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Guys like Danny Fernandes are the reason clichés about judging books by their covers still have traction in the 21st century.
* Samaritanmag.com is an online magazine covering the good deeds of individuals, charities and businesses.
We all face mortality, but Ilana Pekar and her son Arie face it more keenly than most.
* Samaritanmag.com is an online magazine covering the good deeds of individuals, charities and businesses.
It’s hard to believe that another chapter could possibly be added to the story of yoga, which already spans the globe and the millennia. And yet a new, perhaps unlikely group — at-risk and incarcerated youth — is discovering the stress relief, mood-enhancement and improved balance and fitness benefits of regular yoga practice.
That’s thanks to the New Leaf Yoga Foundation. The Toronto-based registered charity brings downward dog, shavasana, meditation and conscious breathing — and the above-mentioned benefits they confer — to teens “overcoming histories of abuse, neglect, incarceration, gang-involvement, addiction, marginalization and other factors that have led them to be identified as ‘at risk,’” according to the Foundation’s website, www.newleafyoga.org.
Those involved insist yoga teaches real-world coping skills (focus, relaxation and calming breath, for example) that youth can access to constructively deal with anxiety and anger rather than acting out. Plus, it’s fun. Judging by the testimonials of former students...
* Samaritanmag.com is an online magazine covering the good deeds of individuals, charities and businesses.
On any given weekend you might find Oshawa, Ontario's Rob Weir catching a pass from former National Hockey League legend Darryl Sittler, attempting to deke around hall-of-famer Marcel Dionne, or ducking and dodging the elbows and slashes of the Hanson Brothers of Slap Shot fame.
Swirling around the ice with former pros is an unlikely place for a guy like Weir, who didn't even start playing hockey until the age of 20, but he's got a good reason. Weir's the program coordinator of the Heart & Stroke Foundations' Hockey For Heart series of charitable hockey tournaments across Ontario. It's his job to play hockey with the pros.
"It's the greatest job in the world," says Weir, 40, with that same sense of awe as a 10-year-old autograph seeker by the side doors of the Air Canada Centre. "I'm literally getting paid to play hockey with [former Toronto Maple Leafs great] Wendel Clark."
Getting to share the ice with the likes of Clark came with a cost, though. The whole reason the Hockey For Heart tournaments exist is because Weir witnessed his own father Roger Weir have a heart attack on the ice at the age of 46 while playing a game with him in 1993.
"I was sitting on the bench, looked down at the other end of the ice where the play was, looked back at my dad and saw that he had fallen over and instantly knew that something wasn't right because I knew it wasn't from something that had happened during the play," Weir recalls of that tragic night.
* Samaritanmag.com is an online magazine covering the good deeds of individuals, charities and businesses.
A half a million Canadians are currently stricken with Alzheimer’s, and within a generation, researchers predict that number will double to 1,100,000, according to Rising Tide, a 2010 study commissioned by the Alzheimer Society of Canada. The cost for dementia care will rise over 1000 percent from the current $15 billion to $153 billion over the same time period.
Those are some shocking numbers.
The most widespread disease of the family of “dementias,” Alzheimer’s affects 5 to 8 percent of Canadians over the age of 65 and 30 to 50 percent over 85. Once diagnosed, the patient usually dies within seven to 10 years.
Dr. Jack Diamond, scientific director, Alzheimer Society Of Canada, and author of a report on the state and current research of the malady, goes as far as to call Alzheimer’s “an epidemic,” but not by the definition of a contagion.
“It isn’t an epidemic in the sense of people catching it, but there is an epidemic in the sense of the increased numbers being newly diagnosed; the total number of people with Alzheimer’s is steadily rising worldwide,” Diamond tells www.samaritanmag.com. “First of all, we’re living longer. Age is the biggest risk factor and the longer you live, the more of a chance you have of getting it. That’s one item that’s contributing.
“Another one is earlier diagnosis. People are now taking their family members for diagnosis where previously they didn’t, so we’re getting more diagnoses. People are getting them there earlier.”
