Our Fight Against Cancer — India

Cancer Together is a youth organization focusing on creating a safe space for youth to reflect, discuss, and learn about the impacts of cancer. It was launched a few months back during the lockdown with an international team from countries like the UK, USA, South Africa, and India! This organization was launched by two girls with a vision from high school in the UK, Tanvi Rao and Priya Shah. Our first meeting was online, which is pretty much the norm these days! As we got active responses from a lot of our international members, we decided to further localize our efforts and launch chapters in different localities around the world with some help from our enthusiastic members.

Amongst the other chapters that we launched, one of our first was the Indian chapter. This chapter is headed by four high school girls from India: Ananya Borde, Keya Bhuta, Poulomi Pitale, and Vedika Diwan. The aim of our organization, similar to the main branch, is to organize events and spread awareness about the effects of cancer in the Indian community. Through these events, we aim to raise money to fund cancer research institutions in India to help those suffering from the disease. In India, a large percentage of deaths due to cancer are due to the ignorance about the disease.

That is why we strive to raise awareness about cancer so that it is detected at an early stage and can be treated. We want to do as much as we can to help the cancer community and to do so, our teams at Cancer Together India will not stop! Our advertising team, partnerships team, events teams, and the interviews team are collectively working with each other, constantly thinking of new ideas and ways to engage our community to help beat cancer. Especially during this global pandemic, cancer patients have been particularly vulnerable. Their routine check ups and treatments have been hindered due to the lockdown in fear of exposure to the virus. That is why though it is more difficult to work during a pandemic and a lockdown, our team feels that right now is when our efforts are needed the most.

Of course, when we started it was a bit difficult for our organization to gain popularity on social media — the main platform through which we will be engaging with our audience. However, as we started reaching out to our other organizations and asking them to spread a word about our mission, along with contacting everyone we know about our organization, we gradually started to receive applications from all over the country! Even now, people keep applying to be a part of our mission and we cannot be more grateful for their contribution towards this wonderful cause. Initiating this chapter was absolutely brilliant, and even before we actually launched it, we could not wait to get started.

Now that we have built a strong team to carry and implement our ideas, we are even more excited to be working with all of them. We have a lot of hopes from what our organization is capable of achieving and we will not rest until we reach our goal: raising awareness and beating cancer. We are continuously working on ideas of how to make our organization bigger and stronger. And we know that with your help, we can do it. We urge everyone to sign up and volunteer to be a part of this team so that you can help the cancer community and make an actual difference.

— Keya Bhuta (left), Ananya Borde (center), Poulomi Pitale (right),15, 15, 15

Pune, India