*November 2025*
Jill Feldman, a patient advocate with lung cancer and co-founder of the EGFR Resisters, joined Lung Cancers Today to discuss her journey into lung cancer advocacy, provide advice for those who are interested in getting involved, and reflect on the power of finding community.
Watch the video here and read the transcript below to learn more.
TRANSCRIPT:
I’ve been doing this for a long time, and people will say, “I could never do what you do.” I didn’t start out doing all of this, and I tell people all the time that when I started out in advocacy, I was helpless; I was hopeless. It was one step forward, ten steps back. It took me a while to realize that I didn’t have to cure lung cancer to make a difference. If you touch one person, if you help one person, that is a gift and that is meaningful. That took me a really long time to realize.
Nobody gets started diving in headfirst. The most important thing with advocacy is knowing that advocacy is more than the historical term advocacy—meaning political advocacy—it starts with self-advocacy. You start by being able to advocate for yourself. Then, you can speak, you can share your story and inspire others. People do that, and it’s really about getting your feet wet here and there.
One thing is that—I mean this from the bottom of my heart, it’s not a cliche at all—every story matters. The bigger story is a tapestry of every story. Whether you’re a big, thick, strong thread or a little thin thread, every stitch needs to be there to hold that tapestry together. That’s our community. That’s the power of community.
Being involved in a community is sometimes where that starts as well. It’s not just about “You need to go out and volunteer and do this, this, and that.” It’s about becoming part of that bigger story and that community, and understanding that that is our power, because everybody’s different, and everybody has something unique and important to bring to this story. That’s what I always say. I always tell people, “Either jump on an online meeting—the White Ribbon Project has their online meetings once a month—or go to an event or join a team somewhere. Just get your feet wet.”
Whatever it is, it has to energize you, not deplete you. That’s hard to do sometimes, but it has to be something that’s energizing, not depleting. For me, what has always helped is having somebody to do it with. I don’t always have somebody to do it with, but just having somebody else there, so that when you’re not feeling it, they can pump you up and motivate you.
It’s a great control to have in a situation where you don’t have a lot of control. Besides making sense of what I went through, and besides never wanting anybody to ever have to go through what my family went through, I look at my advocacy as, “I’m going to choose the role lung cancer is going to have in my life.” If I didn’t have my advocacy, it would be all about losing everybody at such a young age and my own diagnosis. I’m taking control of this. I’m going to be an advocate, and that’s how I’m going to control this situation.
It doesn’t matter what kind of lung cancer you have. There is a large, caring, welcoming community out there that is fighting with you and for you. Reaching out to anybody, any of the organizations and saying you want to get involved, that is really the first step. Hopefully, you’ll find purpose in it as well.
I don’t like to ever push people to get involved. I don’t think it’s for everybody, but I think finding a community—however little or however much you’re involved— is not just lifesaving. It is life changing. So I definitely encourage that.