Alzheimer’s is a heartbreaking disease for the friends and family of the loved one, a progressive and eventually fatal brain disease that eradicates nerve cells and robs people of their thinking ability, memories and eventually the ability to care for themselves.
* Samaritanmag.com is an online magazine covering the good deeds of individuals, charities and businesses.
After the release of Red Hot + Riot – The Music And Spirit Of Fela Kuti in 2002, John Carlin thought he was done.
The co-founder of the not-for-profit New York-based Red Hot Organization had enjoyed a successful run raising funds for AIDs awareness commencing with the 1990 album, Red, Hot + Blue, a star-studded gathering of artists covering Cole Porter tunes that sold over 1 million copies and set the stage for a series of albums that tackled different musical genres and their respective audiences over the next 12 years.
But economic hardship combined with the changing music industry landscape had made it a difficult climate in which to raise funds. By the end of the ‘90s, “Red Hot’s whole economic model fell apart," Carlin tells www.samaritanmag.com.
It became very difficult to sell anything. The Internet came and took the underpinnings out of the economic engine of the music industry in general. So we sort of shuttered the company around 2003, when we did Red Hot + Riot. I really thought that was going to be the last record that we did.”
Until that point, Carlin and his Red Hot Organization hit a nerve with their records; donating over $10 million U.S. in proceeds raised to different HIV/AIDS charities and relief efforts all over the world.
* Samaritanmag.com is an online magazine covering the good deeds of individuals, charities and businesses.
On Sunday, June 19, more than a dozen cities across Canada will host the Father’s Day Walk/Run for Prostate Cancer Canada (PCC). This high-profile event is the second largest awareness-and-fundraiser surrounding the disease in eight months, following a successful worldwide moustache-growing Movember campaign that raised over $21 million towards prostate cancer research and support programs in Canada alone.
Although prostate cancer is the most prevalent form of the disease among Canadian men — an estimated 24,600 are diagnosed annually for a 1 in 6 ratio, with 4,300 lives eventually claimed — it’s a subject that has largely been relegated to the media shadows for far too many years.
Since 2009, however, a rejuvenated and rebranded Prostate Canada Canada has concentrated its efforts in expanding knowledge and awareness of this insidious disease, especially since it’s estimated that 250,000 Canadian men may actually be afflicted.
Prostate Cancer Canada president and CEO Steve Jones feels the tide to get the word out there and encourage men to visit their doctor for check-ups and tests is changing. “The fact is, when we started this reincarnation of this foundation about two-and-a-half years ago, what we saw was that prostate cancer was really on the back burner,” Jones explains.
* Samaritanmag.com is an online magazine covering the good deeds of individuals, charities and businesses.
As Japan continues to pinball between almost incomprehensible disasters, the world is stepping up to help. And Canada is no exception.
In addition to the federal government — which has pledged an array of expertise and technical assistance as well as the Canadian Forces — homegrown humanitarian and relief agencies are in high gear, deploying teams, fundraising and otherwise assisting in any way possible.
“We have made our complete resources available,” John Saunders, director of disaster management in Ontario with the Canadian Red Cross, tells Samaritanmag. “Internationally, we have two mobile field hospitals that are complete surgical units that can be deployed on request from the Japanese Red Cross. And we’re basically on standby at this point for any human or material resources they may require.
“The Japanese Red Cross is a very robust emergency management program with over one million volunteers trained in disaster response,” Saunders continues. “They also have over 50,000 individuals trained to assist in emergency medical teams — so doctors, nurses and medics who are specifically able to be deployed for emergency medical help. All those resources are being engaged.
“Once those resources are exhausted, that’s when the international teams would step up to supplement the strong existing Japanese team. Right now, we are financially assisting them in the costs of relief programs such as bottled water to the millions without it, sheltering operations and medical assistance.”
* Samaritanmag.com is an online magazine covering the good deeds of individuals, charities and businesses.
