Hedging its bets, the JDRF is planning, if necessary, to move more research abroad.
The JDRF also plays the celebrity card well, recruiting people with diabetes in their families.
At JDRF the genuine objective is to go out of business by investing in science and ending the disease.
All three are considerably less efficient than the JDRF in fundraising and overhead.
Despite greater revenues, the rival American Diabetes Association, founded 30 years before the JDRF, put only half that into research.
"If someone prominent has juvenile diabetes in the family, we'll find out somehow, " says Roy Smith, a New York University business professor and JDRF board member.
From the beginning the JDRF has been driven by passionate volunteers who lobby federal lawmakers and agencies--diabetic offspring often in tow--to seek research funding and raise awareness.
And rather than experiment with expensive fundraising tactics, such as direct mail, he stuck to JDRF's tried-and-true methods of seeking big gifts and staging walkathons and galas.
In the meantime the JDRF is campaigning for more young people with Type 1 diabetes to have access to insulin pumps which have been available for many years.
In a nod to its concerned-parents origins, the JDRF is said to be the only large single-illness nonprofit to use a 100% lay board to help review grant proposals.
The JDRF was among the first prominent health advocates to call for greatly increased research on stem cells harvested from discarded human embryos, which could grow into insulin-producing cells.
The JDRF awarded 500 research grants last year, although it thinks it can achieve more by moving toward fewer but bigger fixed-term collaborations with brand-name research institutions like Columbia and Harvard.
Started in 1970 by distraught parents of young children diagnosed with diabetes, the JDRF, headquartered on Wall Street in New York, is now one of the younger entries on the FORBES list of 200 large nonprofits, as measured by donations.
"We were called the crazies, " recalls JDRF founding member Carol Lurie, jolted into action after the diagnosis of her 10-year-old son. (He's now a parent of a diabetic daughter.) The nonprofit stages a Children's Congress every other year, bringing 150 afflicted kids from around the country to Washington to generate not-so-subtle pressure.
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