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 total. Kenya’s medical infrastructure meant that every appointment required hours of travel from our home to Nairobi, hired drivers, constant coordination by phone and text across an eight-hour time difference, and out-of-pocket payments that drained the family’s savings. There was no local oncology clinic. No patient navigator. No one to sit with my father and explain what his doctors were telling him. In 2016, he was gone.
When my mother received the same diagnosis in 2020, the cycle started again: the scramble for transportation, the coordination of caregivers, the financial devastation. She died in 2022.
Two parents. Two cancer journeys. Both defined by isolation, inadequate resources and a health-care system that, for all its dedicated practitioners, simply could not provide the kind of community-based support that might have eased their suffering or my own. The grief settled into something I could not shake, and for a while, I did not know what to do with it.
Eventually, though, I found my answer in the one place I spend more of my work life than anywhere else: my classroom.
For the past several years, I have deliberately structured my capstone courses in public relations around partnerships with cancer-fighting nonprofit 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 case studies or simulated campaigns. My students operate as real PR agency teams serving real clients with real stakes.
The results have been tangible. In 2022, a team of my students won first place nationally in the Public Relations Student Society of America’s Bateman Case Study Competition, based on a campaign they developed for the Lymphoma Research Foundation. More recently, my fall 2025 capstone class piloted the Lymphoma Research Foundation’s new Collegiate Champion Program, an initiative that invites college students nationwide to serve as campus advocates, deliver the foundation’s resources to oncology clinics in their communities and raise funds for lymphoma research. Representatives of the foundation were deeply impressed with the students’ work, and our pilot will guide the national rollout of the program to universities across the country.
My students did all this with zero budget.
That last detail matters because it illustrates a principle I now build every course around: Relationships are currency. Without money for promotional materials or event incentives, my students had to map every stakeholder on campus and beyond who could amplify their message. They secured product donations from Red Bull and Celsius through personal and professional connections. They persuaded Greek life chapters and faculty members to open their meetings and classrooms for campaign presentations. They got the student life office at UNL to approve high-traffic booth locations. They built a network of partnerships that many working professionals would be proud of, and they did it in a single semester.
I share this not because I think my approach is the only way to teach, but because I believe we underestimate the power of purpose in education. The research bears this out. A 2024 survey by the National Association of Colleges and Employers found that Gen Z professionals who participated in experiential learning while in college earn significantly higher salaries—an average of $59,059, compared with $44,048 for those who did not participate—and report higher rates of career satisfaction and greater perceived value in their higher education experience. These are not marginal differences. They represent a fundamentally different trajectory, and the benefits extend well beyond graduation.
But those statistics, compelling as they are, do not capture what I see in my classroom. They do not capture the student who told me that working on the lymphoma campaign made her realize she wanted to pursue nonprofit communications, or the student who cried during our final presentation because her grandmother had just been diagnosed with cancer and she finally felt like she was doing something that mattered.
They do not capture what it means to watch students move from thinking of assignments as hoops to jump through to understanding them as opportunities to make a difference in the world.
The broader labor market reinforces the case for this kind of teaching. The nonprofit sector accounts for nearly 10 percent of all private-sector employment in the United States, or roughly 12.8 million jobs, according to 2022 data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Organizations fighting cancer and other diseases need people who know how to build relationships, craft strategic messages and mobilize communities. We should be training students accordingly.
But the case for this kind of teaching goes deeper than workforce preparation. When students work on behalf of a cancer nonprofit, they are not just learning stakeholder mapping and strategic messaging in the abstract. They are learning these skills in the service of something that saves lives. That changes the texture of the work. It changes how seriously they take it. And in my experience, it changes who they become.
I am transparent with my students about why I choose these partnerships. On the first day of class, I tell them about my parents. I tell them about the hours-long trips to Nairobi, about coordinating care from another continent, about the financial burden that compounded the emotional one. I tell them that in Kenyan culture, we honor our ancestors by carrying forward their values and ensuring their struggles were not in vain. I tell them that my parents did not have access to the kind of sophisticated support systems that organizations like the Lymphoma Research Foundation provide, but that through the students’ work, maybe other families will.
This kind of disclosure is not something every instructor would be comfortable with, and I do not suggest it as a universal model. But I have found that when I am honest about the personal stakes behind our class partnerships, it permits students to bring their own whole selves to 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, a shift happens in the room. The project stops being an assignment and starts being a mission.
I want to make a practical case to my fellow educators, especially those in communications, public relations, marketing and adjacent fields: Consider centering your experiential courses around organizations whose missions address deep human needs. Cancer nonprofits are one avenue, but the principle applies broadly. The point is to find clients whose work carries genuine weight, organizations where the stakes are not quarterly earnings but human welfare. When students see that their strategic communication skills can influence whether a family gets connected to cancer resources or whether a patient navigates treatment with support instead of alone, they learn something that no textbook can teach: They learn that their profession matters.
The operational model I have developed is straightforward and replicable. I approach nonprofits whose missions align with my teaching goals and pitch a semester-long partnership in which my students function as a pro bono agency team. The nonprofit gets strategic communication support it may not be able to afford. My students get a real client, real deadlines and real accountability. The university gets documented evidence of community engagement and student outcomes. Everyone benefits.
What makes this work more than a service-learning checkbox is the intentionality behind the choice of partner. I do not pick these organizations at random. I pick them because I know, from the most painful experience of my life, what it means when cancer patients and their families lack support. That knowledge shapes every assignment I design, every deliverable I require and every conversation I have with students about what it means to practice public relations with purpose.
Cancer took my parents. But it also clarified something I might never have understood so viscerally: that the classroom is not just a place to transmit knowledge. It is a place to channel loss into purpose, to transform grief into action and to show a room full of 20-year-olds that the skills they are learning can change lives, including their own.
Elizabeth Redden
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