In 2014, my father was diagnosed with cancer in Kenya. I was thousands of miles away, teaching at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, and the helplessness I felt was complete. Kenya’s medical infrastructure meant that regular employment required hours of travel from our home to Nairobi, hired drivers, constant phone calls and texting during the eight-hour time difference, and out-of-pocket payments that depleted the family’s savings. There was no local oncology clinic. No sailor is patient. No one will stay with my father and explain to him what his doctors have been telling him. In 2016, he was not.
When my mother received the same diagnosis in 2020, the cycle began again: transportation hack, caregiver interactions, financial meltdown. He died in 2022.
Two parents. Two journeys of cancer. Both are defined by isolation, inadequate resources and a health care system, for all its dedicated staff, that cannot provide the kind of community-based support that might ease their suffering or mine. Grief remained something I couldn’t shake, and for a while, I didn’t know what to do with it.
However, I finally found my answer in the one place where I spend more time of my professional life than any other place: my classroom.
A few years ago, I deliberately planned my major in public relations in partnership with non-profit cancer organizations. My students have worked with the Lymphoma Research Foundation and Angels Among Us, a Nebraska-based organization that supports families of children undergoing cancer treatment. These are not hypothetical events or simulated campaigns. My students work as teams in a real PR agency working for real clients with real stakes.
The results were obvious. In 2022, my student team won first place nationally in the Public Relations Student Society of America’s Bateman Case Study Competition, based on a campaign they did for the Lymphoma Research Foundation. Recently, my capstone class for the fall of 2025 explored the new Lymphoma Research Foundation’s Collegiate Champion Program, an initiative that invites college students across the country to serve as campus advocates, bring foundation services to oncology clinics in their communities and raise money for lymphoma research. Foundation representatives were deeply impressed by the students’ work, and our pilot will guide the national rollout of the program at universities across the country.
My students did all this on a shoestring budget.
That last detail is important because it shows the principle I am building now in every lesson: Relationships are money. Without money for promotional materials or incentives for the event, my students had to draw all the stakeholders on campus and beyond who could amplify their message. Secure product offerings from Red Bull and Celsius through personal contact with experts. They recruited Greek life chapters and faculty members to open their meetings and classes to make campaign presentations. They got the student life office at UNL to approve crowded booth locations. They built a collaborative network that many working professionals would be proud of, and they did it in one semester.
I am not including this because I think my teaching method is the only teaching method, but because I believe that we underestimate the power of purpose in education. Research proves this. A 2024 study by the National Association of Colleges and Employers found that Gen Z professionals who participated in experiential learning while in college earned significantly higher salaries—an average of $59,059, compared to $44,048 for those who did not participate—and reported higher rates of job satisfaction and greater perceived value in their higher education experience. This is not a small difference. They represent a very different route, and the benefits go beyond graduation.
But those statistics, compelling as they are, don’t capture what I see in my classroom. They don’t take the student who told me that working on a lymphoma campaign made her realize she wanted to continue in nonprofit communications, or the student who cried during our last presentation because her grandmother had just been diagnosed with cancer and she finally felt like she was doing something important.
They don’t understand what it means to watch students move from thinking of assignments as hoops to seeing them as opportunities to make a difference in the world.
A broad labor market reinforces the case for this type of teaching. The nonprofit sector accounts for about 10 percent of all private sector jobs in the United States, or about 12.8 million jobs, according to 2022 data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. Organizations fighting cancer and other diseases need people who know how to build relationships, create strategic messages and mobilize communities. We have to train students in the right way.
But the issue of this type of teaching goes deeper than preparing the workforce. When students work for a cancer nonprofit, they’re not just learning to map stakeholders and strategic messages in the abstract. They learn these skills in the service of something that saves lives. That changes the texture of the work. It changes how seriously they take you. And in my experience, it changes who they become.
I am open to my readers about why I choose this relationship. On the first day of class, I tell them about my parents. I tell them about the hours-long trip to Nairobi, about coordinating care from another continent, about the financial burden combined with the emotional one. I tell them that in Kenyan culture, we honor our forefathers by carrying forward their principles and ensuring that their struggle is not in vain. I tell them that my parents didn’t have access to the kind of sophisticated support programs offered by organizations like the Lymphoma Research Foundation, but that through student work, maybe other families will.
This type of disclosure is not something every teacher is comfortable with, and I am not suggesting it as a universal model. But I’ve found that if I’m honest about the personal stakes behind our classroom partnership, it allows students to be more independent in the work. Many of them have their own stories of cancer in their families. Some have lost parents or grandparents. When I tell them mine, there is a shift in the room. The project ceases to be an assignment and begins to become a mission.
I want to speak to my fellow educators, especially those in communications, public relations, marketing and related fields: Consider focusing your knowledge studies on organizations whose missions address the deepest needs of people. Cancer non-profit is one way, but the principle applies more widely. The point is to find clients whose work carries real weight, organizations where the stakes are not the quarterly salary but the well-being of people. When students realize that their valuable communication skills can impact whether a family is connected to cancer services or whether a patient receives treatment with support instead of alone, they learn something that no textbook can teach: They learn that their work matters.
The working model I developed is straightforward and repeatable. I approach nonprofits whose missions align with my teaching goals and set up semester-long partnerships where my students work as a pro bono agency team. A non-profit organization receives meaningful communication support that it may otherwise not be able to afford. My students experience a real client, real deadlines and real accountability. The university receives documented evidence of community involvement and student outcomes. Everyone benefits.
What makes this work more than a service learning checkbox is the purpose of partner selection. I do not choose these organizations at random. I choose them because I know, from the most painful experience of my life, what it means when cancer patients and their families have no support. That knowledge shapes every job I do, every delivery I need and every conversation I have with students about what it means to do public relations with a purpose.
Cancer took my parents. But it also clarified something that I would never have understood at first glance: that the classroom is not just a place to transfer information. It’s a place to turn loss into purpose, turn grief into action and show a room full of 20-year-olds that the skills they’re learning can change lives, including their own.
