Built by the People Who Live It.
Beta Cell Foundation is a diabetes education organization run entirely by people with type 1 — board, staff, and program leaders.
A gap nobody was treating as an education problem.
People with type 1 diabetes are handed a diagnosis, a device, and a pamphlet, and expected to build a lifetime of skill out of it. Devices have improved enormously. What almost nobody has rebuilt is the teaching.
We think that’s the actual bottleneck — and that it’s solvable. Learning science has understood for decades how people build real skill: concepts that scaffold in sequence, active practice rather than passive reading, and immediate application to your own life. Almost no diabetes education is designed that way. Everything we build is.
Concepts in sequence, active practice, then your own life.
Interactive Blood Sugar Simulators let people see how insulin, food, and exercise actually move glucose. Scaffolded workbooks teach specific skills step by step, in print and online. Type One Run coordinates local running groups through chapter leaders around the world. T1Ds in the Wild runs outdoor trips where people learn to manage diabetes in real conditions alongside guides who live with it themselves.
The reason it works is who builds it.
Every program is designed and delivered by people with type 1 diabetes, including all three members of our board. The knowledge in our programs is the knowledge that circulates in T1D communities — running groups, camps, trail groups — organized, sequenced, and made available to people who don’t happen to have access to those rooms.
Our founder, Craig Stubing, was diagnosed at 13 and spent years learning what most people with T1D learn: that the most useful knowledge about this disease comes from other people who have it. BCF exists to make that knowledge reachable by anyone, not only the people lucky enough to find the right community.
We’re a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, founded in California in 2019. We work with health networks, clinics, camps, and nonprofits to bring the same approach to their own diabetes education. And our programs and tools are free for people with type 1 diabetes — because education is the one part of diabetes care that costs no more to give to ten thousand people than to one.
Talk to us.
Questions about a program, an organizational partnership, press, or anything else.