June marks Cancer Survivorship Month—a time to honor the strength, resilience, and ongoing journeys of those who have faced cancer. At Luminaries, we celebrate not just the fact that survivors are here, but the work they do every day to heal, grow, and thrive beyond treatment. This month is a powerful reminder of why our mission matters and the real people behind every statistic and data point.

 

Empowering Survivors Beyond Treatment

Luminaries exists to help cancer survivors do more than just recover. We provide the tools, structure, and inspiration needed to thrive emotionally, physically, and mentally after treatment. Survivorship is about more than avoiding recurrence; it’s about reclaiming life with clarity, strength, and purpose.

 

A Smarter Model for Modern Survivors

Many survivors face stress, ongoing side effects, and a healthcare system that often overlooks the unique needs of life after cancer. Luminaries tackles these challenges head-on with a structured, science-based program that supports survivors in building sustainable wellness habits. We turn insight into action, offering support that adapts to each individual’s reality.

 

Data-Informed from Day One

Every Luminaries participant begins with a personal wellness assessment, rating both the importance and frequency of key health practices. This gives us a clear picture of what matters most to them and where the biggest support gaps lie. From there, we collect both qualitative and quantitative data throughout the program to measure shifts in mindset, behavior, and quality of life. These insights don’t just inform our reports—they shape our programming.

 

Serving a Critical and Growing Demographic
 

Since 2021, Luminaries has served over 2,300 cancer survivors across North America. While the national average age of cancer diagnosis is 66, our participants are most often in their mid-40s to early 60s. This younger survivor cohort is balancing careers, caregiving, and recovery—yet many survivorship programs are still designed around older, Medicare-aged populations.

 

By meeting the needs of this underserved group, Luminaries is leading the way in modern survivorship care, especially for:

• Working-age survivors

• Financially burdened and underserved communities

• Those living far from Comprehensive Cancer Centers

 

The Reality Survivors Face

Employment status varies widely: 43.5% of Luminaries participants work full-time, while 33.8% are unable to work due to disability or retirement. Survivors are managing not only their health, but also economic uncertainty and competing life demands.

 

Geographic access to care is also a barrier. Access to care remains a significant barrier for many cancer survivors. Among Luminaries participants, 52% report not having a Certified Comprehensive Cancer Center (CCC) within 100 miles or within reasonable driving distance from their home. This mirrors national trends: while there are just over 70 NCI-designated Cancer Center in the US., and only 57 of them have the highest rating and classified as Comprehensive Cancer Centers. Since most CCCs are heavily concentrated in urban and academic medical hubs, this reality underscores the urgent need for scalable, digital-first survivorship solutions like Luminaries.

 

By meeting survivors where they are – regardless of ZIP code – Luminaries helps close the geographic care gap, ensuring that healing and support are not dependent on physical proximity to elite institutions. Instead, survivors gain structured, evidence-based guidance from the comfort of their home, no matter how far they live from a cancer center and become part of a survivorship community across North America.

 

Insight into Survivorship Practices

A pre-program assessment (on a scale of 1 to 5) reveals a major gap between what survivors’ value and what they actually practice day-to-day:

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• Mental & Emotional Health: 4.74 value/importance vs. 2.85 practice (out of 5)

• Physical Health: 4.79 importance (highest) vs. 2.58 practice (lowest)

• Lifestyle & Daily Practices: ~4.00 importance vs. 2.88 practice

• Stress & Resilience and Sense of Self also showed large gaps

• Social Connectedness was the only category where practice outpaced importance

 

This shows that while survivors know what matters, they need structured guidance to follow through.

 

Where Luminaries Makes the Difference

Awareness isn’t enough. Survivors need tools, time, and reinforcement to act on what they value. Luminaries bridges that gap. Through personalized, evidence-based coaching, we help survivors build habits around the very practices they struggle to maintain—from emotional health to physical movement to managing stress.

 

We turn survivorship from a passive phase into an active rebuilding process—backed by data, personalized to the individual, and built to last.

 

Luminaries participants enter the program knowing what they want: emotional stability, physical strength, and a life they can rebuild. What they lack is a system that helps them get there. Luminaries provides that system. Our data shows a self-aware but underserved population, and our model proves that with the right structure, survivors don’t just get by—they thrive.

 

In recognition of Cancer Survivorship Month, we reaffirm our commitment to making sure every survivor has access to the tools, support, and community they need to heal and thrive.​

 

If you would like to help us continue this mission, please consider a donation or each out to dreambig@luminaires.life to learn more or assist in our efforts to reach oncology practices across the country.​​​​​​​​​​​​