Dana Farber Cancer Institute has just concluded its Mission Possible: The Dana-Farber Campaign to Conquer Cancer, a seven-year capital campaign that raised $1.18 billion. The Gene Display in the Yawkey Center at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute is the signature gallery of this accomplishment. Visit the Gene Display, read about the science, the campaign, and name a gene if you can.
Category: Social Responsibility
Room To Read’s Erin Ganju at TEDxBerkeley: ‘Scaling Social Good’
Room To Read Co-Founder and CEO Erin Ganju spoke at the second annual TEDxBerkeley conference held on February 19, 2011 in Berkeley, California. Erin delivered a passionate presentation called ‘Scaling Social Good’ about the impact Room To Read has made on millions of children in the developing world since 2000. The table below from the Room To Read website provides “just the numbers”. Watch the video to hear and see the full story.
| Schools | 1,442 | |
| Libraries | 11,246 | |
| Books Published | 553 | |
| Books Distributed | 9.4 million | |
| Girls’ Scholarships | 10,590 | |
| Children Benefited | 5.1 million |
IMPORTANT: You must fast forward to the timestamp, 1:31:58, to see the start of Erin’s talk. Before you can do this, you will need to wait for a 30-second advertisement to play. Once the commercial is over, you can place your cursor on the gray shaded horizontal tool bar immediately below the screen to skip directly to her presentation. (When TEDxBerkeley posts the individual presenter videos to their website in the coming weeks, I’ll add a postscript to this blog post with the direct link to Erin’s.)
Team Perry Raises Millions for the Dana Farber Cancer Institute
I wrote a post a few weeks ago about visiting the Dana Farber Cancer Institute with my Pan-Mass Challenge (PMC) friends on Team Kermit.
Anthony Edwards of WCVB TV Channel 5 in Boston did a wonderful video segment of Team Perry last week. The team is named in honor of Perry Levy, who died at age 32 after only two years of marriage to Melissa. He was diagnosed with a rare and aggressive cancer form of the small bowel and passed away only 3.5 months after his diagnosis.
Watch this video. The words from Melissa, Dr. Robert Mayer, Perry’s lead doctor at DFCI, and Perry’s brother Matt are truly inspirational, especially this quote from Paul: “Life will never be the same but that’s doesn’t mean it’s not good; it’s just different.”
Melissa turned this unbelievable tragedy into action. She created Team Perry with another friend 10 years ago. Last year the team had 70 riders and raised $460K. To date, Team Perry has raised nearly $3 million and funds nine fellowships at the Dana Farber. To make a donation to Team Perry, visit the Team Perry profile on the PMC website.
Our History is Her Future: Celebrating 60!
The Big Sister Association of Greater Boston sponsored a wonderful event last night with the title of this post. It was AMAZING! From the moment I asked Jonah Beukman about parking, to meeting COO Mia Roberts when hanging up my overcoat, I felt an incredibly positive energy in the room. You can’t create a vibe like this out of thin air; it has to be real…and it was! Over 150 people were in the wonderful Artists for Humanity EpiCenter. We mingled, sampled hors d’oeuvres, made friends, started new relationships, and heard wonderful speeches.
Congratulations to Big Sister for such a fantastic evening. TRA360 is exploring ways in which we as an organization and as individuals can get more involved with a truly special and much-needed non-profit as Big Sister.