Paltown Development Foundation

Colontown: online community for colorectal cancer patients and caregivers. Colontown grew by over 1300 members in 2022 and served 8,000 by end of year. The community includes 125 groups, and is managed by a team of patients and caregivers, including a full time program manager, along with more than 100 volunteer member admins.

Searching safari is a 4-week guided workshop to help stage iv mss patients and caregivers find potential clinical trials. Participants gain access to resources for understanding trials, a personal trial list to reference in the future, and a cohort of fellow trial seekers for ongoing support! Colontown university developed a new website for this program in 2022.

Colontown university is an online disease education resource for colorectal cancer patients and caregivers, providing multimedia learning centers on topics of high interest to patients. In 2022, Paltown launched a new website to house colontown university, offering hundreds of pages of high quality educational content, including 59 zoom presentations by researchers and clinicians. The new site had 25,000 visitors in its first year.

Clinical trials education: this program provides patients with education around identifying appropriate clinical trials options and understanding research results in the context of treatment decisions. Program components include a registry of patient-reported outcomes, a trials curator to translate research results for patients, 2 multimedia learning centers on the colontown university website, and a new workshop series, searching safari, designed to help stage iv patients navigate the clinical trials information ecosystem.

2nd opinion project: provides financial support for stage iv colorectal cancer patients seeking second opinions and new treatment options. Support is provided for travel, lodging, and other expenses directly related to the second opinion appointment.

General programs