Story
We’re challenging cancer stigma through community, creativity, and connection.
Led by people with lived experience, CancerBae creates real-world spaces, from community Speak Up hubs to mental health retreats and inclusive sports and wellness events, where people feel seen, supported, and never alone.
Help Us Shift the Stigma Around Cancer
Too often, cancer is talked about in narrow and limiting ways, defined by silence, exaggerated positivity, or the assumption that you’re either fighting or failing. At CancerBae, we see it differently.
We’re building a bold, community-led movement that creates space for people to show up as their full selves, not just their diagnosis. Through storytelling, peer support, sport, and mental health initiatives, we’re challenging the stigma that isolates people with cancer and showing what it means to live fully, even in the face of uncertainty.
Why CancerBae Exists
Stigma doesn’t just affect how people are treated. It affects how they feel, how they cope, and whether they reach out for support.
A major review (Huang et al., 2020) found that people who experience cancer-related stigma are more likely to face depression, anxiety, emotional distress, and delays in treatment. The impact is especially severe for young adults, men, and people from marginalised communities.
As someone living with stage 4 cancer and a rare genetic condition, I’ve seen how stigma silences the complexity of our experiences and how desperately we need spaces that meet us with honesty, empathy, and respect - Will
That’s why we started CancerBae.
What We’re Building
CancerBae is more than a not-for-profit company, it’s a movement grounded in lived experience, community action, and a refusal to let stigma speak louder than our stories.
We’re co-led by Will Wise, founder and former pro athlete living with stage 4 cancer, and Dr Lizzie Gale, a chartered psychologist with over 20 years’ experience in mental health and social care. Together, we’re creating spaces that support not just the medical realities of cancer, but the emotional, social, and cultural weight of it too.
Here’s how we’re doing it:
• Community Work That Challenges Stigma
Through our Speak Up Hub and direct peer support, we’re opening up honest, stigma-free conversations in places where they’re rarely had. We amplify lived experience, help people navigate care, and create space for connection, identity, and healing. We don’t share stories for sympathy, we share them for solidarity.
• Trauma-Informed Wellness Retreats
Affordable, emotionally safe retreats co-designed with people affected by cancer. Led by experienced facilitators, including Dr Lizzie Gale, they focus on breathwork, journaling, peer support, and reclaiming joy in the face of uncertainty.
• The CancerBae Classic
A national basketball tournament for under-12s, girls, and wheelchair users, where elite sport meets real talk. By using sport as a cultural vehicle, we give young people tools to build confidence, talk mental health, and feel seen, on and off the court.
Why We’re Fundraising
We’re aiming to raise £15,000 to support:
• Setting up peer support groups, retreats, and community-led hubs in areas where stigma, isolation, or systemic barriers make accessing emotional support even harder
• Infrastructure to manage new partnerships
Every donation helps us move faster, reach further, and build something that lasts.
Join Us
This is a call to create spaces of solidarity, not sympathy.
Your support helps us show that life with cancer can still be full of laughter, connection, creativity, and power.
Whether you can give £5 or £500, every donation makes a difference. Although you may not be able to claim gift aid - (becoming a fully fledged registered charity is something we are working towards) - your support WILL help to change lives of people living with and affected by cancer. If you can’t donate right now, sharing this page and using the hashtag #CancerBae helps us grow.
Let’s rewrite the story together.
With big love & gratitude,
Will Wise (Founder), Dr Lizzie Gale* (Co-Director) and Kaz Abif (Co-Director)
CancerBae CIC
*I’m one of the co-founders of CancerBae CIC, a not-for-profit community organisation led by people with lived experience of cancer. All funds raised will go directly to CancerBae CIC’s work, including events, mental-health workshops, and support programmes for people affected by cancer. As a director, I don’t receive personal profit from this campaign. Any funds raised will be used in line with our CIC’s community-benefit goals and audited accounts.
