Love Hope Strength Foundation – The Future Calling – The Next Seven Years!
A Message from Mike Peters
Dear Love Hope Strength Family,
It is seven years since Love Hope Strength began.
Together, we have built a charity that we can all be proud of.
As we gather together as one to participate in Vail Rock 2014, we can number so many achievements, both individual and collectively, that have helped change peoples’ lives and the way the world sees cancer forever.
Today is also significant as we can now officially celebrate locating our 1,000 potentially life saving match – an incredible statistic that belongs to all of us who have helped carry the Love Hope Strength banner and all that it stands for.
James Chippendale and I (as co-founders), are very excited about the future and together with our board of directors – Jules Peters, Alex Coletti, George Devanney, Tom Flanagan and Richard Rees, we would like to rededicate and focus the charity towards its core principle, which is to fight cancer on the front line in all corners of the globe.
Our UK Events, Snowdon and Ben Nevis Rocks are once again taking place in June 2015 with more support than ever before, enabling the British chapter of LHS to recently donate over £80,000 worth of funds to cancer centres in Wales and Scotland and bring us into partnership with the British National Health Service.
In Africa, Kilimanjaro Rocks 2 – our trek to support the Ocean Road Cancer Centre in Dar Es Salaam (which LHS funds helped to establish), is gathering momentum before disembarking in January 2015 with cancer survivors and supporters alike being joined in Africa by musicians Robin Wilson (Gin Blossoms), Miles Zuniga (Fastball), Cy Curnin (The Fixx) and Brett Dennen.
In Israel, our Holy Land Rocks trek to support the Hadassah Marrow Registry in Jerusalem may have been compromised by the conflict in Gaza but our support for the lifesaving work of Dr. Amal and her team in building bridges of peace is still ongoing through the creation of a Pledge Music / Guinness World Record campaign to create ‘The World’s Longest Officially Released Song’ that has already raised more than the intended fundraising target figure.
In New York, LHS is building on its relationship with Delete Blood Cancer to create exciting new events for 2015 and in Washington DC, we recently became members of the powerful One Voice Against Cancer coalition and found a new ally in the US State Department that will hopefully help us find funding for our ‘Get On The List’ campaign worldwide and for one of our longer term projects to significantly enlarge the donor registry in South America through LHS Mexico.
Elsewhere in the news, we hear of amazing breakthroughs happening every day about the ways in which we, as human beings, are able to stand up to cancer and on December 6th later this year, I have been invited to represent Love Hope Strength at the World Cancer Congress in Melbourne, Australia. It is an incredible honour to have bestowed on our charity and so, when I take to the podium to deliver the closing speech, I will do my utmost to inspire and unite all who are committed to the battle against cancer and, as a survivor myself, remind the world that there is always hope and there is always something and someone to live for.
Mike Peters
A Message From James Chippendale
As I sit in the airport on my way to Vail, Colorado for our annual fundraiser where I will hike the mountain and celebrate with a closing concert in Vail Village with hundreds of our sponsors, supporters, employees, board members, volunteers, co founder, and musicians. I reflect back on what the organization has accomplished and endured since its humble beginnings seven years ago.
Fourteen years ago I was battling leukaemia and was desperately searching for a donor to save my life when my miracle in the form of Klaus Kaiser from Gutter, Germany appeared. Klaus is why I’m alive today. I’m proud to say our organization has now add over 80,000 “Klaus Kaisers” to the international registry who are ready to be that lifeline/miracle for others in need.
• We have found over 1200 matched donors.
• We have been part of or produced over 1500 events around the globe.
• We have successfully changed the regulations in the UK, increasing the eligible donor age from 30-55, which gives us the potential to add millions of new donors.
• We have opened up a chapter in Mexico where our work is desperately needed. If you are Latin and need a transplant you have less than a 10% chance of finding a match since there are only 7000 total donors on the Mexican registry. We have a lot of work to do there.
• We continue to fund and support our children’s cancer center in Tanzania that provides hundreds of children each year a fighting chance of survival.
• We continue to support our center in Nepal where before us, there was not even treatment options for the most basic cancers.
It’s not a great organization because I’m the co-founder, it’s a great organization because of the employees & volunteers who work tirelessly at festivals and concerts around the globe and the bands, artists, venues and festivals that give us the platform to save lives.
Love Hope Strength
James Chippendale
PS: Here is a link to a 20 minute film that documents the very beginnings of our charity Love Hope Strength. ‘The Song That Changed My Life’ was directed by Russ Kendall of Kaleidoscope Pictures who is currently working on a feature length documentary that will screen in 2015, highlighting the incredible story of our Love Hope and Strength.
The Song That Changed My Life – vimeo.com/50866648