Valentine’s 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, we’re 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 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 across the world who needs it.
We’re hopeful that our friends in the DOC will help with this effort, if they’d like to pitch in.
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?), etc about the organization and the Spare a Rose, Save a Child effort.
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. 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 we’ve created so we can see how much impact our social media campaign has generated.)
Also, please go to Kerri’s 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 Valentine’s 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