I’ll never forget the day in September 1997 when I got the call that said, the “National Fibromyalgia Awareness Campaign” had been chosen to become a project of an incubator program, which would allow us to serve the fibromyalgia community as a non-profit organization.
Within a short amount of time we had decided to re-name ourselves the “National Fibromyalgia Association” (NFA) and we had been granted our own independent non-profit status! Although the NFA’s operations started on a card table in my family room, over time we became the largest and most influential NPO representing people with fibromyalgia in the world.
Karen Lee Richards, my co-founder and myself, along with a group of dedicated women with FM worked as much as our painful muscles and joints would allow us and met regularly to plan conferences, write letters to the media, prepare a newsletter and answer thousands of letters and phone calls from others with FM who were desperate for information.
