Get involved
Volunteer with us
National Cancer Information Foundation runs Cancer Explained: free, plain-language, sourced cancer information for patients, caregivers and anyone trying to understand a result they were handed. Almost everyone working on it is a volunteer.
Below are the specific things we need help with, each with a small option, a medium one and a real project. Pick a task, not a role. Five accessibility fixes on a Sunday is a genuine contribution, and you never have to commit to more than the tier you chose.
Every task listed is work that is actually open. If something is done by the time you reach it, we will say so and point you at what replaced it.
Developer
Front-end or full-stack developers comfortable with TypeScript and React.
The site is a static Next.js export with around 15,000 pages. Most of what slows readers down is fixable in an afternoon by someone who knows the stack.
2–5 hours
- Fix a single scoped GitHub issue with acceptance criteria already written.
- Repair a broken internal link or a route that 404s.
- Add a missing page title or meta description.
10–20 hours
- Paginate an oversized directory page — our largest language hub ships about 3MB of HTML.
- Reduce JavaScript on the article template.
- Trace and fix a family of broken routes.
Ongoing project
- Own a section of the codebase — the report decoder, the search index, or the Pages Functions.
- Plan and execute the Next 16 upgrade.
Helpful: TypeScript · React / Next.js · Git and GitHub
Accessibility specialist
Anyone who audits against WCAG, or who uses assistive technology daily and will tell us what is wrong.
Our readers are frequently tired, on a phone, in a waiting room, or using a screen reader. Accessibility here is not a compliance exercise — it decides whether someone can read their own diagnosis.
2–5 hours
- Audit one page template for keyboard navigation and focus states.
- Check colour contrast across our design tokens.
- Review heading hierarchy on the article template.
10–20 hours
- Screen-reader pass over the most-visited pages, written up as issues.
- Reconcile image alt text against the actual images — we know a batch of these describe a different picture entirely.
- Audit our forms for labels, error handling and validation messages.
Ongoing project
- Take the site to WCAG 2.2 AA and help us keep it there with automated checks.
- Set up axe or similar in CI so regressions fail the build.
Helpful: WCAG 2.2 · Screen readers · Semantic HTML and ARIA
UX / UI designer
Designers who care more about clarity than polish.
People arrive here frightened and skim. Layout decisions change whether they find the answer or leave.
2–5 hours
- Review one page on a phone and write up what gets in the way.
- Propose a clearer layout for a single component.
10–20 hours
- Redesign a template — the report decoder, the glossary, or a category hub.
- Audit our mobile experience across the most-read pages.
Ongoing project
- Help us build and document a coherent design system.
- Run lightweight usability sessions with patients and caregivers.
Helpful: Figma · Mobile-first design · Plain-language and information design
SEO specialist
Technical SEO people, especially anyone who has worked on large content sites.
This is our hardest problem. Around 2,150 pages are indexed and 4,500 are not — most never crawled at all. People search for exactly what we have written and do not find it.
2–5 hours
- Review our sitemap structure and tell us what you would change.
- Audit structured data on one template.
10–20 hours
- Diagnose our crawl-budget problem properly against Search Console data.
- Audit internal linking on orphaned sections.
Ongoing project
- Own the indexing problem end to end.
- Help with authority building — the one lever we have never pulled.
Helpful: Google Search Console · Technical SEO at scale · Structured data
Physician / nurse reviewer
Physicians, nurses, NPs, PAs, pharmacists and genetic counsellors — including retired clinicians.
This is the review our editorial process depends on most. Every page cites a primary source; we need clinicians to confirm the page says what the source says.
We verify credentials before clinical review assignments, and we name reviewers on the pages they review unless you would rather we did not.
2–5 hours
- Review one article against its cited source and sign off or flag it.
- Check a report-decoder page for anything a patient could misread.
10–20 hours
- Review a cluster of articles in your specialty.
- Help us reconcile our escalation guidance — when we tell someone to call, and how urgently.
Ongoing project
- Serve on our editorial review board.
- Own clinical review for a cancer type or treatment area.
Helpful: Active or retired clinical practice · Patient education experience
Medical / public-health researcher
Public-health students, librarians, and researchers comfortable with primary literature.
Sourcing is the whole product. A page that cites NCI accurately is worth more than ten that sound confident.
