It’s always nice to be told you are doing a good job. It’s even nicer when it’s unexpected. That’s certainly the case when we, the Communications Team at the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, found out we’d been named as a finalist for the Patient Advocacy Award (non-profit category) as part of the Phacilitate Advanced Therapies Awards.

To be honest, we didn’t even know we’d been nominated. But who cares. We are now in the final. And we are in good company. Our friends at Americans for Cures were also nominated. They advocate for stem cell research in California and were instrumental in passing Proposition 14 in 2020; that voter initiative refunded CIRM with $5.5 billion.

The other finalists are the Alliance for Cancer Gene Therapy and the Rare Advocacy Movement.

While we focus on different areas, we all share a common goal: ensuring the patient’s voice is front and center in all we do. At CIRM we have patient advocates on our Board and on the panel of experts who review applications for our funding. Patient advocates help guide the clinical trials we fund. As we expand our efforts to reach every community in California, patients and patient advocates guide that work as well.

We do this work because it matters, and because without the support of the patient advocacy community, we wouldn’t be here.

It’s an old cliché that when you are in this position you say, “it’s an honor just to be nominated.” But in this case, it’s true.