What we have
actually done.

Advocacy

The petition, November 2024. Before the nonprofit existed, our founder launched a national petition for affordable GLP-1 access. It gathered 27,000 signatures and generated 400 public comments in the federal rulemaking process, and led to nine media interviews.

Contact Congress Day, June 2025. A day of action asking our community to call and write their members of Congress on three specific things: Medicare coverage of GLP-1s for obesity, an end to step therapy and prior-authorization roadblocks, and treating obesity as the chronic disease it is.

Patient voices in reporting and research

Journalists and researchers kept asking us the same thing: can you find people who will talk about this honestly. So that is what we did.

• Reuters and WIRED — we helped reporters reach patients willing to describe what happened to them when affordability collapsed and when compounded GLP-1 access ended abruptly.
• I-MAK — we helped connect patients whose lived experience of access barriers went into I-MAK's report on how patent tactics delay lower-cost alternatives.
• Wageningen University — we shared a graduate research survey with our community so that real patient experience shaped academic work on meal solutions that reduce GLP-1 side effects.

Naming an outlet or an institution here describes work we did. It is not a claim that any of them endorses, sponsors or is affiliated with the GLP-1 Collective.

Direct support

We sent care packages to members who told us they were struggling to get the supplies that go with these medications. It was a handful of people rather than a program, and calling it a program would round it up.

We also ran free live sessions, including question-and-answer sessions with obesity specialists, hosted by people who gave their time for nothing. Those sessions now happen several times a week in the community we point people to, so we stopped duplicating them.

This website

The largest thing the Collective produces is the site you are reading: plain-language education on what these medications are and what they are approved to treat, a side effects guide, a page for teenagers and their parents, how to argue with an insurer, ten free calculators that store nothing, and a policy tracker following what is changing for access. There is no account to make, nothing to buy, and no advertising or tracking of any kind.

Where we fell short

The Collective was founded intending to help people pay for their medications directly, and it never managed to. Our mission page explains why in full. We would rather publish a short honest record than a long impressive one.