From the LIVESTRONG SUMMIT

Blog #3

I’m hailing from Columbus, OH, where I’m participating in the second LIVESTRONG summit. 800 of the 1000 participants here are cancer survivors. Take that cancer! The event organizers placed me in the fundraising track for breakout sessions. It was a bit intimidating to end up there. I’m a writer and a poet. I’ve had some luck asking friends and family to support my efforts to get out and read poetry at support groups and conferences. I have really appreciated their help, but I’m not so sure how well I can do it on a larger scale. This must be where faith comes in handy, and I get to reckon with there being some reason I ended up where I did.

The first breakout session was pretty fun. They divided our group of about 110 people into 12 smaller teams. They gave us little digital video cameras and assigned us to film commercials for the LIVESTRONG. We had 60 minutes to film a 60 second commercial. Our message needed to support LIVESTRONG’s mission: “To Make Cancer a National Priority. It also had to convince people to donate to the Lance Armstrong Foundation, and share how that can be done. Collaborating in groups to do this was fun, intense, and at times frustrating. We did okay, but there was another group that really nailed the message. Good for them. This project was a pretty good approach to teambuilding. In the next session, a couple that do a lot of fundraising for LAF talked to us about how they have found success. The central message was to work fundraising into something we already have fun with and know.

Since one of my favorite things to do with my friends and family since my diagnosis with brain cancer has been to play softball, I thought a tournament would be a good way to raise funds and have some fun. So now I have an idea for a fundraiser that could actually end up a pretty cool event.

Well, it’s late in the Buckeye state and I have an early date with my LIVESTRONG buddies, so goodnight for tonight. There’s a jazzy piano trickling out of my Mac book. After a quick shower, I’m knockin’ out for hopefully a nice solid night of snooze. Jetlag be gone! As my homie Keith likes to say, “Peace and hair grease.”

Wrick