Jeremy Payne is not only a fighter, but also a creator. Payne is a sophomore at UNL and right before his freshman year of college, started the club STAC. STAC stands for “Students Together Against Cancer.”
I interviewed Payne as to his motive for creating STAC and found his answers very amazing. In December of 2006, Jeremy was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma cancer. Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma is a cancer of the lymph tissue found in the lymph nodes, spleen, and other organs of the immune system.
Payne said, “After going through fourteen months of chemotherapy, three surgeries, medicinal regimens, spinal taps, bone marrow biopsies, CT scans, PET scans, and many other rigorous medical tests, procedures, and surgeries, I wanted to forget about the whole experience.”
He said it is due to mandatory community service hours from his high school that he was not able to forget about his experience. For his service hours, he decided to reach out to Make-a-Wish, where he did public service speaking for them for months. He said, “I decided that my experiences could benefit the lives of other people. Initially, I didn’t want people to associate me with cancer; I don’t want to receive pity for my experiences.” When he realized that beating cancer was something that he could not simply leave behind, Jeremy decided to act on it.
“When I realized my story could help others, however, I started to find ways to reveal it. The summer before my freshman year of college is when I got my friend together to see if we could start this organization.”
Payne acknowledges it was an ambitious project, but comments, “The reason I started STAC is not to help myself or to share my story, but to help people in similar situations to the people I met in the waiting room at Children’s Hospital in Omaha during my treatment.”
The purpose of STAC is to: first, provide emotional and financial assistance to local cancer patients, secondly, provide the students of UNL with opportunities to develop skills in their areas of interest and use them in settings that benefit people in the local community, and third, to assist other cancer-related organizations.
And because Payne decided to start STAC, they have accomplished so much in the past two years. “STAC has accomplished well beyond what it’s initial mission was intended. First…I have made it a huge emphasis to go to local high schools and middle schools to talk about leadership and finding your passion.”
Besides helping younger students start clubs in their own schools, Payne said that the most important thing STAC has done is assist the local cancer patients in the area. “In our second year of existence, we were already able to help out two cancer patients. The first patient was about to give up a whole month’s worth of treatment because his insurance was getting too expensive.” STAC was able to supply him with that treatment right around the 2013 holiday.
“To start off 2014, we made a donation to a woman who was one month away from entering remission. Our insurance payment took care of her final month of treatment before she became cancer free. And relieving that burden allowed her to become more comfortable around the time she was able to beat cancer.”
STAC has done amazing things for the local community.
If you want to get involved with STAC to help cancer patients around the area, you can find STAC on Facebook at: WWW. Facebook.com/huskerstac. Or, email Jeremy at: unlstac@gmail.com. You can also contact any of the executive members via email, Facebook, or Twitter. General STAC members meet every four weeks, and special committees meet every two weeks.
