December Update - Onwards To 2023!

Hello Lewy Warriors!

This is our last blog post for 2022 and we thought that we would recap our amazing year and show our gratitude to everyone involved in CLBDI (including our amazing community). If you want an in-depth look at everything we've done this year, I recommend browsing the archived blog posts of 2022, which can be found at the bottom of the CLBDI Blog page.

First and foremost, we hope that you had a Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays! We hope it was spent having fun with your friends and family. Even though we had some rough weather in the region, we still managed to find some joy and comfort this holiday season and we hope that you did too.

I guess we should start off with our new donation total! At the start of the month, Ashley, our liaison at UWO let us know that we were sitting at $38,261.00 in total donations! WOW. We're so excited to see that we've passed our goal of $35,000.00 and are nearing our next milestone! We've also been informed that there have been some donations later in the month that put us over $38,500.00. That means that this year we raised around $10,000.00 this year! Amazing! We don't know the exact number right now but we're confident that we will surpass $40,000.00 early in the new year. As always, we can't thank you enough for your support and your donations. To all the folks who have been a part of this journey, whether you attended a show (digitally or in person), are a member of our advisory team, donated your money or time, visited our site, or shared our information with someone in need... THANK YOU. We couldn't do it without you. Together, we are actually making change and helping to further understand, manage, and combat Lewy Body Dementia in our own community. We'd also like to say thank you to our UWO liaisons Emily and Ashley for all they've done this year (including the amazing new landing page for LBD donations) and for that lovely lunch we shared in May. It was so nice to finally meet you both.

So, what did we do this year? Well, we donated the funds from our 2021 Holiday Fundraiser at the end of December 2021 and since then we have sold many CLBDI shirts. We've been donating 50% of all sales in small lump sums to Dr. Pasternak's LBD fund since the start of the year. Our annual donation from Bob's LBD Trust Fund was also made in June. In the summer, we launched our fabulous second online art show. It featured 8 amazing artists from all across Canada, The United States, and the UK. We wanted to take a moment to thank them all again for donating their artwork, time, and creative energy to our little project. We're constantly floored by the kindness and willingness of our friends and peers to join us on our mission to educate, fundraise, and advocate. That amazing online show lead to our first ever in-person art showing at Three Sisters Cultural Centre in October. It was so much fun and we're already planning on doing more live events in 2023. We wanted to thank everyone at Three Sisters for being such amazing hosts, helping us with the show, and having such a wonderful and inviting space.

In February, we connected with Valeria Hill at the The Record to remember and honour Bob with "Remembering Bob Schmidt, a Lewy Warrior". The article was so wonderfully written and we appreciate every word. Throughout the year, we worked with Ashley and Emily to have the aforementioned landing page set up to make donating easier and finally got to meet them both in person. They've been instrumental to all we've been able to do and in connecting us to UWO. We also connected further with other LBD websites and communities like Forward With Dementia and The Purple Sherpa over the year and look forward to building those relationships more in 2023. We held many meetings with our Advisory Board, all of whom have given their time and advice to help us stay on track and grow. We wanted to say thank you to each and every one of them. We appreciate all that they do.

Over the last few months, we've been working on plenty of great CLBDI content behind the scenes. We've also made some big plans for the new year that we can't wait to share. One of the first things that we've done is launch the first set of the CLBDI holiday/birthday cards! They come in four unique designs and can be purchased in packs of four or individually. More information and an order form can be found on our Community page.

In conclusion, it has been a wonderful year and we cannot say thank you enough to everyone who has been involved. I'm sure that I've mentioned before that Carol, our founder, likes to say we're small but mighty. "We're just small potatoes," she often says, "but we should be proud of what we've done." I am. Very much so. I don't want to ramble here so I will keep it short. We appreciate all of your support and are grateful to have made an impact, whether it is by funding Dr. Pasternak's LBD research at UWO, connecting with fellow Lewy Warriors and their families, or simply giving people who are in search of information a place they can use on their LBD journey. We will have plenty more things to share in the early months of next year. For now, all we want to say is this: 

Happy New Year. Thank you all for an amazing 2022. We wish you all the best in 2023.

Cheers,
​Joe and the CLBDI team.