Spare a Rose, Save a Child


Dear DOC Friends,

Valentines Day is coming up, and we, as a community, have a chance to show some love for people with diabetes around the globe. A small group of us Kelly Close, Manny Hernandez, Bennet Dunlap, Kerri Sparling, and Jeff Hitchcock with the support of some folks at Johnson & Johnson, got together recently to see how the diabetes community could make the move to use social media for social good, and an idea was born out of that meeting that can impact the lives of children with diabetes across the globe.

Specifically, were looking to help the Life for a Child program, which is an International Diabetes Federation program aiming to take contributions from donors [to] go to established diabetes centers enabling them to provide the ongoing clinical care and diabetes education these children need to stay alive. Our idea was to take the typical dozen roses, so popular on Valentines Day, and save just one rose to spare the life of a child. Spare a Rose, Save a Child is simple: buy one less rose this Valentines Day and share the value of that flower with a child with diabetes in the developing world. Your loved one at home still gets flowers and you both show some love to someone across the world who needs it.

Were hopeful that our friends in the DOC will help with this effort, if theyd like to pitch in.

Heres what you can do to help:

The week of February 10 16th, please help raise awareness for the Life for a Child program by blogging, Tweeting, Facebooking (is that an official verb?), etc about the organization and the Spare a Rose, Save a Child effort.

If youd like, you can download an image to use for your post, or host it on your site for the week of Feb 10 16th.Three banner sizes are available for you to use on your web site (click on the respective link below to access the file):
Download the 728W x 90H banner
Download the 160W x 600H banner
Download the 160W x 199H banner

Please use the URL: http://bit.ly/SpareRoseSaveChild to link to the IDF site. (This is a short URL weve created so we can see how much impact our social media campaign has generated.)

Also, please go to Kerris blog post on Spare a Rose, Save a Child and post a comment there with a link to your blog post so we can keep track of how many DOC sites are participating.

The hashtag for this effort is #sparearose

This Valentines Day, we can both share our care for loved ones at home and give a little help to those we have some much in common with around the world. We hope to connect our love for our families to helping other families keep their loved ones alive. It is a simple, caring, but life-changing message. And it shows that the diabetes online community takes care of one another, both online and off.

Thanks for reading all of this, and for everything you do as part of this community.

Kerri,Kelly,Manny,Jeff,Adam,Bennet

Updated: Heres a link list of sites that are helping raise awareness. If yours isnt on here, please comment at SixUntilMe with a link or emailinfo@diabetesadvocates.org.


Category: Blog

Tags: #sparearose, Diabetes, Doc, Life for a child, Social media, Spare a rose, Valentine