JDRF New England Young Leadership Committee
The JDRF Young Leadership Committee (YLC) is a group of passionate and motivated young professionals who believe in JDRF's efforts to cure T1D while finding ways to improve the lives of people with T1D today. The YLC is dedicated to supporting and raising awareness for JDRF through various fundraising, networking, and social events that attract young professionals in the Greater Boston area. Members have a special connection to T1D—whether they live with the disease everyday or are connected through a friend or family member.
YLC Signature Event Committee
Maggie Berkeley – President
Elizabeth Erickson –Vice President
Ryan Stuebe –Secretary & Treasurer
Billy Reardon –Past President
John Swanson –Signature Events Sub-committee Chair
Lauren LoPresti –Marketing Sub-committee Chair
Nick Anderson –Challenge Sub-committee Chair
Beneficiary: JDRF New England
JDRF leads the global type 1 diabetes research effort to keep people healthy and safe until we find a cure for the disease. Help us create a world without T1D. Millions of people around the world live with T1D, a life-threatening autoimmune disease that strikes both children and adults. There is no way to prevent it, and at present, no cure. JDRF works every day to change this by amassing grassroots support, deep scientific knowledge and strong industry and academic partnerships to fund research.
What is Type 1 Diabetes?
With T1D, your pancreas stops producing insulin—a hormone the body needs to get energy from food. This means a process your body does naturally and automatically becomes something that now requires your daily attention and manual intervention. If you have T1D, you must constantly monitor your blood-sugar level, inject or infuse insulin through a pump, and carefully balance these insulin doses with your eating and activity throughout the day and night.
However, insulin is not a cure for diabetes. Even with the most vigilant disease management, a significant portion of your day will be spent with either high or low blood-sugar levels. These fluctuations place people with T1D at risk for potentially life-threatening hypoglycemic and hyperglycemic episodes as well as devastating long-term complications such as kidney failure, heart attack, stroke, blindness and amputation.