Show Your Appreciation for the Fundraising Work of Lifespan.io

The Lifespan.io and Life Extension Advocacy Foundation (LEAF) volunteers have over the past few years put together and maintained a crowdfunding infrastructure used to successfully raise hundreds of thousands of dollars for rejuvenation research projects. They have carried the message that aging can be effectively treated as a medical condition out to new audiences, expanded our community of supporters, and helped to connect researchers and entrepreneurs to new patrons. The LEAF volunteers are presently running a small fundraiser in search of monthly donors to help expand their present advocacy for the cause of rejuvenation research. If you have been following their efforts for the past few years, I encourage you show your appreciation for all they have done by signing up for a modest monthly donation.

Here at Lifespan.io we are funding research to help extend healthy human lifespan, and thanks to our community here we've done amazing work already: raising over $200,000 for companies and nonprofits working to overcome age-related disease, decrease the period of ill-health during life, and address key societal issues being faced by our aging population. All we've done thus far has been primarily volunteer effort, and we believe we can go so much further with even a modest budget of our own. So we're turning to you, and asking you to stand with us, to #BeTheLifespan, and help us overcome age-related diseases for good. What this means is that we're asking you to be a Lifespan Hero by supporting us with monthly contributions, which will allow us to not only fund more research but also offer amazing community rewards.

In addition to improving our features on this site, we'll create a private networking group for patrons and researches. We'll also begin running a live-streamed journal review, led by our own Dr. Oliver Medvedik, where we'll go through the latest papers with researchers and you, so we all learn together. We'll be able to make awesome collaboration videos with popular creators on services like YouTube to engage the world. This has the power to inform millions of people about the feasibility and desirability of longevity research, and can be a game changer in terms of raising societal awareness. If we can get to $10,000 a month, we'll even start running an annual full-scale longevity conference in New York City, to help make this research truly mainstream. In addition to driving the field forward with increased sharing of information, a stronger presence in NYC will attract private capital, and help build a thriving longevity biotech industry.

Every day over 100,000 people die of age related diseases: Alzheimer's, heart disease, cancer. Together we can fight this; together we can be Heroes.

Link: https://www.lifespan.io/campaigns/join-us-become-a-lifespan-hero/

Comments

I immediately signed up for a $25 monthly donation (cedar).

Posted by: Norse at April 20th, 2017 9:45 AM

Thank you Norse and thank you Reason too :) It means a huge amount to everyone at LEAF to know the community values our work. In an ideal world we could do it for free but after 2 years we have reached the point where we are too large and there is too much to do on a part time basis. We have lots of amazing things planned and we need our heroes - you guys, to lend us a hand. Thank you so much for believing in us and we have more quality content and more heading your way soon.

Posted by: Steve Hill at April 20th, 2017 11:28 AM

Donated. I'm still toying with the idea of raising my annual donation again by doing a 4 day fast or a march or something else painful to raise money from my friend network who seem amazingly resistant to ever reading any links I send them.

I've requested it before, but I was wondering if Lifespan.io could set up a tool/page/form so that members can conduct fundraisers with the money going directly to Lifespan while getting all the nice features of fundraiser pages such as a progress bar? The individual page addresses would not have to be on the lifespan.io address.

Sites like Justgiving take a 5% fee and then there is the paypal or whatever fee to transfer the eventual funds to lifespan.io

Also if there could be some template blurbs so that each fundraiser turns into a bit of a promotion about research in one of the seven SENS areas that would be cool. E.g. I'm raising $500 for lysosomal garbage research because...

Posted by: Jim at April 20th, 2017 7:33 PM

One thing I am a bit Leary about is the conference in New York. Given that there is already an annual rejuvenation biotechnology conference annually in the US already won't this just be a duplication of effort? I know conferences are fun to attend, but this one seems like a waste of money.

Posted by: Jim at April 21st, 2017 12:46 AM

Thanks for the support everyone!

Jim this is definitely an interesting idea, and something we can more seriously consider architecting with an expanded budget. I've actually seen similar structures employed in other areas as well, for example what the charity ExtraLife does with video gamers, and I think it can be a very powerful model.

Thanks for the suggestion and for the support.

Posted by: LifespanKeith at April 21st, 2017 12:50 AM

Good ideas Jim thanks.

Posted by: Steve Hill at April 21st, 2017 5:31 AM

Regarding the NYC conference; this is actually very important for the growth of the rejuvenation biotech industry for a variety of reasons. Here are a few: 1) More centralized hubs in major cities for knowledge transfer and public display is good for researchers (especially local ones) and for PR. 2) There is a ton of money in NYC, but it is all bound up in Fashion, Finance, and Real Estate. We have networked with numerous NY-based investors and funds curious about biotech that want to see events like this, both for information and as a public sign that there is a viable industry here to put money into. 3) It is politically important to display that interest for this research is not pigeon holed to just Silicon Valley or Boston. The Netherlands talk I gave last year has a few reasons why this is so.

Those are just some quick answers; but hopefully that makes the desirability of such a goal more clear.
Thanks again!

Posted by: LifespanKeith at April 21st, 2017 12:50 PM

Thanks for the reply Keith, I guess a conference could be useful after all if it is connecting researchers with funding. I am perhaps a bit negative on conferences as I did voluntary work with AIESEC at uni, but then saw at the international conference in Switzerland that most of the funding raised ends up on the members just having a good time (like a lot of the UN).

Posted by: Jim at April 21st, 2017 9:26 PM

Thanks for the clarification Jim; now I understand the nature of your concerns. I would like to believe that any one who has been in the trenches with our team knows that wasting resources on anything not to the purpose of our mission is the furthest thing from our minds.

Posted by: LifespanKeith at April 21st, 2017 10:27 PM
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