April Update

Good afternoon Lewy Warriors!

Well, it's the end of another month and that means it's time for another update! First and foremost, we wanted to say thank you to everyone who visited our first online art show, "Our Emotional Journey With Lewy Body Dementia". It was an incredible turnout and we've read all of your lovely comments and reviews. Thank you all so very much for making this such a successful event. As of today, we've raised a total of $3,525.00 for LBD research and sold 10 of the 15 pieces that our founder, Carol, was showing. On top of that, we've raised another $800.00 through our Spring Fundraiser. That puts the total amount raised at $4,325.00 raised since March. Wow. We are so proud and humbled by the generosity of our community. That means that our donation total is sitting around $17,306.00 (possibly more) at the time this is being posted. Can you believe we are almost at $20,000 raised through donations?! Incredible.

The CLBDI Online Gallery space will be closing down tomorrow and a post-show review and summary will be added to our "Community" page. The Gofundme for our Spring Fundraiser will remain open until the end of the month and will close early June. Hopefully we can surpass our previous fundraiser's total. If you are not in a situation where you're able to donate, don't worry! There are so many other ways to get involved! Leave a comment, share a post, or consider sharing the Gofundme page around to friends and family directly... a simple message can help spread awareness about what we're doing and is greatly appreciated by everyone here at CLBDI.

Direct link to our Spring Fundraiser.

May will continue be a bit of a quiet period here as we put together our summer plans and hopefully get to finishing more original CLBDI content. We've been in touch with other great LBD groups across the globe and, hopefully, we will be doing some collaborations together in the near future. Plus, we have all sorts of CLBDI goodies that we hope to have available to everyone soon. During this down period, we will also be doing some updates to the site and, as always, regularly adding to our resource lists. Thank you again for all your generosity and support. We couldn't do this without the wonderful members of our community.

I wanted to mention that we have recently updated the donations page and added more ways that you can donate directly to Dr. Pasternak and his team. Giving different avenues for direct donations makes it easier than ever to donate to LBD research on your own terms. We also wanted to take a moment to say thanks to Ashley, our liaison with UWO, for always being so helpful and making sure we have all the information necessary to run this smoothly. We appreciate all your hard work.

Lastly, Carol had the chance to write an article for the Retired Teachers Of Ontario's latest newsletter. The theme of this edition was "Changes, Challenges, and Choices" and Carol held nothing back in writing about the changes and hardships that come with an LBD diagnosis. We've included it in this blog post, so check it out when you have a chance.

All the best,
Joe