Written By Tony Ward, exclusive to Lakeland.net
At a time when many charitable walks and events are seeing their final tallies plummet due to the scary economy and rising costs of gas, food and living in general, the 5th Annual Arthritis Walk received
record-breaking corporate support and saw its highest number of walk-participants on May 10, 2008. “Our committee met weekly this year and made a concerted effort to reach out to community partners that have employees living with arthritis or are in some way connected to the cause”, explains Amy Brown, Volunteer Chairperson for the 2008 walk, and mother of Walk Honoree (and the number one individual fund-raiser in 2008) 14-year old Hunter Brown. She continues, "We leapt from just a couple corporate sponsors over the last couple of years to more than 20 in 2008! We also had our first bank day ever thanks to
Colonial Bank which allowed walkers to turn in funds before the walk and not have to carry money with them to the site."
In addition to the inspiring corporate support, Amy and her walk committee were blown away by the amount of walk–up registrants on the actual day of the event. With about 70 people pre-registered to attend the walk, the committee made goody bags for 100 walkers in anticipation of possibly an additional 30 unregistered walkers showing up. Everyone was a little shell-shocked yet pleasantly surprised when more than 150 additional unregistered walkers showed up the morning of the event. The amount of teams participating in the walk also soared from 8 teams last year to 17 teams walking in 2008.
While there were many factors that added to the success of this year’s Arthritis Walk, most of them can be traced back to the efforts of Amy & Hunter Brown and their committee of relentless volunteers. Together they worked tirelessly to educate Lakeland Citizens about the 46 million Americans living with arthritis, including 300,000 children, many of whom live in Polk County. In addition to educating people one on one, this year’s education efforts were greatly increased by access to two much larger forums, Radio and the Internet. Amy and Scott Brown were invited to bring their daughter Hunter to the home of Lakeland’s Big 4 radio stations,
Hall Communications, where they were given the opportunity to share their moving story on all 4 radio stations! In addition, the
Blue Marlin Group, a one-stop full-service ad agency, allowed the committee to utilize
Lakeland.Net as an Arthritis Awareness Month Headquarters featuring personal stories of local kids living with arthritis and other interesting facts about arthritis, which many people wrongly classify as a disease only affecting our elderly.
Because the Arthritis Walk is a dog-friendly walk, it’s also billed as the Arff-ritis Walk. And thanks to a new partnership with the
SPCA of Lakeland, this year’s walk was more dog-friendly than ever. The SPCA booth at the walk was certainly a hot-spot for walkers with dogs, and even walkers without dogs were allowed to get in on the fun by walking one of the several dogs up for adoption that were present that day.
Stimulating the excitement at the event and keeping the walk environmentally responsible was a barrage of students from Lakeland High School’s Green Club led by team captain and teacher Nancy Fish. The students arrived early in a blur of green T-Shirts to set-up recycling bins for the countless empty water bottles produced by thirsty walkers. Even
Lakeland Christian School got involved by submitting a team and entertainment.
The school’s music teacher Sheron White attended with her talented daughter Jessica who performed a stirring rendition of the song "We Can Make a Difference". Once everyone was fired up and ready to go, YMCA Instructor Jessica Young led the walkers in a brief yet important stretching exercise and off they went.
While this year’s Arthritis walk broke records in many areas, and raised nearly $13,000 in support of the Arthritis Foundation, it still fell short of the committee’s original goal of $20,000. Yet funds are still coming in and the committee continues to encourage people to donate to their walk effort online until the end of May which is Arthritis Awareness Month.
If you haven’t made a personal donation, it’s certainly not too late. You can make a donation online by
clicking here. If you are not in a position to make a donation yourself, please feel free to e-mail this article to someone who you feel may be moved to help, whether it’s a friend or a corporation.
The 5th Annual Arthritis Walk Committee would like to extend a special thank you to this year’s Corporate Sponsors: