Veronica McLaughlin will tell you, with a laugh, that she has “delusions of grandeur.”
When she started planning a March fundraising campaign for her husband Reed, who is living with Stage IV kidney cancer, she pictured the whole thing landing at the Final Four. USC women’s basketball coach Dawn Staley would point to the camera. The arena would shake. The Reed on 3! theme song (yes, she wrote one) would bounce through the rafters. America would huddle up and open their pockets to pour in cash for kidney cancer research.
That didn’t happen — yet. What did happen is arguably better, and definitely more real. Over the course of one month, Reed on 3! raised more than $53,000 to fund kidney cancer research through KidneyCAN. Family, friends, former coworkers, kids Reed once coached, and total strangers picked up their phones, gathered their people, threw their hands into a huddle, and, on the count of three, shouted “Reed!” into the camera. They then posted the video on Instagram, Facebook, and/or TikTok with a message of purpose, #reedon3, and a link for donations.
And the donations rolled in — in increments of anywhere from five to five thousand dollars — from people Reed and Veronica know by heart, and from people they’ve never met.
It is, in every sense, the kind of thing that happens when you refuse to be reasonable about hope.
For Reed, family has always been at the center of everything. Nicole and Erin have walked beside their dad through every challenge with strength and humor.
Veronica became the driving force behind the “Reed on 3!” campaign, channeling their family’s love of community, teamwork, and connection into a fundraiser that inspired hundreds of people to show up, speak out, and support kidney cancer research.
In April 2022, Reed and Veronica took their two daughters to New York City. Reed had always wanted to walk his girls through Times Square, and oldest daughter Nicole was about to graduate high school. The weather was perfect. They logged over 34,000 steps in a single day.
On that trip, Reed noticed blood in his urine. He is, in Veronica’s words, the kind of guy who goes to his primary care doctor for anything that feels off with his health, so he had an appointment scheduled before they were home. A few days later, while playing his usual pickup basketball game, he couldn’t catch his breath. He drove himself to urgent care. The bloodwork came back with terrifying numbers. A CT scan showed pulmonary embolisms in every lobe of both lungs — and a mass at the top of his kidneys.
Reed was 45. He had a radical nephrectomy at Loyola in Chicago at the end of May 2022 — the cancer had grown through his renal vein and into his inferior vena cava — and he was discharged four days later with no evidence of remaining cancer in his body.
The McLaughlins exhaled.
Eighteen months later, scans showed metastasis to his lungs.
Reed has now been through immunotherapy that didn’t work and left him with rheumatoid arthritis, a Keytruda combination that didn’t work either, and is currently on his third line of treatment, with a small spinal metastasis that he is also managing.
Due to pain from the arthritis and vertebral tumor, he has had to give up pickup basketball, golf, and pickleball. He has not had to give up being Reed.
Sports, teamwork, and community have always been a big part of the McLaughlin family’s life. Both Nicole and Erin have served as managers for the women’s basketball team at their colleges — Nicole at Xavier University, and Erin at the University of South Carolina. This allowed the family another way to stay connected to the game, and to each other.
To understand why this campaign worked the way it did, you have to understand Reed. Veronica is the one in the family who pulls a baseball cap low and prays not to run into anyone at the grocery store. Reed is the opposite. He scans the aisles hoping he sees someone he knows.
He is, by every account, the “rabid fan” of the people he loves.
He coached his daughters’ teams. He drives to recitals and games. He buys the coupon book — every coupon book. The McLaughlin family’s former neighborhood in Batavia, Illinois, was famous for the Batavia’s “Biggest Knockout Challenge,” the annual basketball shootout Reed and Veronica hosted in their backyard. A hundred-plus people would show up.
So when Veronica started looking for a theme, the answer was sitting right there: Teamwork on 3. Win on 3. Reed on 3.
Long before “Reed on 3!” became a rallying cry, Reed was simply a devoted dad. He is the kind who showed up for every stage, every game of every season, and every moment with his girls.
Reed, who normally does not shy away from attention, did not want a flood of it due to his diagnosis. While family and close friends knew about his cancer, nothing was shared on social media because he did not want to field questions and receive pity from people he had not seen in 30 years.
