It is nearly September, Childhood Cancer Awareness month. After raising more than $2.2M since 2019, the Relay FM community is joining together for a fifth year to support the life-saving work of St. Jude Children's Research Hospital throughout September.
St. Jude builds hope by pursuing their mission of finding cures & saving children, sharing their breakthroughs with the world, and supporting the families of their patients so they can focus on caring for their sick child instead of bills. Last year I created a sub-campaign called "Building Hope," and for each $25 raised I built a section of the Lego Lighthouse—a symbol of hope. Together we raised $425 toward the overall campaign!
For 2023 it's time for Building Hope 2.0, bigger and better!
Last year I built this Lego lighthouse:
This year you can vote with your support to choose which Lego set I'll build. Will we Chomp Cancer with PAC-MAN, or Wave Goodbye to Cancer with the Lego Hokusai – The Great Wave? Vote in the poll here!
Once we reach $200 I'll make a matching $200 donation to unlock the Lego building stream! Have I ever streamed before? Nope, but it's for the children! Assuming no technical disasters I'll be streaming on Twitch as OliveOctopusInk
Since April I've been working on a project to re-swatch all the inks in my growing collection on Col-o-ring cards and create a new Col-o-dex of inks (learn more about that project in my "120 Col-o-dex Cards" post). At the $100 milestone, I'll schedule a low-key ink-swatching hangout stream while I work on completing more cards.
Are you into fountain pens and ink, or curious what all the fuss is about? I've added a new campaign reward for $50 where I'll mail custom ink swatches (as long as you can provide an address I can mail an envelope to from the U.S. with a First-Class or International stamp). When redeemed, I'd love to chat about what colors or specific inks swatches you'd be interested in (picked from my Fountain Pen Companion (FPC) profile), then I'll swatch 10 different inks on a couple different papers as thanks for your generous support!
If that's not your thing, there are also rewards for a personal thank you note (happy mail!) or digital thank you (no address required) posted online, handwritten in your favorite color of ink (if provided).
It was through listening to other Relay FM shows (and the Lego building specials!) that I eventually found my way to the Pen Addict community and fell down the rabbit hole of pens and inks. Brad Dowdy and the Pen Addict community are incredibly welcoming, supportive, and generous so naturally there would be a huge outpouring of support from the community for the Pen Addict Raffle for St. Jude.
What is this raffle? Well, here's the post introducing the 2022 Pen Addict Raffle for St. Jude as an idea of what to expect. Stay tuned to the Pen Addict blog next week (week of Sept. 4th, 2023) for more information about this year's raffle!
I look forward to this Relay FM campaign to support the work of St. Jude every year because there's a lot of fun to be had, but ultimately it's all about supporting the life-saving work of St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, and giving hope to the families facing a cancer diagnosis for their child.
I hope some of you will join me in supporting the Relay FM campaign, spreading the word, and hanging out on Twitch for fun with inks and Lego!