There are a lot of problems in the world—you know this!
So how do we do a better job of living in the world and improving lives? How do we insure that we make an impact and truly make a difference? We’ll let our Founder say it for all of us:
If you’re like me, you start with a cause and often a journey which drives the passion for that cause.
For me, my passion for a cause started when I was sixteen and volunteering at a hospital in St. Anthony, Newfoundland, a remote fishing village on the northern tip of the Canadian province. The hospital was home for 20 or so children from the outlying islands who were brought there to recover from chronic diseases, usually tuberculosis. They were there for months, my summer job was to amuse and distract the children from the tedium.
One of the first days on the job, I came into the toddler ward and found a new patient, a two-year-old covered in bruises and crying with pain. In my efforts to comfort him I was told not to touch him, he had leukemia, and even a gentle hug would cause bruising. Several days later I returned to the ward and found the crib stripped of bed clothes—a not so subtle indication that the patient was gone, in this case gone forever.
Yes, the cause to fight cancer began for me in Newfoundland, but gained its power through my cancer journey—a journey which included not only my own fight with breast cancer–and then augmented by the many friends and family who’d been touched by the evil disease.
The close to home cancers fed the drive, but so too did the cancers of faraway. From the child in Newfoundland, to the Ugandan woman I met at the 2006 Breast Cancer Summit in Budapest who told me that treatment for women in Uganda for breast cancer was only morphine—and that was only for the lucky ones. Travel revealed the global magnitude of the problem and fortified the drive, and not only for the cancer cause.
Yes, there are a lot of problems in the world. But there are many people with a drive, a passion, for THEIR cause too.
At JourneyGives™ we believe in the power of one, and the the dynamic force of many. Helping YOU raise funds for YOUR cause means we all have a chance of doing a better job of living in the world and to truly make a difference.
Rebecca Gray