May 2010

ELLE Canada Editor Helps Restore Sight To Thousands In Bolivia

Submitted by admin on Mon, 05/31/2010 - 16:04

BY MARY DICKIE

It’s a long way from the offices of a high-profile fashion magazine in Toronto to a medical charity’s temporary optical clinic in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia, but the contrast between those two very different worlds is exactly what Noreen Flanagan is after. Flanagan is the editor in chief of ELLE Canada magazine, and while her job often requires travelling to glamorous locales, there’s a kind of satisfaction she only gets from donating a week or two of her time to Medical Mission International (MMI), a charity that provides medical services for people in developing countries.

In February, Flanagan, a former nurse, travelled to Bolivia with a group of volunteers that included her sister Jean, a physician in Vernon, B.C., to provide glasses, eye surgery and optical support for the residents of Santa Cruz.

“It’s a great thing for someone who doesn’t necessarily have a medical background, because you get this wonderful hands-on experience,” she says. “You are giving people glasses, and it’s really a very intimate exchange that you have with them. In some cases, they haven’t seen clearly for many years, and when you put glasses on them suddenly they can read. It’s very moving.”

Jewel’s Foundation Partners On Give A Drop Campaign

Submitted by admin on Mon, 05/31/2010 - 01:13

By Steve McLean

Jewel Kilcher’s 1995 album, Pieces Of You, is one of the most successful debuts of all time — selling 12 million copies in the U.S. alone. She was just 21. Only three years earlier, while homeless for a year, she became ill and struggled to buy the two gallons of purified water she needed for her ailing kidneys. So in 1999, a career in music well on its way, she co-founded Project Clean Water, then called The ClearWater Project.

“If we’re in the States and we can’t drink our tap water, what’s it like in a Third World country where you can’t even buy bottled water?” Jewel told Samaritanmag, during an interview to promote her new country album, Sweet and Mild, out June 8. “I thought that if I ever got in a position to help, I would look into it.

“So when my life did turn around, one of the first things I did before I even made a lot of money was to set up the charity. It’s been a great experience and it’s a great charity to have because it doesn’t take a lot of money to make a difference. Cancer research takes millions and millions of dollars. This was something that I felt I could do on my own.”

Project Clean Water targets villages around the world with a lack of clean water and works with them to find sustainable solutions to their problems. The non-profit foundation has so far helped more than 30 communities in 13 countries on five continents.

MUSIC
NEWS

Gym Class Heroes’ Travie McCoy To Continue Work With Staying Alive Foundation

Submitted by admin on Tue, 05/18/2010 - 16:21

By Karen Bliss

Gym Class Heroes vocalist Travie McCoy, who shot a documentary and released a charity single last year for MTV Networks International’s Staying Alive Foundation, plans to continue bringing attention to the global prevention of HIV and AIDS.

“They actually made me ambassador of Staying Alive so I’m proud to carry that title,” McCoy tells Samartanmag. “I’m sure they will be other projects we’ll have in the future.”

The Foundation (www.stayingalivefoundation.org) provides grants to youth-led initiatives committed to educating their peers, fighting stigma and discrimination, and empowering other young people to protect themselves against the disease.

“I went to South Africa, the Philippines and India with Staying Alive,” says McCoy of the whirlwind 10-day trip last June. “I got to meet some young grantees who are given money every year to fund their grassroots program that they’re doing in their communities to help raise awareness and education in their communities — and they’re young people too.

Charity Loans Cottages To Cancer Survivors

Submitted by admin on Tue, 05/18/2010 - 16:14

BY JIM BARBER

Seana O'Neill was sitting on her dock on Clement Lake in Wilberforce, Ontario, in the early summer of 2002, when she realized that once she returned to Toronto for work her Haliburton-area cottage was going to sit vacant for weeks. Hence, the idea for Cottage Dreams, which lends cottages to cancer survivors.

"My mom is a two-time survivor of breast cancer, and we had a cottage growing up on Lake of Bays in Muskoka, so we spent a huge amount of time there. It just made sense that when I had my own cottage, and going through the cancer scares with my mom, that we could do something with it," O'Neill tells Samaritanmag.com.

She decided to look into lending her cottage to survivors of cancer, as a way for them to get away with friends or family and celebrate survivorship, and see if other cottage owners would be willing to do the same thing.

"I tried to get rid of the idea, because it didn't fit into my world to do anything like this, because I was going back to the film industry, but it wouldn't leave me," she says. "So I started looking into it, through contracting a lawyer, contacting a cottage rental agent, and contacting my insurance broker saying, 'I've come up with this idea, and I have narrowed it down to a plan. What do you think?'"

Andrew Ference

Teri Scully

Haiti

Meeka

Beige Blazer

Band The New Pornographers Asks Fans To Contribute To ALS Society

Submitted by admin on Sun, 05/16/2010 - 16:19

By Karen Bliss

The CD booklet inside Canadian indie pop-rock band The New Pornographer’s latest album, Together, has a message “in memory of Lynn Calder — please contribute to the ALS Society of Canada.”

Lynn is singer-keyboardist Kathryn Calder’s mother and the half-sister of the band’s founder and main songwriter, Carl Newman (a.k.a. A.C. Newman).

“My mom died of ALS last year so I’ve donated lots of money,” Calder tells Samaritanmag.

ALS stands for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a fatal progressive neurodegenerative disorder, which causes paralysis due to degeneration of motor neurons in the brain and spinal cord. In North America, it is also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease.