Guelph schools unite for brain tumour fundraiser
For Immediate Release
March 17, 2016
Ten 4 Ten aims to raise $100,000
GUELPH, Ontario — In 2006, ten staff members and students at John F. Ross CVI shaved their heads to raise money for the Brain Tumour Foundation of Canada. The goal was to raise $10,000, but when the fundraising total was added up, the group had raised more than $30,000 in just three weeks. Ten years later, organizers have an even more ambitious goal: to raise $100,000 by April 9th when over 100 staff and students will shave their heads or donate their pony tails.
Ross teacher Mark Yanchus developed the idea of Ten 4 Ten in 2006 as a tribute to the memory of his brother who had died twenty years earlier in his early twenties. At the time, one of his colleagues had just lost her mother to a brain tumour, and another of his colleagues, Melanie Denoon, had an eight year-old daughter who had been living with a brain tumour for five years. Today, Alicia Denoon is 18 years old, a brain tumour survivor, and a grade 12 student at John F. Ross. She said, “The 2006 Ten 4 Ten fundraiser was extremely important to myself and my family because it let us know that there were mountains of people who cared and wanted to help in any way they could, not just for us but for families like us as well. This fundraiser helped my family, and I truly see that anything is really possible.”
Denoon said this year’s event brings back a “flood of emotion” from memories of the 2006 event. “I was eight years old, fresh out of my relapse and moving into a stage of continuing on into recovery. We didn’t know if I was going to be able to continue with a normal life – to function properly, go to school, high school, university, work just like anyone else (with a few alterations here and there), or be independent.” Today, she’s one of the major student planners of the fundraiser with plans to go to university next year.
John F. Ross principal Beth Burns was part of the original group that shaved their heads back in 2006 when she was a vice-principal at the school. She calls that day, back in 2006, “the best day of my career. I saw our community as a school and the greater community of Guelph join forces like I had never seen before. It was truly beautiful to behold.” She’s hoping this year’s event will be able to replicate that sense of community.
In 2006, the Ten 4 Ten fundraiser was specific to John F. Ross. This year, the fundraiser includes all seven high schools in Guelph. Yanchus hopes that this initiative will be a powerful force that shows students that they have more in common with each other than they think. “Our stories at our school are the same as all the other schools; sadly in this regard, we have more in common than we think. I have always wondered what could be possible if we set in motion a collective effort to do one thing under one banner, all teenagers in Guelph stepping up to cancer as a citywide collective to raise money and awareness all the while they relax their age old rivalries to become one force for good.”
Students throughout the Upper Grand District School Board are fundraising by creating online profiles, holding fundraising events, and fundraising the old-fashioned way with pledge forms. The next fundraising event is a bottle drive that will take place on March 21-22 and again on March 29-30th from 7:30-9:00 a.m. in the teacher parking lot at John F. Ross. Members of the community are encouraged to bring in bottles that can normally be returned for deposit refund.
A series of fundraising events will take place throughout March and April at participating schools, culminating in the big event on the evening of Saturday, April 9th. Yanchus said the evening “represents a gesture of the generosity of our teenagers citywide. Its grand purpose is to bring together a group of people who share cancer in common, to allow a venue to recognize people we have lost to cancer and to support those who still fight it in their lives today. This colossal fundraiser will come to fruition on that evening, and our teenagers will have served a greater good in the lives of others and changed the world, at least a little, forever.”
To donate to the Ten 4 Ten fundraising campaign, please visit braintumour.ca and click on the Ten 4 Ten link.
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For more information:
Tim Mathewson, Ten 4 Ten Media Outreach Coordinator
Upper Grand District School Board
519-822-7090
[email protected]
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