00:00:01 Intro
Thanks for listening to the GOSH podcast. GOSH stands for the Gynecologic Oncology Sharing Hub, an open space for real and evidence-based discussions on gynecologic cancers. We'll share the stories of gyne-cancer patients and survivors and hear from researchers and clinicians who are working behind the scenes to improve the lives of people with gynecologic cancers. Our podcast is produced and recorded on traditional unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. It is produced by the Gynecologic Cancer Initiative, a province-wide initiative in British Columbia with a mission to accelerate transformative research and translational practice on the prevention, detection, treatment, and survivorship of gynecologic cancers.
Hi, I'm Nicole Keay, and I'm Stephanie Lam and you're listening to the GOSH podcast.
00:00:55 Almira
Hi, I'm Almira Zhantuyakova. I do behind the scenes work for the GOSH podcast. Today I'll take over Stephanie and Nicole's place as a host. And you are listening to the GOSH podcast.
00:01:08 Almira
Hello, everyone. Welcome back to the GOSH podcast. Today we have a special guest, Jim Shepard. He is the founder of The Plunge for the Cure. The Plunge for the Cure Foundation is a registered Canadian charity that was established to raise funds for drug and treatment development targeting ovarian cancer. Jim initiated the foundation motivated by a family member's diagnosis and the alarming five-year survival rate of under 40 percent.
The foundation's focal point is an annual event held on the last Sunday in May, where individuals and teams engage in fundraising and take part in celebrating the arrival of summer by plunging into the water. These funds are directed towards the world-renowned UBC/VGH research facilities in Vancouver.
The episode aims to spotlight ovarian cancer issues, sharing the inspiring stories and efforts of individuals like Jim Shepard. Their collective goal is to increase awareness and improve outcomes for ovarian cancer, making a meaningful impact in the ongoing fight against this challenging disease.
00:02:17 Almira
Yeah. Thank you for joining us today on the podcast and willing to answer our questions.
So, let me start with the first question regarding founding the Plunge or the Cure. Can you take us back to the moment when you decided to establish Plunge for the Cure and what was the driving force behind creating this foundation?
Well
00:02:45 Jim Shepard
Well, if I go back to the very, very start I was sitting having dinner, I was just about to have dinner. I was sitting in a restaurant in Palm Springs. On a Saturday night and I was sitting down just about to put my knife and fork into this wonderful dinner was put before me that my cell phone rang, and it was my son. And he says, “Hey, dad. How are you doing?” I said “Good. How are you doing?” He says “well”, he says “Are you sitting down. And I say, “well, yeah, I'm sitting down. Why?”. He says, “well, I've got some pretty serious news to tell you”. And that is what Sadie says “Well, Leslie has been diagnosed with ovarian cancer.”
Well, anyway, to make a long story short, I was on the plane the next day back home, and then we began the vigil that goes with the diagnosis of ovarian cancer and the treatment that goes with it.
I knew nothing about ovarian cancer. I'd been involved with a company that designed to develop a drug for prostate cancer a number of years before. So, I was familiar with the whole idea of what it takes to run a clinical trial and to combat prostate cancer, I knew nothing about ovarian cancer, so I did some of my own work. And I was disturbed to see that the five-year survival rate was under 40% and when in fact I knew that the prostate cancer survival rate for five years was over 90%. I knew that because I was involved with the prostate cancer project that a company, I worked with that I was a chair of a company called Oncogenic whose purpose was to develop a prostate cancer drug. So, I saw the difference between the survival rate of prostate cancer for men and the survival rate of ovarian cancer for women. And I just thought there's something wrong here. I looked a little bit further and I saw that the awareness level of ovarian cancer was low and that, not surprisingly, results in a relatively low fundraising performance. So, between all that, I decided to do something and how I arrived at what we did was. I was born and raised in Vancouver. I was raised at, and the West End in English Bay was my playground. And I remember that on the third weekend in May, they brought the rafts around for swimming. And the lifeguards went on duty. And for us kids that went to Lord Roberts School, just a few blocks from English Bay. We would go to school with the towels around her neck because as far as we are concerned, those rafts arriving meant it was beginning of summer, so all of us down in the West and that lived there, in those days summer began for us in the last week of May and it was wonderful by the time other kids got out of school at the end of June and came down to English Bay Saying we all had 10s and we're feeling smug about ourselves. Well, we used to take pride in ourselves the fact that summer came early to us, I thought, you know what? That's not a bad idea, so I thought, you know what? We're going to hold an event that celebrates summer coming early in Vancouver. And we chose the last weekend, the last Sunday in May, to do that. And we celebrated with the punch for the cure, and we now hold it a kiss on the beach.
