Dear Colleague:
Why should you donate to the Davis-Thompson Foundation? There are many reasons why our colleagues support the Foundation and here are only a few:
1) By supporting the Foundation, you support pathology and lab animal medicine education around the world. In the last two years, the Foundation has begun an unprecedented electronic outreach program that is unmatched by any other organization in our field. The Foundation is the leading provider of FREE educational resources for veterinary pathologists around the world. In the last year, the Foundation has doubled the images in Noah’s Arkive, which it acquired in 2017, making these images available for students and teachers around the world. The Foundation’s YouTube page contains over 125 hours of lectures from its Faculty and from its courses around the world – and that number continues to grow! This year we published our first free electronic book - Opening Pandora's Box, a primer on gross description in pathology by Drs. Paul Stromberg, Daniel Rissi, Claudio Barros, and Bruce Williams. Finally, the Foundation has just set up its first virtual slide servers, which we will be stocking with diagnostic cases from our four annual slide seminars.
2) The Davis Foundation is truly an international operation, with over 40 courses on six continents in 2018, and given in multiple languages. Many of our international courses are given in emerging countries at no cost to participants, and cover basic but very necessary concepts such as autopsy techniques and critical thinking skills for vets and paraprofessionals. Your donation also supports over 150 international study centers at veterinary schools around the world, where veterinarians in all specialties can study Foundation DVDs and publications. By supporting the Foundation, you support young veterinarians around the world. Each year, the overwhelming majority of participants at Foundation courses, or visitors to our study centers, are young pathologists or lab animal practitioners studying for advanced degrees or board certification, and your donation helps keep course prices down, especially in countries where the cost of a course might be a month's salary.
3) By supporting the Foundation, you can support your friends, colleagues, and faculty members who volunteer their time and energy as our speakers, course directors, and officers on a wholly volunteer basis. (Yes, we do it all for free). As you probably also know, the Foundation has no endowment, so each year, we must raise the funds to continue to hold courses, publish online materials, and establish study centers around the world
4) In 2018, the Foundation began the publication of the third edition of the Surgical Pathology of Tumors of Domestic Animals with Volume 1 – Epithelial Tumors of the Skin, and followed it up in summer 2019 with Volume 2 - Tumors of the Mammary Gland.. More than twice the length of the 2nd edition, the new series is all-color and includes not just histology, but immunohistochemistry, molecular pathology and notes on tumor biology and prognosis. You donation helps us price these books far below any other publisher.
5) All memberships are counted as donations to the Foundation, a publicly donative charity and fully deductible from your US income tax.
All of these are great reasons to support the Foundation - and we hope you will.
Thank you for your time, and thank you for your support.
Sincerely,
Bruce H. Williams, DVM
Chairman, Board of Directors, Davis-Thompson Foundation
