Considering recent organizational changes, we wanted to share news from our chapter.

This year, during great mission progress, came a global pandemic which disrupted our event-based fundraising model and forced us to reimagine many of our annual fundraisers to keep our community safe. During this time, it became clear that to continue funding critical, life-changing research, we would have to make some significant changes to our organization. Breakthrough T1D is now fast-tracking new strategies to drive mission momentum in the current challenging fundraising environment.

As part of these efforts, we’ve realigned our chapter footprint to support broader geographies more efficiently and become a more “volunteer-powered” organization. Moving forward, we will be a leaner organization with fewer staff and chapters sharing resources across larger geographic areas. As a result, the Greater Missouri & Southern Illinois and Kansas City chapters have now joined as one: the Kansas and Missouri Chapter, which will serve Kansas, Missouri and Southern Illinois.

The staff dedicated to the Kansas and Missouri Chapter are as follows:

• Sherri Lozano, Executive Director
• Tori Freeman, Sr. Development Manager
• Megan Hanna, Development Manager
• Marlo Martin, Outreach Manager
• Christina Reilly, Outreach Manager
• Kayla Taszarek, Development Coordinator

In the coming weeks, you will see updated website content and social media pages, as well as more details on how the Kansas and Missouri Chapter plans on accelerating our mission.  We invite you to read more about JDRF’s vision for the future and should you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out directly to our Executive Director, Sherri Lozano, at slozano@BreakthroughT1D.org.

Thank you for your support of our T1D community and Breakthrough T1D.