Spare a Rose, Save a Child
Valentine’s Day is coming up, and we, as a community, have a chance to show some love for people around the globe with diabetes. A small group of us – Kelly Close, Manny Hernandez, Bennet Dunlap, Adam Brown, Jeff Hitchcock, and Kerri Sparling – with the support of some friends at Johnson & Johnson, got together recently to see how the diabetes community could use social media for social good, and a wicked cool and powerful idea was born.
We want to help the Life for a Child program, sponsored by the International Diabetes Federation, which aims 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 Valentine’s 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 Valentine’s 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 who needs it.
We also want to raise more awareness for the Life for a Child program, and we hope that our friends in the DOC will help with this effort.
Here’s 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? probably not, but it works), etc., about the organization and the Spare a Rose, Save a Child effort. The earlier we can get the word out about this, the better.
- If you’d like, you can download an image to use for your post, or host it on your site for the week of Feb 10 – 16th.
- Please use the URL: http://bit.ly/SpareRoseSaveChild to link to the IDF site. (This is a short URL we’ve created so we can see how much impact our social media campaign has generated.) For more information on the Life for a Child program, please check out that link.
- Also, if you do decide to post about this effort, would you please leave a comment on this blog post so we can keep track of the posts that were in support of this effort?
- The hashtag for this effort is #sparearose, should you be feeling Twittery.
This Valentine’s Day, we can both show our affection for loved ones at home and give a little help to those we have some much in common with around the world. 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.
Thank you for reading this and for everything you do as part of this community. Seriously – thank you.
at 9:06 pm
Thanks for helping to spread the word on this incredible effort.