Your OMF gift tripled this week!

https://www.omf.ngo/?form=TripleTuesdayOMF



Triple Tuesday OMF begins today!

What if the entire world came together to give? Imagine what we could do!

We are thrilled to announce that in response to the new opportunities and hope from the Community Symposium, two anonymous donors have stepped forward to encourage everyone to contribute at this critical stage in ME/CFS research.

Watch Linda Tannenbaum's message here.

Our generous matching donors will triple every dollar you donate. So your $10 donation will be tripled to $30; $100 to $300; and $1,000 to $3,000. Your donation, of any amount, will help OMF reach our goal of $525,000.

 

What do they need the $525,000 for? And have OMF announced how they will be using the $5 million donation from the Pineapple Fund yet does anybody know?

 

@Andy YES! We want to know!

 

I think they have said donations are primarily used to hire more people so they can get more done and secure salaries for two years at a time so they can attract the best researchers. Would be good to have a public statement/overview, though.

 

Indeed It looks like it’s not specified on their website why they are setting a 525.000 dollar goal now.
see below.

But surely a lot of funding is needed to support this group.

wanted to donate last week. Glad I waited because now its tripled! Too bad donations are not tax deductible if outside US.


Triple Tuesday OMF includes donations made any day of the week from October 23 to Giving Tuesday on November 27.

Join this global action to accelerate finding a cure to help millions of people suffering from ME/CFS and other related chronic, complex diseases. Help them return to living the lives they dream about. Together we will raise over a half million dollars for research.

Triple Tuesday OMF donations support OMF’s efforts leading research and delivering hope for patients around the world.

Please join our Triple Tuesday OMF campaign!

#TripleTuesdayOMF will run from October 23 – November 27, 2018. Donate any day of the week during this period to have your gift tripled.

 

Your donation supports:

• ME/CFS Collaborative Research Centers at Stanford University & Harvard University
• Cutting-edge, cost-efficient research
• Research focused on molecular and cellular pathways to get to the core problems
• Testing pre-approved FDA drugs using in-lab technologies
• Collaborative research meetings
• Global collaboration with researchers, clinicians, and patients
• OPEN results to engage a broader research community
• Outreach to the world-wide patient community
• US effort to disseminate disease-related medical education to schools and physicians
• Collaborative meetings with clinicians to improve diagnosis and outcome

“We are all in this together. I have no doubt that we will figure out what has gone wrong in the bodies of patients with this tragic disease, and find treatments that will work to make it better or someday cure it.” Ronald W. Davis, PhD

 

I'm just curious is all, I did have a quick look on their website but couldn't see what the goal relates to. And as for the $5 million, I seem to remember Dr Montoya, in my Q&A with him, being very confident that he would know what to do with, I think it was, $1 million - it's 6 months now since OMF received their $5 million and it would be interesting to know if it has gone on supporting existing work or expanding their range of work with new projects, or whatever. I would love it if part of it went on employing whoever they need to employ to allow them to write up and submit their work for publication.

 

I thought that part of it went on setting up the Harvard centre and part on assuring continuity of employment (crucial for retaining skilled staff) but this is from memory and I could be wrong.

Maybe @JaimeS knows?

 

I expect good researchers need to get a decent wage!. I think we should all chip in if we can...it's a great opportunity to increase Research funding. Especially after the disappointing drop in NIH funding this year.

 

I’m not sure it’s a good idea to donate to something where the askers can’t be bothered to tell you what it’s for. I’m a little bit fed up with the near constant OMF non attributable or accountable fund raisers.

Come on OMF At least give us an idea as to why you want even more of patients limited funds.?

It would be great if we could have a few more formally reported results too before asking for more cash.

I’m not going to donate in case you were wondering.

 

I'd like to say thank you to everybody that donates.

 

They've been doing a lot of different studies and projects, and started a lot of them after the $5 million donation. They did an overview of all the research they were funding a few months ago, which you can see here: https://www.omf.ngo/2018/05/25/omf-funded-research-overview-2018/ They might have started some more stuff since then.

Since then they've mostly talked about how they need money to employ more people so the projects go faster.

 

Not all patients have limited funds. Some may even be loaded. (I’m not)
But to be able to triple my donation sounds good to me.

Furthermore if OMF is not on the right track than who is?
I expect great things from this team.

 

Actually I had missed that from them, and also missed that we have a thread on it here, https://s4me.info/threads/omf-funded-research-summary-25th-may-2018.4316/, so that does go some way, for me, to explaining where all the money that they received is going to.

 

Well perhaps I would have a little more confidence in them if they did more science (like reporting their findings) before doing a multi buy promotion or any of the many other sleazy marketing ploys they use to extract money out of people. I’m sure some patients are loaded, but the vast majority of people on this site I would say are not.

When posting fund raising threads of this sort it’s worth considering this ...you are effectively encouraging people to part with their cash by posting it here, so some responsibility has to be taken by the poster for spreading the campaign (and any other misleading information that goes with it (like we need more people to go faster...which I doubt) and of course all of us for encouraging it.

 

"What does your donation support?"

https://www.omf.ngo/your-donation-supports-research/

 

Hard for me to understand this kind of reaction on an ME patients forum. Clearly OMF needs multi millions over the next years. Our governments sure are not going to pay for it. So if we don’t support OMF, who will?
Or can you recommend another research group more worthy of receiving much needed funding?

 

Wow...
We are talking about Ron Davis and many other highly respected researchers here.

Sleazy marketing??
You think he'll be buying a nice new Mercedes from this?

 

Why them vs someone else and why pour money at them until they have shown they have something? They’ve got enough money to prove their worth...what I would like to see is reported findings before they get any more...otherwise it’s just platitude after platitude from them with nothing to show for it?

And sleazy...is a good definition for extracting cash on promises that never deliver. I am talking mainly about the marketing fund raising ploys being sleazy not the researcher.

An example would be to use patient desperation for a cure to extract donations under the guise of being open.

I am hopeful they will find something, but Ron Davis has been promising reported findings from his work for a while now ...it just doesn’t seem to come. For some reason he seems to think that further research funding can be given without doing this?

In research...negative findings are as useful as positive ones. This helps everyone.

 

You've edited your original post to remove the statement about 'sleazy' fundraising but didn't you say that the 'three for one' approach was sleazy?

If so, I don't think it is. If I was minted (which I'm not), and wanted to give a big donation to a charity, I'd be pressuring them to leverage it to spur more donations and in particular to encourage new donors to start giving by offering to double or triple their donations in exactly this way. It's to everyone's advantage.

The question about what OMF are spending it on and whether they really need it is a separate one and can probably be best addressed by contacting them and asking them, if you're not already satisfied with the information that they've already provided. Given how fragile fundraising tends to be, and how desperate we are for more patients and supporters to start giving, I think it's generally better to give a charity a chance to explain itself first before publicly raising doubts about it in a way that might harm donations, but that's just my opinion.

I share your frustration with the lack of publications so far, but I thought that Ron and others at the symposium had mentioned one or more papers submitted, if not in press. @JaimeS, I wonder if you could encourage some information to be forthcoming about this?

FWIW, I'll be donating this week.