He spent two decades launching off aircraft carriers and flying into combat zones. He processed life-or-death decisions at speeds most people will never experience. He served his country without hesitation.
Then cancer came for him.
Stage three. Colorectal. Diagnosed while still on active duty, working inside the Pentagon. The prognosis was brutal — initially a 57% chance of surviving five years.
Bill Phillips beat it. But what he learned during treatment changed him more than the diagnosis itself.
"Therapy was helping, but not enough," he said. "Through a former squadron mate, I met a life coach who works with professional athletes. And my life changed in that moment."
That moment became a mission. And that mission became the KFG Project — an organization built to provide free coaching to the people America asks the most of and supports the least when they're fighting for their lives.
The Kash Foundation backs that mission. Here's why.
The Gap No One Is Filling
Cancer treatment in America is world-class at keeping people alive. It is far less equipped to help them actually live.
For military service members, veterans, and first responders — people trained to push through pain, suppress fear, and solve problems under pressure — a cancer diagnosis creates a particular kind of crisis. The same mental toughness that got them through combat or a burning building becomes the wall that keeps them from processing what's happening to them.
And survivorship is its own battlefield. The scans don't stop. The anxiety doesn't stop. The fear of recurrence — the quiet dread that builds in the weeks before every six-month check-up — is sometimes worse than the treatment itself.
"Cancer is not like healing from a broken bone," Phillips explained. "It's something that existed in your body that tried to kill you — and there's always the potential of it coming back. The fear of recurrence is sometimes greater than the fear of beating cancer while you're in it."
For young adults — patients between 13 and 39 — the rates of new diagnoses are climbing with no end in sight. For military families, the stakes compound: a young spouse facing the possibility of losing their partner, raising children alone, navigating a system that was already hard to navigate when everyone was healthy.
There are organizations that offer therapy. There are organizations that offer support groups. But there is no organization providing free, professional coaching — the kind that reconnects patients and caregivers to their identity, their purpose, and their future — at no cost.
Until now.
The Man Behind It
Bill Phillips retired after 20 years of naval aviation. He flew combat missions. He served in the Pentagon. He lived the life of a career military officer — disciplined, mission-focused, and built to endure.
None of that prepared him for what came next.
"I was preparing to retire and was diagnosed with stage three colorectal cancer," he said. "I started treatment and was in a very low place."
Traditional therapy helped — but it kept him anchored to the past. It asked him to process what had happened. What Phillips needed was something that pointed forward — something that reconnected him to who he was and who he was becoming.
A former squadron mate connected him with a life coach who worked with professional athletes. The shift was immediate.
"Coaching helped me reconnect to my identity and my purpose," Phillips said. "Everything changed. My treatment, my quality of life, my outlook — all of it improved."
The coach also connected him to complementary practices — breathwork, meditation, nutrition, and a holistic focus on mental and physical health that went far beyond what the medical system offered.
"It was the missing piece," he said. "And once I found it, I knew I had to give it to everyone behind me."
Phillips launched the KFG Project in April 2025. Less than a year later, it is already changing lives.
The Program in Action
The KFG Project provides free coaching to adolescent, young adult, veteran, military, and first responder cancer patients and caregivers. Every person who enters the program — called a "member" — is matched with a professional coach through a clinical coordinator who ensures the connection is personal, intentional, and built to last.
The coaching program runs for one year per member — long enough to accompany someone through treatment, into survivorship, and beyond. But coaching is only the beginning.
KFG members also receive access to breathwork sessions, meditation training, retreats, financial literacy resources, and a growing network of modalities designed to improve quality of life from every angle.
The coaches themselves are not volunteers reading from a script. They are elite professionals — the same people coaching NHL players, UFC fighters, and NFL athletes. Phillips and his team attract that caliber of talent because the mission demands it.
"You don't attract somebody like that without resources," Phillips said. "The funding from The Kash Foundation pays for those coaching sessions — and because of that, we've been able to bring in coaches who are also providing free breathwork sessions and other modalities that they'd normally charge substantially for."
