Gilda’s Club Westchester is joining its fellow Cancer Support Community’s (CSC) network partners that include CSC, Gilda’s Clubs, and healthcare partnerships, to celebrate the second annual Community Is Stronger Than Cancer Day. Following the success of the previous year’s inaugural day, CSC and its network are excited to announce that they are continuing the tradition. The event is a day of awareness to promote the support, resources, and services that the passionate community provides to cancer patients, survivors, caregivers, and loved ones.
The celebration takes place each year on June 28, a date that coincides with the birthday of one of the great comic geniuses of the 20th century: beloved Saturday Night Live star Gilda Radner who died of ovarian cancer. It was Gilda Radner’s experience at The Wellness Community in Santa Monica, California that inspired the creation of Gilda’s Club. The Cancer Support Community was formed in 2009 when Gilda’s Club and The Wellness Community merged.
Gilda’s Club Westchester is part of the 190 locations in the United States and beyond that make up a network where cancer patients, survivors, caregivers, and loved one’s access free emotional support, healthy lifestyle activities, social connection, education, and referral services provided with compassion and expertise—in person or online. Across all locations, the network has served the community with nearly 300,000 visits in 2022. Each year, Gilda’s Club Westchester alone serves over 4,000 people. Gilda’s Club Westchester Member Mila Bello stated: Gilda Radner once said, “The goal is to live a full, productive life even with all that ambiguity.” And that’s just what Gilda’s has done for me. It’s allowed me to be more than my cancer and to live as fully as possible despite my diagnosis by providing me opportunities to take pleasure in social activities and FREE programs that I might not have been able to have had access to without Gilda’s.
In addition to having support in their community, participants are presented opportunities to join forces with other impacted people from partner locations to advocate on issues important to cancer patients at the state and national levels and to contribute to important research that inspires positive change in cancer care and the patient experience.
Executive Director of Gilda’s Club Westchester Sarah Sedo says “Being a part of Gilda’s Club and CSC means being a part of a community. It is about finding a place and people you can connect to during one of the most difficult life experiences someone can go through. No one wants to be in the position to seek out our services, but all we can hope is that once someone does, they feel less overwhelmed, less anxious, less depressed, and less alone. Every service we offer, for free to our members, is aimed at supporting them and making their cancer journey more manageable.”
Gilda’s Club Westchester is asking its supporters to help the network raise awareness of the services available to impacted people at no cost by sharing its social media posts using the hashtags #CelebrateCSCGC #CommunityisStrongerThanCancer.
