Giving Center

The American Cancer Society was founded in 1913 as the American Society for the Control of Cancer (ASCC) by 15 prominent physicians and business leaders in New York City. At that time, a cancer diagnosis amounted to near certain death. Rarely mentioned in public, this taboo disease was steeped in fear and denial. Physicians sometimes did not tell their patients they had cancer, and patients often did not tell their friends and families if they had been diagnosed. Today, the American Cancer Society is a global leader in the fight against cancer, with $1 billion in resources annually to save lives by helping people stay well and get well, by finding cures, and by fighting back against the disease. Thanks in part to the Society’s work, there are 11 million people alive in the United States alone who have survived cancer. To put it another way, we’ve helped create more than 300 birthdays each and every day just since the early 1990s. And we won’t rest until we expand that progress so that no one – in the U.S. or around the world – will ever lose another birthday to cancer.