The philanthropists of our community, of greater and lesser means, stepped up to provide more than three quarters of a million dollars to the SENS Research Foundation in the last months of 2018. The work of the SENS Research Foundation depends on our support: building the foundations for rejuvenation therapies that would not otherwise be constructed, unblocking important research that is stuck, cultivating vital but neglected fields of science. Look at the yearly reports for much more detail. This non-profit is entirely dependent on philanthropic donations to power the vital work undertaken by its staff and allies in the research community.
Thank you very much to everyone who contributed to 2018's Reimagine Aging end-of-year fundraising campaign. The original General Fund goal of $500,000 was our most ambitious yet, and you enabled us to exceed this goal for an incredible $771,393 total! We are grateful beyond measure for your generosity and support to continue our mission of curing age-related disease. Every dollar you give helps bring the future we all want to bring into existence.
A very special thanks to Vitalik Buterin for his incredible gift of $350,000 in Ethereum, as well to IAS, Josh Triplett, Reason, Christophe and Dominique Cornuejols, Didier Coeurnelle, and Olivier Roland for providing matching grants during this campaign.
Here at Fight Aging!, Josh Triplett, Christophe and Dominique Cornuejols, and I put up a challenge fund for SENS Patrons, the monthly donors that supply a steady stream of funding to the foundation. For several years now we've aimed to grow that community of grassroots donors. They are steady folk; 80% of all of those who sign up stick around for at least a year, and the more donations that arrive on a schedule, the easier it becomes for the SENS Research Foundation staff to plan ahead and organize longer-term projects. We didn't do as well in 2018 as in 2017, only hitting 50% of our goal: $29,987 out of the $54,000 target - but it wasn't very many years ago that this would have been a sizable set of funding for the small organization that the SENS Research Foundation was back then.
In general, 2018 was a more muted environment for charitable fundraising. It would have been hard to top the end of 2017, at the height of the cryptocurrency bubble, when a great deal of philanthropic funding was disbursed to many research organizations. Now we are back to the point of having to work hard once again to grow our community, to persuade people that, in the midst of enthusiasm over clearance of senescent cells as a rejuvenation therapy, there is a great deal more necessary work to accomplish. One success does not complete the job at hand - there are still forms of age-related damage for which the science continues to languish, and each of them is enough on its own to produce age-related disease and death.
The efforts of the SENS Research Foundation and allied groups such as the Methuselah Foundation are just as vital now that the first rejuvenation therapies have been achieved as they were when only the vision existed. The road is only partly traveled, the journey only just begun, and our help is still required.
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