2–5 hours
- Verify the citations on one article against their primary sources.
- Check whether a source has been updated since we cited it.
10–20 hours
- Research and draft a sourced outline for a page we are missing.
- Audit a content cluster for claims that have drifted from their source.
Ongoing project
- Own source currency for a subject area.
- Help build our claim-checking process.
Helpful: PubMed and NCI PDQ · Evidence appraisal · Citation discipline
Translator
Bilingual speakers, especially with health or medical translation experience.
We publish in twelve languages. Machine translation got us coverage; it also once turned a 67.8% survival figure into 567.8%. Human review is what makes translated pages safe.
2–5 hours
- Review one translated article against its English source.
- Check our medical termbase for your language.
10–20 hours
- Review a core set of translated articles in your language.
- Fill in and verify the unverified terms in your language's termbase.
Ongoing project
- Become the reviewing voice for one language.
- Help us decide which content is translated next.
Helpful: Native or near-native fluency · Medical or health translation · Patience with hedged clinical language
Video / audio volunteer
Editors, motion designers, and anyone with a good voice and a quiet room.
Short explainers reach people who will not read an article. We have 90 and they work.
2–5 hours
- Check caption timing and accuracy on a few videos.
- Cut a vertical version of an existing explainer for social.
10–20 hours
- Record human narration to replace synthetic voice on a set of articles.
- Produce a short explainer from an existing reviewed script.
Ongoing project
- Own our video pipeline.
- Build a library of clinician-narrated explainers.
Helpful: Video editing · Audio recording · Captioning
Data / AI volunteer
Data engineers, analysts, and people who have shipped LLM features responsibly.
We run an Ask feature grounded in our own content, and a lot of validation tooling. Both need people who know where these things go wrong.
2–5 hours
- Review our Ask grounding and refusal behaviour and tell us what worries you.
- Write a validator for a content rule we currently check by hand.
10–20 hours
- Build an evaluation set for Ask, especially around emergency-symptom detection.
- Improve our search relevance.
Ongoing project
- Own the Ask pipeline end to end.
- Build the analytics that tell us whether any of this is helping.
Helpful: Python or TypeScript · LLM evaluation · SQL
Student service project
High-school and university students needing service hours or a capstone.
Much of our backlog is well-scoped, finite and genuinely useful — good first real-world work.
2–5 hours
- Check a batch of outbound links and report the dead ones.
- Proofread a set of articles for typos and broken formatting.
10–20 hours
- Reconcile a category of image descriptions against the actual images.
- Build a glossary or resource list for a topic we do not cover.
Ongoing project
- Take a capstone project with a defined deliverable and a named mentor.
Helpful: Care and attention · Following a checklist honestly
Eagle Scout / Gold Award project
Scouts planning a service project with a lasting community benefit.
These projects need scope, a beneficiary and evidence of impact. We can provide all three in writing, and the work is real.
Planning
- We will help you scope a project that meets your award requirements.
- We provide a written description, a named contact and sign-off.
Typical project
- Build a printed resource pack for a local treatment centre from our material.
- Organise a translation or proofreading drive with your school.
Larger project
- Lead a team to produce something we publish and credit.
Helpful: Project planning · Organising other people
How to start
- 1. Email [email protected] with the role, the tier you have time for, and a line about your background.
- 2. We reply with a specific task and what “done” looks like, so you are never guessing at scope.
- 3. You do it on your own schedule. We review promptly — if we are going to be slow, we say so in advance.
Developers can also go straight to the open issues on GitHub. Clinical reviewers, we verify credentials first — see the note in that section.
We are glad to serve as a reference, confirm service hours in writing, and sign off school or award paperwork. Ask.
What we will not ask you to do
Volunteers are never responsible for deciding what is medically accurate, and no volunteer contribution publishes as medical guidance without clinical and editorial review. Medical and editorial decisions stay with the nonprofit. If a task ever feels like it is asking you to make that call, stop and tell us — that is our mistake, not yours.
See also our careers and volunteering overview and our editorial process.
Social media volunteer
People who can write plainly and post consistently.
We have the content and almost no distribution. Reaching people is the bottleneck, not writing.
2–5 hours
10–20 hours
Ongoing project
Helpful: Social copywriting · Scheduling tools · A steady tone around difficult subjects