From Butt Pics to Public Health

Advocacy at Work · Apr 16, 2026 · 28m

When David Russo discovered he had precancerous polyps after fighting for a colonoscopy, he uncovered a family secret: colorectal cancer had silently killed his grandfather and two cousins. Nobody had talked about it. Nobody wanted to admit it. The stigma was so strong that his own father, who’d been getting polyps removed since his forties, never connected his condition to the disease that took his father’s life.

That moment of realization sparked a question: What if people could talk about colorectal cancer without shame? What if, instead of whispering about it in the dark, we celebrated…