The Second Life: The National Association for Cancer Research (AIRC) – Part one
On April 14, 1939, Guido Venosta’s father, Giuseppe, died of liver cancer after months of excruciating suffering. That date marked a fundamental turning point in his son’s life, as he was forced to confront the absolute impotence in curing the disease. It was an indescribable tragedy, for he lost in a short time the person he had loved most and with whom he had been closest, all without being able to do anything. Ten years later, the same fate befell his mother, Argia. About twenty years after that, these painful experiences would eventually bear fruit.
Venosta himself recounts that in 1966 “steps were taken at Pirelli, where I was an executive, to determine whether the company could provide a suitable person for an initiative that was just beginning to develop at that historical moment—a small solidarity association that would later become the great Italian Association for Cancer Research. The records say that Franco Brambilla, then CEO of Pirelli S.p.A., mentioned my name—also recalling the great success I had achieved in a recent fundraising campaign—thus establishing the contact and marking the beginning of my journey into the nonprofit world.”
Venosta agreed to join the “small association” for two fundamental reasons: one, a philanthropic motive, stemming from the conviction that “the social classes and groups who, by birth or by chance, had enjoyed the best living conditions ought to ‘give back’ to others; that is, they had the moral duty to intervene in the community for the benefit of those who had not been so fortunate (…)”. The other reason was personal—the death from cancer of both of his parents.
He then joined forces with Camilla Falck, then president of the association, and Aldo Borletti, one of the initiative’s early proponents, who sought to establish an organization to support cancer research, modeled on those already active abroad: “nonprofit in the Anglo-Saxon sense, that is, independent of any particular ideology or affiliation (…)—to join, one only needed to share the purpose (…)”, with its activities based on information dissemination and fundraising to support prevention and finance initiatives.
It would not have been an easy task: once, when Venosta asked his friend Giovanni Spadolini—then director of Il Corriere della Sera—to cover the issue of cancer and the research being done to fight it, he was told that “the newspapers couldn’t even mention the word ‘cancer’ as it alone would agitate readers, who refused to confront the subject.”
Sources:
G. VENOSTA, “Unpublished Memoirs”, 1997–1998.
Albiate (MB), Villa San Valerio, Villa San Valerio Archives, Guido Venosta Archive; AIRC/FIRC Archive.
Bibliography:
G. VENOSTA, Dal profit al nonprofit. Storia di un’esperienza, Milan, 1997.
