AMM Run for Awareness — Australian Marrow Match

Sunday 24th of October was a big day for AMM. It was our inaugural AMM Run for Awareness which encouraged people to run or walk and share a pic on their social media to help shine a light on stem cell donation in Australia.

We decided to organise this run because there is a continuing need for more people to register to be stem cell donors in Australia and because of the pause in funding the Strength To Give swab program is currently on hold. Swab registration is an internationally accepted and cost effective method of registering to be a potential donor on The Australian Bone Marrow Donor Registry (ADMDR). It is as easy as registering online, receiving your kit in the post, swabbing, filling in a form and posting it back! More swabs means more donors which means more lives saved. Every 31 minutes someone in Australia is diagnosed with blood cancer and for many of them a stem cell transplant is their only hope. 80% of Australian patients receive their donation from overseas. If you would like to support the campaign to ensure that swab registration is properly funded, you can sign the petition here.

On the day, people participated all around Australia. We even had someone walking to raise awareness in Switzerland! There was lots of people running and walking with friends (and dogs) in an amazing effort to highlight the need for more stem cell donors in Australia. You can see all the highlights on our instagram.

We could not have been more pleased with how many people jumped on board and participated in this event, with lots of people tagging us in their social media posts. A big thank-you to every-one who got involved! As AMM is based in Melbourne a few of us and our friends gathered to walk/run around The Tan in the city. It was very exciting to be able to walk with so many friends, after many weeks of lockdown, and catch up whilst being able to support a great cause. See pictures above.

Thanks especially to everyone who got involved but also Beyond who got their whole allied health team involved.

We recently posted a story about Luke, which you can read here. Luke received a life-saving transplant from his sister Tawna in 2020. Luke’s friends, in the UK, organised a Leukathon on October 23rd, to raise money by getting people to participate in an event/activity outside their comfort zone. In support, being on the other side of the world, Billy, Luke’s brother, organise a run and swim in Adelaide to coincide with this event. We too thought it would be a great idea to support these great initiatives and so the Run for Awareness was born. We are looking forward to doing it again next year!