The Campaign Against Aging

The health and vigor of an advocacy community might be measured by the number of different initiatives presently underway. This is a marker for the number of people who feel strongly enough and sure enough about the envisaged end goals to get out there and spend their own money and time to make a difference. More of these people will bring a greater diversity of ideas to the community, and enable a more rapid exploration of what works and what doesn't work. Many hands make light work, and this is as true in advocacy as anywhere else.

So that said, allow me to point you towards the most recent addition to the stable of grassroots longevity science advocacy groups, the Campaign Against Aging. Insofar as science goes, the founders support the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence viewpoint: don't try to slow aging, but rather identify the biochemical damage that causes age-related degeneration and work to repair it, thereby reversing aging. From a recent thread in their forum:

We will be starting a major awareness raising campaign in February, lasting through February and perhaps March. This campaign will use "feet on the ground" methods such as posting flyers, distributing business cards, speaking to groups of people, and so on. I'll provide more details as the plans solidify. The tentative goal is to reach about 5,000 to 20,000 people by these methods.

This is a good start. I don't recall this methodology being tried at this scale in recent years by the longevity science community. The more usual focus tends to be on online advocacy, networking in the fundraising and scientific communities, and conferences. Having the bandwidth and enthusiasm to try new things - or old things that have worked for established organizations in other fields - is one of the benefits of organizational diversity.

I see that the Campaign has a Facebook page, and a list of suggested ways to help advance their efforts. There is also this:

Hopefully the Campaign Against Aging will prosper, establish a solid means of raising funds, and ultimately advance the state of SENS-like scientific research. Whether that is the case is as much up to you as it is up to the founders - so take a look at what they have to say at their website, and see if you want to help out.

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