NEED SOME KARMA POINTS? VOTE FOR SKATE4CANCER
posted by SARAHblackbox
“We may not be able to raise enough money to change the world, but we can raise enough people to change the world.” Those are the words of Skate4Cancer’s founder, Rob Dyer. Skate4Cancer has entered an online competition called the Aviva Community Fund, seeking between $50,000-$250,000 in funding for a space in Toronto S4C did sign up a bit late for this competition though, and need help catching up to the leader who has 3,000 votes so far.
To help them out, go to http://www.avivacommunityfund.org/ideas/acf1885, do a quick registration and cast your vote. It only takes about 15 seconds. You can use every single email address you have, even those embarrassing ones you made when you were 10! You can also vote more than once; in fact you can vote once a day! Don’t forget to spread the word amongst your friends and contacts as well.
Skate4Cancer is a non-profit cancer awareness organization based in Toronto, Ontario. Our goal from the outset has not been to raise money, but to promote cancer prevention through education on healthy lifestyle choices. The Aviva Community Fund is exactly the type of opportunity that our organization could use to give Skate4Cancer a home in the city of Toronto.
The space we’re envisioning would serve as a public drop in center, where people could stop by at any time to speak to someone about the education and programs we promote. Currently, the Skate4Cancer community is predominantly youth-oriented, which we feel is another reason to consider establishing a headquarters downtown – giving kids a positive environment to visit, learn and benefit from. Many kids also feel at ease to share their stories with Skate4Cancer volunteers – Cancer battles of their own, or battles that they’ve watched loved ones have to fight. This space would give us the opportunity to sit down for one-on-one talks with kids who need to talk, share, grieve and heal.
We have a variety of different educational programs that we have taken on the road with us over the last couple of years. The most popular are our no-smoking program, the self breast examinations program and the importance of wearing sunscreen. These programs, along with others would find a permanent home in this space.
We also envision regular events at this space. These could include town hall type meetings to discuss our programs, recent news or advancements in the fight against cancer, or even promotion of other healthy-lifestyle type organizations. It could also include talks from invited guests - historically, Skate4Cancer has always partnered with individuals in the music, entertainment and skateboarding community to promote our ideas, values and programs. Having a home base to invite these higher-profile individuals in will lend a sense of legitimacy to what we are doing, and promote the space to a much broader demographic than we can reach on our own. The Skate4Cancer community is growing steadily across Canada, and internationally. However giving the organization a home base where we can try out new program ideas, host regular events, and further our community growth would be very beneficial.
As Skate4Cancer has emerged and grown in the past couple of years, we have also seen an increase in the workload of administering the programs and the organization as a whole. This space would also give us an opportunity to establish an administrative home-base. Being able to attach a formal address to a store-front type space in downtown Toronto would be the next logical step, and give us a place to train the volunteers that will be so vital to us as the organization continues to grow.
Skate4Cancer also relies heavily upon sales of t-shirts and other accessories to help fund its initiatives where possible. To date, these retail items have been sold on tour and online, generally at cost. These items are absolutely integral to the awareness the organization has achieved over the last few years. Our plan would devote a small portion of the space to design and sell these garments and accessories. We want every person who visits the space to leave feeling educated, empowered, and willing to share what they learned with others to promote the community. The garments and accessories are a major part of that, and we feel the community would be extremely receptive to this part of the space as well.
We’ve discussed how this space would benefit our home base of Toronto Ontario. However we should mention that Skate4Cancer tours successfully throughout North America, and are traveling overseas for the first time this November for dates in Europe. We also have vibrant followings in Australia, and the online component of the Skate4cancer community is also enormous and growing. As such, the ideas, events, programs and community that are developed and fine tuned in the proposed space will have a much more broad impact than just in Toronto. These core elements of Skate4Cancer will be taken around the world to promote healthy living and cancer awareness internationally, tracing their roots back to the space in Toronto.
We are proud of the growing profile that Skate4Cancer has developed in Canada, the United States and overseas. We think this space would be the perfect home-base and compliment to all the work we do. We hope that you see the value of having such a positive, open and vibrant space, especially because of the youth-oriented nature.
Cancer is a scary subject for everyone, and having a forum for education, discussion and community building will serve to give people in Toronto abroad an opportunity they may not have otherwise had.
Skate4cancer.com / myspace.com/skate4cancer / twitter.com/Skate4Cancer