But Veronica, whose background is in event management and fundraising — she ran events for the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation in a previous chapter of her career — had reached a point where waiting was no longer an option.
Treatment options for Stage IV kidney cancer narrow as patients move down the line.
Research is slow.
Research is also expensive, and the federal funding climate has been brutal for cancer scientists. She knew that if she wanted to make a real dent in something that might benefit Reed and the patients behind him, she was going to have to step off the sidelines.
She interviewed the major kidney cancer organizations herself. She read their 990s. She met with their teams. KidneyCAN was the clear fit.
“It was, yep, there’s no doubt in my mind who I’m going with, who I want to partner with.”
— Veronica, on choosing KidneyCAN
From there she built the thing the way a fundraising pro builds things. She created a brand. She commissioned a logo. She wrote a theme song. She put together a four-pager that explained Reed’s story, the mechanics of the challenge, a template script, and photos of Reed. She tested the donation page. She launched the campaign about a week before March 1, so it would have momentum heading into both Kidney Cancer Awareness Month and March Madness.
And then she did the thing every fundraiser eventually has to do: she let go and trusted people.
Whether he was coaching his daughters’ basketball teams, organizing neighborhood tournaments, or proudly wearing his Gamecocks and Musketeers gear, Reed has always believed in the power of sports to bring people together. That same spirit of teamwork, encouragement, and community became the foundation for the Reed on 3! campaign.
The Reed on 3! campaign took off in truly wonderful directions. Veronica sat down with the KidneyCAN team to share their experiences and what they learned throughout the fundraiser.
KidneyCAN: What made the videos so powerful, do you think? People could have just donated quietly. Instead, this turned into a real campaign with a real face and real energy.
Veronica: There’s something about a video and the vulnerability of, oh, hey, that’s my friend or my cousin, and they’re willing to put themselves on camera to do something. Because they care that much. That draws people in. Of course, I was inspired by the viral success of the 2014 Ice Bucket Challenge for ALS. A post is one thing. A video, where you can watch someone you know taking action, is so much more moving.
KidneyCAN: How did you actually launch it? Day one, what did you send out?
Veronica: I sent the four-pager to close family and friends and said, here’s what I want to do. My cousin Kate kickstarted it. Her family’s video, with her husband and her boys, was awesome and served as the perfect template for others to see how it’s done. After that, people just did what they did. I kept getting on Instagram a few times a week to do little update videos myself, just to say there are no rules, post however you want, and thank people for their support.
Adrian: And the Dawn Staley video — that didn’t come out of nowhere. Tell me how that happened.
KidneyCAN: Our daughter Erin is a manager on the South Carolina women’s basketball team, so we know Coach Staley a little. We were watching a team practice and she came up and hugged us, like she does, and asked Reed how he was doing and if there was anything she could do. He told her we were launching this campaign, and she said, count me in, send me the info. And then, in the middle of preparing for March Madness, Coach filmed her Reed on 3! video and posted it on her Instagram account, and it got more than 11,000 likes. People started commenting about how kidney cancer had touched their own families.
KidneyCAN: Sometimes the comments and the community that come from these posts … it’s just as powerful as the post itself. Just amazing. Is there anything you would do differently?
Veronica: I would have lightened up on the initial video and social media post instructions because I think some people were intimidated and worried about doing it wrong. But, ultimately, it worked out great and we reached our goal! While Reed on 3! was not the highlighted charitable campaign for the 2026 March Madness basketball tournament, I’m holding out hope for next year! My delusions of grandeur keep me motivated to work even harder until we have a cure.
KidneyCAN: We agree! We think about that a lot, especially in the kidney cancer community. Patients have to believe they will beat the odds. Researchers have to have some delusions of grandeur, too. Cancer affects so many of us, takes millions of people from their families every year. Somewhere, somebody in some lab is sitting there thinking, perhaps delusionally but so very necessarily: I’m going to cure this.
Veronica: Absolutely. And that’s the whole point. That’s why I needed to do this right now.
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There is a moment in most kidney cancer conversations where the statistics arrive and the air in the room gets a little thick. The numbers are just not good.