The diversity of the coaching roster is intentional. Some coaches are faith-based. Some are clinicians. Some lean into meditation and mindfulness. The goal is simple: meet every member where they are.
"I want a diverse range of coaches from all backgrounds," Phillips said, "so that we get a better likelihood of a real connection. And we have a therapist coordinating it all — she talks to the members, understands what they need, and matches them with the right coach from the start."
Real Impact
The KFG Project's first grant from The Kash Foundation went directly to supporting two active-duty members of the New Jersey National Guard — a cancer patient named Tom and his wife, his primary caregiver.
Tom has been receiving consistent coaching since the grant was awarded. He attended an in-person retreat in Arizona with his coach. His wife — who waited for Tom to complete the most intensive phase of treatment — is now matched with her own coach and seeing results.
But the story that captures the full power of the program belongs to a woman named Carrie.
Carrie is the wife of an active-duty Marine Corps colonel. She is a brain cancer survivor — multiple surgeries, recurring tumors, and the relentless anxiety that comes with scans every two years.
"Every two years I have a recurrence and I freak out," she told Phillips. "I have scan anxiety. I don't want to go in."
Carrie wasn't sure about coaching. She told Phillips she wasn't into what she called the "woo spiritual stuff" — she had her faith, and she had God's plan. Phillips didn't push. Instead, he matched her with a coach who is also a physician's assistant and a Catholic — someone who could meet Carrie exactly where she was.
The result was transformational.
"For the very first time, she was able to sleep and relax before her scans," Phillips said. "She went in, and the scans were clear. She credits the coaching with helping her stay calm and improving her quality of life in a way nothing else had."
That is what the KFG Project does. It doesn't replace medical treatment. It doesn't replace therapy. It's the companion to care that no one knew they needed — until they experienced it.
Why The Kash Foundation Stepped In
The Kash Foundation's mission is to back the brave and build the future. The KFG Project is both — delivered through a model that didn't exist before Bill Phillips built it.
This is a decorated naval aviator who looked at the gap between treatment and true recovery and refused to accept it. He didn't write a white paper. He didn't wait for a government program. He took his lived experience — twenty years of military service, a stage three cancer diagnosis, and the coaching that changed his trajectory — and turned it into a blueprint for everyone behind him.
The Foundation's grant funded the coaching sessions that are actively supporting military cancer patients and their caregivers right now. Without that funding, Tom and his wife don't get matched with world-class coaches. Carrie doesn't sleep before her scans. The breathwork sessions, the retreats, the modalities that complement the coaching — none of it happens at the level Phillips demands.
"There's no organization that provides free coaching," Phillips said. "Plenty charge for it. I'm going to raise money and give it to them for free — because they deserve it and they have their whole lives ahead of them."
Mission First isn't just a tagline. It's the standard every grant, every initiative, and every partnership gets measured against. KFG met it. The Foundation showed up.
Bill Phillips doesn't run the KFG Project because it's easy. He runs it because he sat in that treatment chair, looked around, and saw a gap that no one else was filling.
He calls it grit. "I can't shut it off," he said. "I observed a gap in healthcare personally. I experienced it. And I learned that if you're stressed and going through treatment, it's probably not going to work."
He's not wrong. And he's not stopping.
Phillips is currently expanding KFG to partner with major oncology centers across the country — Johns Hopkins, Memorial Sloan Kettering, University of Chicago, and more. He's building a tech-driven platform to scale the model nationally. And he's developing retreats that take the virtual coaching experience and make it tangible, transformative, and lasting.
The Kash Foundation believes that America's defenders extend beyond the battlefield — to every service member, every veteran, every first responder, and every person who answered the call and now needs someone to answer theirs.
KFG is answering. We're standing behind it.
The mission doesn't stop. Neither do we.
To learn more about the KFG Project, visit kfgproject.org. To support organizations like this one through the Kash Foundation, visit thekashfoundation.com/support.