00:06:20 Almira
Great. Thank you for sharing that story. I was wondering if your experience with prostate cancer treatment and clinical trials helped you like navigate the Plunge for the Cure Foundation and its goals
00:06:39 Jim Shepard
Could you ask that question again please?
00:06:41 Almira
So, if your experience with prostate cancer like campaigns and clinical trials, did that experience help you in any way? Like founding Plunge for the Cure
00:06:57 Jim Shepard
What? Do you mean about my experience with the Prostate cancer initiative?
00:07:00 Almira
Yeah, yeah. Did that help?
00:07:03 Jim Shepard
Yes, it did. A couple of things. It showed me a couple of things. One is that a clinical trial is a huge undertaking. It requires thousands of, not hundreds, but thousands of patients to be enrolled. And so, it takes a lot of time, and it takes a lot of money and a lot of effort by very expert people for it to happen. And so, because of that, I was aware that if we're going to impact ovarian cancer, there's need to be more funding. And I felt that the Plunge for the Cure foundation that we've established for Vancouver to be held at Kits beach could be the forerunner for plunge for the cures on other parts of the world. So somewhere, maybe in 10 years from now, there'll be a dozen Plunge for the Cures around the world, raising millions of dollars for ovarian cancer. That's my long range. Look , right at the moment we're focused on making sure that we've got a tremendous success with plunge for the cure at Kits beach right here in Vancouver.
00:08:08 Almira
That's great. And I like how you like, bring back your childhood memories about like plunging and swimming in the ocean at English Bay. It's a very, very cool and sweet memory. And I feel like in terms of Plunge for the Cure, it's really accessible because a lot of fundraisers do like 5K marathons or like the full marathons. And it's kind of might be inaccessible to some people. But Plunge for the Cure, like everybody can do it seems like kids, families, anyone of different abilities, I would say. And I was going to ask you about more details about the annual sort of the culmination event in the last summer of May, what activities take place, what participants and supporters could expect from the event?
00:09:14 Jim Shepard
OK. Well, first of all, it's a genuine family event. We have young children. I'm not sure how young they could be, but they'd have to be big enough to be able to walk into the water, so maybe four or five years old as younger youngest ones, and the older ones there's a few of us in our 80s. I think there might even be one or two in their 90s, I'm not sure. So, it takes in all ages. And so, it's very open and very available for everybody. And it's a plunge. It's not a swim, although we do have several hard souls that make a point of swimming out there a little in the deeper water and stay out there for quite a long time, but they're the superheroes. The rest of us, we go in and plunge, splash around, take pictures and just have fun. And it was really quite amazing is that you're having so much fun when you're doing it. I have never heard anybody ever complain about the temperature of the water. You don't even feel that because it's just so enjoyable, because you're having fun doing something that is extremely important and that is raising funds and awareness for ovarian cancer. One important aspect of our foundation that is unique is that we are a pure charity. All volunteers. We have no head office. We have no paid staff, permanently paid staff, and we have no overhead. So, every dollar we raise goes directly into ovarian Cancer Research and UBC VGH.
00:10:51 Almira
That's great. And I when I was researching about Plunge for the Cure, I saw that there were some also activities for the kids to keep them engaged and things like that.
