the actual facility. There’s one thing to know it intellectually, and another to share a space with the actual patients of St. Jude. This stuff matters so much.
St. Jude’s mission statement is: No child should die in the dawn of life. This has led the organization to treat children for free (there are no bills!), take care of their families, and also launch an enormous effort to research cures for cancer and other childhood diseases.
On one of my recent visits I got to hear a doctor talk about how genetic profiling of cancers has transformed our understanding of the disease. Cancers that used to have simple names based on where we found them are now, genetically, identified as being different sorts of cells with entirely different methods of treatment. This has led to targeted therapies that can not just cure a child’s cancer, but ensure that they are as minimally affected by the treatment itself as possible. As the doctor said, the goal is not just to see these kids live to adulthood, but to see them flourish, graduate from college, get married, that sort of thing.
A lot of your favorite writers and podcasters from the Apple world devote a lot of time to this great cause. If you can, I encourage you donate today. And I hope you’ll tune in on YouTube for the Podcastathon on September 19.
- For those of us involved in this event, it’s “basically” been September for a few months now. So forgive us for firing off the starting gun a little early. ↩