On world leukaemia day national blood cancer charity Cure Leukaemia launched its fundraising and awareness campaign for Blood Cancer Awareness Month called ‘The Cure Leukaemia (CL) Lifesavers 100 Club’ to address the £1,300,000 shortfall the charity faces in light of COVID-19.
With all of Cure Leukaemia’s major fundraising events scheduled for 2020 cancelled due to the COVID-19 crisis, the charity has created a fun and engaging campaign to encourage anyone and everyone to help raise funds during Blood Cancer Awareness Month and beyond.
The campaign focuses on how £100 raised for Cure Leukaemia can help save the lives of blood cancer patients across the UK. Not everyone can run marathons, cycle hundreds of miles or climb Everest and whilst there will always be remarkable people who take those challenges on, this campaign shows that everyone that raises funds can become a lifesaver too.
The CL Lifesavers 100 Club is open to anyone, from anywhere and of any age. It doesn’t matter how they choose to raise £100, but if they do, they will automatically join the CL Lifesavers 100 Club and, in return, every fundraiser will receive a CL Lifesavers 100 Club medal and a personalised card.
Whether it is a sporting challenge, regular donation, sponsored silence, raffle, cake bake or head shave there are hundreds of ways to raise £100. By all pulling together, Cure Leukaemia hope to encourage as many people as possible to join the Club and, by doing so, they will help address the £1.3m shortfall for this year.
The first member of the CL Lifesavers Club is inspirational blood cancer survivor Lizzie Dean. Lizzie, 31 from Birmingham, was given just months to live when she relapsed after a transplant to combat acute myeloid leukaemia in 2016. Thanks to a clinical trial made available to her by Cure Leukaemia, Lizzie is alive and well, back working and doing all she can to help the charity that saved her life.
Having not walked further than 2.6km in one go since her diagnosis she completed this distance for the 2.6 Challenge in April and now, in September, she is attempting to walk a full marathon distance of 26.2 miles during Blood Cancer Awareness Month.
Speaking about her challenge she said: “In 2016 I didn’t think I would be here in 2020 but I am thanks to this charity and I want to do everything I can to help other patients. To walk this distance will be a huge achievement for me and whilst I may be doing it in stages it really will be my ‘marathon’. I love Cure Leukaemia’s new Lifesavers campaign. People like me can’t cycle huge distances or climb mountains; but we still want to do our bit and it is great that the charity is going to recognize its fundraisers in this way.”
Cure Leukaemia CEO James McLaughlin said: “The COVID-19 crisis has decimated the ability of all charities to fundraise in 2020 and we have not been any different. However, it is imperative that we continue to do all we can to raise as much as physically possible to ensure blood cancer patients across the UK are not impacted further due to COVID-19.
“A person is diagnosed with blood cancer every 14 minutes in the UK and that stark statistic has not stopped since the virus swept through the world and that is why we must maintain the Trials Acceleration Programme (TAP) to enable patients across the UK, like Lizzie, to have access to potentially life-saving clinical trials.
“With the launch of this campaign, we are keen to recognise the value of the collective and potentially lifesaving impact that can be made by those who raise £100 for Cure Leukaemia. We want this to be fun and engaging for all our supporters across the UK and we look forward to hearing about their ideas in the coming weeks and months.”