00:11:05 Jim Shepard
Yes, well. So, what we do is we hold it in the lawn area, right behind the boathouse restaurant at Kits beach. And we call it the punch bowl. And it's surrounded by tents. There's a tent there for the lifeguards and first aid people. There's another tent there for the popcorn and hot chocolate and treats and so on. And we this year, we're going to have. 10th, sponsored by the Royal Bank of Canada, another tent is sponsored by KPMG. Another tent is sponsored by Nicola Wealth. Another tent is sponsored by Tellus Health and there'll be some more. And we're going to be, we'll have a booth there, a tent there for CKWC Fox because they're going to be our medium for broadcasting our commercials and awareness. We have an area called the children's zone and in the children's zone, we'll have a balloon arches there providing balloon art artwork for the kids and we'll have face painting, and we'll have cornball engagements and other shows I activities and it is right adjacent to a very modern and advanced children's playground. So, the kids can have and will have a lot of fun there and they really enjoy it.
00:12:32 Almira
Yeah, it seems like it's really family friendly. And it's great to hear that all these big companies like Tellus and KPMG are supporting these events.
00:12:43 Jim Shepard
Absolutely, it's vital their support has the ones that have made it possible for us to make as much progress as we have. And we've done quite well in under two years. We've already turned over $470,000 to UBC VGH ovarian Cancer Research. So, we're making headway.
00:12:59 Almira
And when did the Plunge for the Cure started?
00:13:08 Jim Shepard
Well, we had a rehearsal plunge in the May 2022 out at Jericho Beach, and that was real rehearsal that worked the bugs out there was about 75 of us that did that plunge that day, but it was really to find out all the wrinkles and we discovered a number of wrinkles that had to be ironed out. And then we felt like ok, we're ready to go to basically go to the main event, which was Kits beach. So, in May 2023, we held our grand inaugural at Kits beach. We had over 200 plunging and it was great fun and from that we've learned to enhance it even more, make it even more fun. It'll be significantly bigger on May 26th, 2024.
00:13:53 Almira
Yeah, great. And that's really impressive. And just like basically in two to three years, you raised, as you said, 450,000.
00:14:04 Jim Shepard
470,000. Yeah. And there's more where that came from.
00:14:08 Almira
Yeah, that's really impressive. Just talking about the VGH and UBC research facilities, I was just wondering how does the Plunge for the Cure collaborate with them and how does the partnership contribute to advancement of ovarian cancer treatment?
00:14:27 Jim Shepard
Well, I wanted to make sure that we were dealing with experts and that the key is what I wanted to do is I didn't want to establish a charity that would have a head office with a bunch of bureaucracy involved that with the remote distance from the actual research laboratory. So right from the get-go, when I established the cabinet I recruited that a Doctor Dianne Miller, a retired the, I think most everybody in ovarian cancer know about Doctor Dianne Miller and Doctor David Huntsman, the two founders of off care. So, they both were the first two that I asked to join the cabinet doctor Janice Kwan, who said over a heads up of the gynecological area in ovarian Cancer Research and. And so, we had that we had the medical expertise right in our cabinet and then that was augmented with people like Juggy Sihota who heads up Tellus Health and who's on the board of UBC VGH. She's a huge help to us. And then a number of others there based Pamela Martin of everybody would know Pamela from her days at TV and radio. She's our ongoing MC. And Sam Sullivan, people would know about Sam. Sam is an expert in messaging and public communication. And Kelly head and who's an expert in communicating with the business community and so forth. So, it's the cabinet is made-up of a combination of expertise in the medical and expertise in the communication and expertise in business. So, I wanted to make sure all the different avenues were covered in our cabinet to make sure that we were communicating as effectively as we could.
00:16:17 Almira
Yeah, it sounds like it's a really powerful team from my interactions with Dianne Miller with Jessica Juan. It's really. And David Huntsman is my supervisor, so it's a.
00:16:30 Jim Shepard
Janice Kwan.
