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Profiles in Sharing

George Beach
Artist’s Diagnosis Leads to Deeply Rewarding Volunteering and a Sense of Community

 

GEORGE BEACHAs a young man, George Beach built a full and wonderful life. He graduated from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, opened his own creative art and design studio in the city, won numerous awards for his design and marketing skills, and after starting his business, went off to Paris to do graduate work at the Academie de la Grande Chaumiere.

Then, in 1976, when he was only thirty-eight years old, his hands became painfully inflamed and almost motionless.  The diagnosis?  Rheumatoid arthritis: a chronic disease that causes pain, stiffness, swelling and loss of function in the joints and inflammation in other body organs.
He had just completed a mural for the nation’s centennial.  Now he feared he might be putting his paint brushes away forever.
Fortunately, this was not the case.
After being diagnosed, he took cortisone injections, and they proved a remarkable success. He was one of the lucky ones. At about the same time, his rheumatologist recommended that he volunteer with the National Arthritis Foundation. 
George says that shortly after connecting with the group, his involvement grew rapidly. He served as chair of the Arthritis Foundation’s Pennsylvania's Public Relations Committee, then was selected to be on the state board of directors, then chair of the Eastern Pennsylvania chapter. 
He now has contributed at every level from fundraising to membership recruitment to political lobbying.
"I've never been around such positive people in my life as when I'm around people with arthritis," Beach explains simply. "We know each other's intellectual capacities, and each other's physical challenges." 
Currently, he also serves on the group’s National Awareness Committee, deepening the Foundation’s advocacy so that it more effectively involves the specific needs of different ethnic groups in its lobbying work. 
 
And George’s contributions continue to be invaluable in shaping government policy about arthritis; but perhaps more remarkable is that the community he has discovered since he was diagnosed has become irreplaceable.