Localized kidney cancer — cancer that hasn’t left the kidney — has a five-year survival rate north of 90%. Catch it early and the odds are with you.
But once kidney cancer becomes metastatic, the picture changes sharply. The five-year relative survival rate for distant-stage kidney cancer sits at roughly 19 %. Immunotherapy has been a genuine breakthrough for many patients, but it doesn’t work for everyone. It didn’t work for Reed.
Layer on top of that what’s happening to research itself. Through the first three months of 2025, federal cancer research funding fell by roughly 31% compared to the same period the year before.
The administration’s FY2026 budget proposed cutting the National Cancer Institute by close to 40%.
Congress has been pushing back — the bipartisan funding package finalized in January 2026 actually added $128 million for cancer research and blocked some of the deepest cuts — but hundreds of grants have already been terminated, labs have already lost staff, and many early-career cancer researchers have already looked at the landscape and walked away.
This is the part where a reasonable person looks at the numbers and gets scared.
But every patient living with Stage IV kidney cancer is asked, in a way, to keep believing in an outcome the odds don’t actually favor.
Every researcher applying for a grant in 2026 is being asked to keep believing in a system that just told them no twice as often as it used to.
Every nonprofit — like KidneyCAN, with just three employees and a roster of volunteers — is being asked to keep building when the larger ecosystem is being cut from underneath them.
The reasonable response would be to shrink. The Reed on 3! response is to huddle up and get loud.
By the end of March, Reed on 3! had raised $53,228.90 against a $50,000 goal. The team had hundreds of donors. Many of them, Veronica and Reed had never met. They were friends of friends, people who saw a video pop up in their feed and decided to be part of it.
One number Veronica keeps coming back to: of that total, roughly $26,000 came from donors who gave less than $250.
The big gifts matter and the team is grateful for every one of them. But more than half of what the campaign raised came in modest amounts from people who might otherwise have wondered whether a $25 or $50 donation “would even do anything.”
“It’s collective. It all adds up. People think the goal is so big, the need is so daunting, they don’t even start. But it all adds up, and Reed on 3! is a perfect example of that.”
— Adrian Hayes, KidneyCAN
It is worth saying clearly: the energy behind Reed on 3! is the energy KidneyCAN runs on.
KidneyCAN is a small organization. Our team is held together with grit and group texts and an absurd amount of love for this community that nobody joins voluntarily.
Every dollar moves the needle on something real — research funding through the Kidney Cancer Research Consortium, patient advocacy on Capitol Hill, the Patient Resource Center, content that helps newly diagnosed patients ask the right questions on day one.
Seeing the support and energy growing behind the Reed on 3! campaign is just the shot in the arm that the KidneyCAN team loves to have after the devastating funding cuts of 2025.
A lifelong competitor and sports enthusiast, Reed has always brought energy, humor, and team spirit wherever he goes — whether on the basketball court, the golf course, or rallying people together for a cause bigger than himself.
Reed on 3! is what the McLaughlin family’s campaign looked like. Yours may look different, and that’s okay. What’s important is that each of us find a way to accelerate cures for kidney cancer.
If you’ve been touched by kidney cancer — your own diagnosis, a parent’s, a spouse’s, a friend’s, a former classmate you only just heard about — here are a few ways to step off the sidelines:
Any amount. Small gifts collectively raised half of what Reed on 3! brought in. You can support Reed’s team directly or give to KidneyCAN.
The McLaughlin family shows us what it looks like to courageously stay in the game, even when the going gets rough. The have brought hype and hope to all of us in a way that will accelerate progress and give others a fighting chance.
Veronica’s “delusional” optimism is what it looks like when your hope won’t quit, and that optimism runs through every part of our community.
Patients need it to endure treatments, uncertainty, and fear.
Caregivers need it to keep showing up on the hardest days.
Researchers need it to continue pursuing breakthroughs after setbacks.
Advocates need it to continue fighting for funding, awareness, and urgency even when progress feels painfully slow.
And communities need it to believe their voices and actions can matter.
The McLaughlins chose to believe anyway.
And because they did, thousands of people learned more about kidney cancer. Hundreds participated. Critical research dollars were raised. Conversations were started. Awareness spread with the hype, and hope became contagious.
