Dr Jay and Fern Bachter have raised 1.8 million for paediatric palliative care and are now meeting to build on their golf event successes to reach more sick kids and their siblings. The Dr. Jay Charitable Foundation website provides a huge amount of information about their quest:
"Adding life to a child's time, not just time to the child's life."
I attended a meeting on Wednesday night where Dr Jay laid out their successes and strategic goals and motivated us to think about how we could build out the network offering palliative care support and grief councelling. An exciting initiative is support for developing a paediatric component for the EPEC (Education in Palliative and End-of-life Care) program that began in the United States and that could be then brought to Canada.
The eight people around the table shared stories about fund raising successess: like a school care-athon for kids visited by politicians and fed by one of Golden Griddle's top execs personally, or social networking like the volunteer Time Raising initiative of The Framework Foundation.
Coincidentally, the following night I bumped into Anil Patel of Framework, Domenic Bortollusi of The Working Group who coded Framework and Paul McGrath, a technologist and journalist with the CBC. We were circling around what must be a common meme in volunteer and tech circles - what is a MySpace equivalent focused on connecting socially to help the sick and differently advantaged, green the world and reconnect communities to do good and have fun at the same time.
Dr Jay emailed me after reading Catherine Dunphy's article about Sasha in the Star and we spoke several times. The lightbulbs go off in their own time, however. The Dr Jay foundation supported the Max and Beatrice Woolf program at Temmy Latner Centre, the program that helped us bring Sasha home approaching 6 months ago. Jay and Fern were in our universe some time before we knew them.
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