Posted on May 20, 2015

Where Everyone Has a Voice & Story CANVA (2)The Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization (ADAO) is dedicated to preventing asbestos exposure, eliminating asbestos-related diseases, and protecting asbestos victims’ civil rights through education, advocacy, and community initiatives.

Whether ADAO is working on stronger asbestos legislation in Washington, D.C. or speaking at asbestos educational conferences around the world, our community goes with us. How? Our Share Your Story (SYS) collection provides a platform for Mesothelioma Warriors or family members to share how asbestos has affected them. These stories save lives by helping people understand how to prevent asbestos exposure, provide much-needed support to other shattered families dealing with asbestos disease and the heartbreak of losing loved ones, and assure other asbestos victims that they are not alone. ADAO also uses these stores as a powerful demonstration of asbestos’ impact when advocating for regulation on The Hill. At a recent Congressional staff briefing, ADAO distributed copies of 70 different Share Your Stories to attendees and displayed eight posters of victims’ messages around the room in order to personalize the issue and put faces to the names of those affected.

In 2013, ADAO designed and published “Shared Stories: How Asbestos Changed Our Lives,” a book comprised of asbestos victims’ Share Your Stories, for our annual conference in Washington, DC.  You can view and share nearly 70 stories with a single click.

ADAO is proud that the Share Your Story collection has grown to almost 150 stories from 7 countries and 40 U.S. States, but we still need more!  We are especially seeking stories from Delaware, Kansas, Maine, Mississippi, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, and Wyoming so that we have stories from all 50 U.S. states.  If you haven’t Shared Your Story, please do so today.  Every single story told matters.

Together, change is possible.

Linda