Awareness

“It’s great to raise money to find a cause and cure for Type 1 diabetes, but it’s the public education that is so important,” he said.

That’s particularly important for Crohn’s sufferer Trent Linford, who is dealing with a disease that often isn’t addressed as openly as some.

“Awareness is key that there is this disease that affects a lot of people ...,” he said. “In Canada it’s like one in 150 are diagnosed with IBD (inflammatory bowel disease) ... So it’s one of those things that it’s quite prevalent, it’s just that people don’t know about it, don’t know that these fundraisers take place and things like that, so it’s good that we have these kind of walks.”

Linford hopes that raising funds through events like this will one day ensure that his daughters never have to go through what he and other Crohn’s and Colitis sufferers endure on a daily basis.

“You do find other people and you’re able to share your stories and that, but myself, my own opinion on it is that these walks are just a good way to kind of to just sum up all your fundraising efforts because, for some of us, we’ve been fundraising for four months now and it’s just kind of the big finale where we get together,” said

“MORE KIDS ARE

GETTING DIAGNOSED WITH

DIABETES EVERY YEAR.”

BRENDA EVANS

Linford, who estimated he’d raised about $5,200 for the event.

Scott Anderson, chair of The Arthritis Society’s Saskatchewan Advisory Board, said walks remain an efficient way to raise funds.

“It’s something that we believe will have benefit,” he said at Sunday’s Walk to Fight Arthritis. “I mean, when you look at it from the board perspective, you look at the cost-benefit ratio — how much money does it cost you to raise the money — and it’s a fairly effective way of raising money because the staff time is a little less, the volunteers do a lot of the work, and the people themselves are raising the money. And so we’ve had events in the past where 85 or 90 per cent of the dollars generated go towards getting the dollars and that’s not very effective for a charity ... Eleven per cent of our monies raised (at walks) goes toward administration and running the divisions and national office; 89 per cent of it goes towards our primary mission of helping people with arthritis and funding research. And so we feel pretty good about it from that perspective.”

Sunday’s Walk to Fight Arthritis raised just over $17,000 with about 200 people participating.

As far as Evans is concerned, fundraising walks aren’t going anywhere.

“More kids are getting diagnosed with diabetes every year, so you have more people coming out,” she said. “There’s more support and it keeps growing, so it’s showing that (walks are) growing, they’re not diminishing.”