00:16:31 Almira
Oh. Janice Kwan. Yeah, we have ones in the lab. Yeah, it's great. I'm pretty sure some people from our listeners are already thinking about joining the event. And I was just wondering how individuals can get involved for this cause for the plan here
00:16:56 Jim Shepard
Good question. We have a website. It's called plungeforthecure.org. If you go on to that website, it'll give you a guide, how you can register. And the registration just opened earlier this week. So, the timing of this interview is perfect. So if you go on to that, that website and just follow the prompts for register, you can register as an individual, but we really encourage people to register as a team, either a family team or a corporate office team or a school team, whatever group that you have with you and fundraise with it.
00:17:35 Almira
Yeah. Great. I will attach the link to the website and our show notes. So, to go to the link and see what's available. So, I know you mentioned a little bit about the future of Plunge for the Cure, but I was wondering if you can maybe elaborate about the future aspirations for the Plunge for the Cure and maybe some of the milestones for the foundation.
00:18:06 Jim Shepard
Yeah, basically what we're doing right now is we're refining the template of a punch for the cure right here at Kits beach in Vancouver. Once we've got that completely refined to the point where we say we've really got, we've covered everything, we've crossed the T's dotted all the I's. We've encountered all the possible complications that you can come run into with this kind of an event, and we've ironed out and we have a clear instruction book, if you will, on how to conduct a Plunge for the Cure. Once we've done that and it's going to be another couple of years before, I think we've really got the template completely clean and clear and precise. Once we have that, we would then start to reach out across Canada, starting probably with calibrate. And then probably next to Toronto. I'm not sure of that. It could be other places, but the idea my long-range goal is that this becomes such a successful and wonderful fun event in raising awareness and funding for ovarian Cancer Research. That is something that can catch fire eventually. But it won't catch fire until we get it absolutely perfect here in Vancouver, Kits beach. And then we move on out to other locations, but I can see where this could be, something that could spread globally if it's really done properly, but I don't even want to get ahead of myself. And you're just asking me what my long-range plan is, that's not in our plan right now. Those are sketch plans, but they're not going to be activated until we've got it absolutely right here in Vancouver.
00:19:50 Almira
To some of the milestones that you're thinking about in Vancouver, what are the things that you are planning for Vancouver for now?
00:20:00 Jim Shepard
Well, we don't talk about how much we're going to get. I'll tell you what it's like when I started this, I set out from a little island and a little boat with the cabinets David Huntsman and Dianne Miller and Janice Kwan and so forth. And we're heading away from this island, which is full of ovarian cancer. Not full of ovarian cancer, but it has ovarian cancer that isn't being beaten properly. And we're sailing away from that. And all we can see in front of us is the horizon. So, where we're going on that horizon, it's not really clear, so I can't spell it to you. So, If you ask me about my progress to do that, I look back and see how far we are from the island. And right now, we're 470,000 miles, $470,000 away from that island. And I expect by the end of the year we'll be much, much more than that. But I don't talk about how much we're going to do ahead of us. I talk about how much we've already done, because to me what's getting done is more important to talk about then what we're going to do.
00:21:18 Almira
That's great. Thank you. I think that was my last question and thanks so much. First of all, for doing for founding the Plunge for the Cure and doing all the work. Thank you so much for that. I do believe that this is a really great initiative in this podcast. We talk a lot about Women's Health, how it's under have been historically underfunded under studied and you are here and your team is doing the work to improve that or to fight that and thank you so much for all your work. And joining us today. Thanks.
00:21:59 Jim Shepard
OK. Well, just to encourage everybody, come on out to the plunge. If you're not going to plunge, then just come out and that cheers on and we'll have doctor Janice Kwan there, who'll be able to take your credit card with the donation.
00:22:11 Almira
Thank you so much. And yeah, everybody follow the link in the show notes to the Plunge for the Cure website. Then join us for the plun ge on the 26th of May .
00:22:24 Jim Shepard
Six. Yeah, 26, I mean, yeah.
00:22:27 Almira
Yeah, perfect. Thank you.
00:22:29 Speaker 1
Thanks for joining us on the Gosh podcast to learn more about the Gynecologic Cancer initiative and our podcast. Make sure to check out our website at Gainey, Cancer, initiative.ca.