Luncheon January 22, 2015

Our third meeting of 2015...the year is flying by! Karen introduced our speaker Shannon Jolley, Team Lead, Annual Giving for the S. Interior Region of the Canadian Cancer Society. Working out of Kelowna, Shannon leads a staff of 3 and 1500 volunteers with an annual fundraising success of $1.5MM. She brought 16 years of marketing to her current role and was here to remind us of the work the Cancer Society does, their current strategies, the synergies with Rotary and the upcoming fundraising campaign. She was a very articulate, knowledgeable and entertaining speaker. 

She shared overall cancer survival gains since the Society began in the 1950's where they were 28% compared to the 63% of today. The short term goal is 80% with the longer term being eradication similar to our polio objective. The strategies to get there include research (consumes 1/3 of the spending), prevention (belief is that 50% of cancers are preventable) and earlier detection of the 200 different types of cancer. Shannon spent more time on the prevention component of the Society's work which is growing with a new cancer prevention center and overall increased funding. An interesting piece of this was the fact that it takes 17 years to get a new treatment/drug from discovery to the patient - they are working to shorten this dramatically!

In fundraising, some $35MM is raised in BC, $2MM in the S.I. and $60-$70M in Osoyoos. April is the big focus with pins and fresh daffodils and she was looking for help with both this year - Jeff stepped up and volunteered himself and his company to look after the pin campaign for Osoyoos...cool, eh? 

There will not be a Relay for Life this year per se. There will be a 'Daffodil Dash' instead which will be a 1 or 5km walk with similar teams and sponsor sign up sheets...stay tuned!

Reminder that there is no meeting at noon next week - it is replaced by the fellowship evening at Marieze's on Friday evening. There is a board meeting on Thursday at 4 at McKia's, everyone welcome. 

The meeting ended with Karen winning the 50/50, claiming that it will not be used to offset the cost of her purchase of a ski cabin on Mt Baldy this week but instead will eventually go to purchase some daffodils in April...pictures please!