- Kerry Kunzli
The Ripple Effect
The Ripple Effect
When you start something like Ride2Survive, you don’t really know where it will go or what effect it will have.
Ride2Survive is like that. We started as just a crazy long, hard ride and to raise awareness and some money for the cancer cause. That first one in 2005 inspired us to repeat it and make it better and bigger not knowing what could or would happen.
Years later we look out to the ripples as they steadily move and spread out, impacting more people all the time. These are some of the ripples:
- Your donations of $7M to research has moved diagnosis and treatment along to make outcomes better.
- Families have changed as parents and children take part in an entirely volunteer event… we have seen kids "grow up" in Ride2Survive.
- Some families have been created out of relationships started at Ride2Survive
- Many, many members now ride or do other physical / athletic activities who never did until they got involved in Ride2Survive.
- Many members have never volunteered for anything until they took part in Ride2Survive and now they are contributing back in other areas of their community.
- The pride in our crew and riders who fully understand what “all volunteer” really means along with what can be accomplished with no costs coming out of donor dollars.
- The effect of a ride-by visit to a cancer fighter is impossible to describe except that we have been to several funerals for some of those fighters and while the ride-by visit was only 10 or 15 minutes of their whole life, we see pictures of the ride-by and the Ride2Survive impact at the funeral along-side their whole life story. How can that be? But it is.
- The year after year buy-in from the many businesses who fully donate goods to help us operate the event because they know and want all the donors' money going to researchers, not costs.
Perhaps the best way to describe the ripple effect from this 'thing' we call Ride2Survive are the words we have heard many times; "you have changed my life".
If you would care to make a donation please go to http://cancer.ca/ride2survive and select a rider/volunteer to donate to.
And if you've read this far, just to show you how it hits home, we just got word this evening (Wed, June 20th) that one of our very strong riders from last year has been moved into hospice today. One year from no problem to hospice. His wife, who rode with us as well, says he's fought enough and it is time to rest… we can't imagine.
And if all that isn’t clear, sometime, just ask any of our team why we do Ride2Survive…
Follow us, live, on ride day this Saturday June 23rd at http://ride2survive.ca
Kerry and Vicki Kunzli