Mentoring e-Mail # 21

Hello my coming down the stretch Nashville Mentees –

‘Tis I, your Artful Mentor with yet one more Tuesday night message for you. This one will discuss the “Final Four”.

No, not North Carolina, Michigan State, Connecticut, and Villanova, although as a Villanova grad, I am pretty excited by this turn of events. It is only the third time that the Wildcats are in the Final Four! GO WILDCATS!

But the Final Four I am talking about relates to these concepts:

The three of you plus me makes four of us going to Nashville among my mentoring group
The fact that we have only four weeks of training left before the race, including the week that we are in
The even more important fact that we essentially have only four weeks left to fundraise.

Technically, yeah, I know, I know, we really have more than that amount of time because we can fundraise after the event for a couple of weeks. But seriously, don’t you want to go to Nashville, your mind clear of fundraising, and just concentrate on your race? And on having a great Team in Training event, the first one for two of you? So KEEP PRESSING AHEAD WITH THAT FUNDRAISING. And kudos to Dave, who got a $500 donation this week. Now that is the kind of news that puts a big smile on a mentor’s face!

I got to talk to the two of you who are still below minimum and it sounds like both of you have solid ideas, help from friends and family, and money starting to come in. So just keep on with that full court press (getting back to basketball for a second) and pull out all the stops.

Congratulations to all three of you for completing the Monument Avenue 10K last week. Wasn’t that a blast? I put a few photos on my blog, and coach Vicki has some photos that she sent as well.

I have a mission moment for you. One of the things that LLS does, that the money you raise helps to fund, is called First Connection. This is where volunteers who have survived a blood cancer get in touch with someone who currently is dealing with leukemia, lymphoma, or myeloma. I volunteer for this, and when I am given an assignment, I give the patient a call and we chat for 15-45 minutes about all kinds of things that they are going through. Volunteers don’t get paid, but where the money you raise comes in is paying for the LLS patient services coordinators (this is just a small part of their job), training materials, maintaining the database of patients and connections, and so forth.

This week, I called a lady named Cindy who lives in Tennessee. She just finished chemotherapy in December for Hodgkin Lymphoma, and is dealing with some troubling left over side effects – neuropathy in her feet and hands, and joint pain. I could not help her with that a lot, because I was lucky enough to feel pretty good within a month or two of wrapping up chemo and never had either of those ailments. But we did chat about some other things. So what is the mission moment in all this? Well, there are two. First, the dollars you raise are helping real people, right now – not just funding cures 10 years from now. Second, even curable cancers like Hodgkin lymphoma can have pretty awful cures and lasting side effects. Hopefully the money we raise can not only help discover more cures, but more humane and less destructive cures.

By the way, Cindy’s husband is in the Nashville race so even though none of us will know her, someone out there cheering the racers is being helped by what we all do.

I am proud of each of you for sticking through training and fundraising despite injuries, recessions, tough fund raising climate, and job loss. Keep going, just for four more weeks. Don’t let up now – you are almost there.

GO TEAM!
Art