Reid R. Sacco Adolescent & Young Adult (AYA) Cancer Alliance

The Reid R Sacco Adolescent & Young Adult (AYA) Cancer Alliance is an all-volunteer organization dedicated to its mission of improving the clinical care, medical treatment, and outlook for AYAs diagnosed with cancer. Established in 2005 shortly after the death of our son, Reid, at age 20, after a two-year battle with cancer. Reid was stricken with a rare sarcoma, but one that is predominantly found in teens and young adults. During the fight for his life they found tragic gaps in care and treatment of AYAs diagnosed with cancer. Operating in unfortunate silos, the Pediatric Oncology and Medical Oncology communities left the AYA group grossly under-served. One result was that this age group did not proportionately benefit from advances in cancer treatments and its survival rates remained among the poorest of all age groups.

Three months following Reid's death, his family held its first Reid's Ride 28-mile Bike Ride. Now in its sixteenth year the Ride has raised over $3 million and has used these proceeds to dramatically increase public and medical-professional awareness about the situation, an to promote and fund the launch (with interrupted annual support to) two Reid R Sacco AYA Cancer Programs in New England. These programs are innovative pioneers in changing the models-of-care and clinical research for AYAs diagnosed with cancer and AYA cancer survivors.

Mission:
To help others achieve two goals that Reid could not attain before his premature death, those being:
• To attend the college of his choice; and
• To survive cancer.
To this end, the mission of the Alliance is to provide a fundraising and educational organization from which to promote scholarship, medical research, and other benevolent purposes that, directly or indirectly, correlate with the values, ambitions, and life of Reid Sacco.

Vision:
To one day be regarded as an organization that has effectively provided pivotal funding and/or the impetus for having found a cure or effective long-term treatment for the sarcomas and other cancers that primarily affect adolescents and young adults. Our dream is to awake one day to the realization that these cancers have become routinely curable.