Cancer Resource Center director to step down

Marilee Murphy, current executive director of the Cancer Resource Center (CRC) in Ithaca, recently told Tompkins Weekly that she will be stepping down from her position in March of this year. The search for a new executive director is currently underway.

CRC is a local nonprofit that provides various support programs and resources to those living with and affected by cancer. Murphy started as executive director of CRC in June of 2019, bringing with her considerable experience in the health care field as a practitioner of acupuncture and oriental medicine.

Tompkins Weekly covered her start, which also fell on the nonprofit’s 25-year anniversary (full article at https://t.ly/4vEy), and Murphy at the time shared her hopes for the organization and her role in it.

Looking back over the past year and a half, Murphy said she’s quite proud of the work that she’s done at CRC, particularly her work to increase community participation by offering more wellness programs.

“Coming on, I didn’t necessarily know what I was going to be facing,” she said. “I knew what my vision was from the perspective of the mission of the organization, and I do feel that we’ve made amazing progress, particularly in the realm of wellness programming, which is something that’s a passion of mine.”

Murphy also guided the organization through numerous operational changes, like launching a new website and database.

“We had a 13-year-old database that really just wasn’t working well for the organization, so we transitioned to a brand-new database,” she said. “And that really supports everything for us in terms of our internal functioning as well as our interface with the public. And that’s a huge thing to undertake, to change over your whole database.”

The biggest change for the organization by far was having to adjust to the pandemic. At the start of the pandemic, CRC quickly pivoted its programming to virtual platforms, including creating online support groups and wellness classes. And since then, CRC has seen a consistent increase in participation, which has been a silver lining during this challenging time.

While CRC has seen success during this pandemic, funding continues to be a challenge.

“Historically, we’ve had community groups do fundraisers for us, and a lot of times, that might be an in-person fundraiser,” Murphy said. “Those obviously haven’t been able to happen, so what we count on as regular support each year has not been able to happen. … We’re still trying to pivot and figure out ways to recreate other options for fundraising.”

Murphy and CRC staff have worked especially hard to tackle whatever challenges came their way in the past year. As Murphy explained, CRC’s growth was very much a team effort.

“All that has been accomplished was not me,” Murphy said. “It was hard work not only on my part but on the staff and Board of Directors part as well.”

And that hard work is worth it, as staff recognize that those they serve are struggling.

“Dealing with cancer sometimes can feel like a lonely experience. Cancer during COVID just magnifies that a little bit,” Murphy said. “We’ve expanded our services to provide support for those clients that we think may be at more risk of feeling isolated.”

The county’s vaccination efforts have thankfully helped to lessen this effect, as CRC staff and clients alike are hopeful that there’s finally a light at the end of the tunnel.

Murphy is proud of her time with CRC, which is why she’s “sad to be leaving,” she said.

“I’m leaving for personal reasons — there were some changes in my personal life that had an impact on that decision for me — and so, I’m sorry not to be here to reap the benefits of the hard work that I just put in in the last two years to move the organization forward,” she said.

Murphy still plans to stay involved in the organization, though. She’ll continue to serve on CRC’s finance committee and will be doing some volunteer, project-based work surrounding CRC’s recently formed relationship with the Ithaca Equestrian Center.

But before that work, Murphy plans to take some time off from the organization after stepping down, time she’ll use to focus on a project she started a number of years ago. The project, which Murphy called her “personal dream,” is to create an online health resource guide based on her over 30 years of experience working in the health care field.

As Murphy explained, when she was a health care practitioner prior to CRC, she would field many questions from patients that showed gaps within the medical profession, particularly the challenge of short appointments not leaving much time for patients to discuss all their questions and concerns. This project is meant to serve as an online resource guide to address this issue, Murphy said.

“There is a lot of information that you can find online for sure. I’m not trying to replicate the volumes of information that are out there,” she said. “What I am trying to do is take the bits and pieces of that sort of overwhelming mass of information and narrow it down [as] a way of helping people strategically think through something that they’re confronted by.”

Once she finishes the health resource guide, Murphy plans to return to acupuncture and herbal medicine and work with CRC again under a different role.

Though she’ll be leaving in a month, Murphy still has high hopes for the organization both before and after she steps down. In particular, she’s excited about CRC’s efforts to move toward an “overarching survivorship program.”

Survivorship, as Murphy explained, applies to the entire lifespan of a cancer survivor, and focusing around this idea shows how CRC can help along the whole cancer journey.

“[We want residents] to identify what we do that’s when somebody is first diagnosed, what we do that’s the support while somebody is in treatment, and then what we do to support somebody well beyond when they have finished treatment and continue to live their lives,” she said.

In the next month, much of Murphy’s efforts will be focused around the current renovations to CRC’s headquarters in downtown Ithaca, including installing new carpeting.

In CRC’s search for a new executive director, Murphy is hoping staff will find someone who’s just as passionate about CRC’s mission as she is and who will continue the work she started in 2019. In addition, she’s hoping for someone who has more experience in the realm of development than she did when she started.

“That was something that was an area of growth for me, and making these connections and relationships and doing work towards development-type work is something I didn’t have as much time to be able to do because of the operational, functional type things that we had to address,” she said. “The organization’s now ready for that kind of leader, and I think the organization will benefit greatly from having somebody who’s got a strong development background.”

Murphy also hopes the new leader will continue the collaborations CRC has had with area nonprofits and will work to expand services to meet the many needs of the community.

Murphy reflected on her time with CRC and expressed hope for whoever the next executive director ends up being.

“I’m really happy for all the relationships and connections in the community that I’ve made,” she said. “And I’m really excited for the next person. We have some great candidates who have applied, and I’m super excited to support that person with the transition so that it’s a seamless transition and to help support them in their success to build on what we’ve just done in the last couple of years.”

For more information about CRC, visit its website at crcfl.net.

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