The Kids researchers with Fat Cat
Huge congratulations to Telethon on another record-breaking year, with generous West Australians donating just over $38 million to help sick kids.
This year’s tally of $38,000,554 not only topped last year’s 50th Anniversary total of $36 million, but set an even more impressive record by bringing to $306 million the total raised over the 51-year lifetime of the annual event.
We are proud to be a major beneficiary of Telethon, along with more than 40 other WA organisations supporting kids, and we’re incredibly grateful for the continued support of the West Australian public, along with major donors who once again dug deep to contribute to children's health.
Your donations are critical to the important work we do at The Kids, and will enable our researchers to continue to do all we can to discover, prevent and cure childhood disease and disadvantage.
Of special relevance to The Kids, the Lexus Ball on Saturday night saw the announcement of the Kerry M Stokes Chair of Child Health – created by Telethon, Curtin University and The Kids to honour the commitment, contribution and leadership of Kerry Stokes as he steps down as Chair of the Telethon Trustees.
This highly competitive and prestigious Chair will allow us to recruit an outstanding researcher to undertake ground-breaking health and medical research for the benefit of children and the adults they will become.
Also at the Lexus Ball, a Gift of Giving auction item raised more than $1 million for mental health research at The Kids – an incredible result that will be translated into important work by our researchers focused on youth mental health.
Elsewhere over the weekend, Telethon staff including Director Professor Jonathan Carapetis were out in force in the phone rooms, on stage, and across two booths at the Beneficiaries Expo at the Perth Convention and Exhibition Centre.
Our booths were swamped with enthusiastic families and kids eager to check out our activities, meet some of our researchers, and become co-researchers on important projects aimed at helping premature babies, keeping kids cyber-safe, and emphasising the importance of the early years.
At the main The Kids booth, hundreds of children – and a few big people – took up the challenge to become Skin Superheroes, swabbing their arms to help with research that aims to stop premature babies getting sick from skin infections.
Our Skin Superheroes ranged in age from just six months up to grandparents, and we even had a few cheeky superheroes – including Bat Girl and Batman – pop in to support the cause. All up 321 Skin Superheroes had swabs collected.
More than 500 of you also joined our competition to name the animated puppet who features in our innovative new CoLab campaign, ‘Bright Tomorrows Start Today’.
This magical blue creature is helping CoLab, a partnership between the Minderoo Foundation and The Kids Research Institute Australia, offer parents and carers an insight into the remarkable receptiveness and learning capacity of the infant brain.
We’ll let you know the creature’s name as soon as we can!
Our cyber safety researchers also spoke with hundreds of families (and more superheroes!) about cyber safety, and had 45 parents complete a short survey about the challenges they face in helping their children to have a safe and positive experience in the digital world. Their responses will help to shape the cyber education projects currently being developed by our researchers.
The team also folded around 600 chatterboxes with cyber safety tips inside, and handed out 300 The Kids cyber safety magnets to parents.
A separate booth showcasing the ORIGINS Project – a collaboration between The Kids and the Joondalup Health Campus – saw hundreds of children come along to learn about nutrition and make their own healthy plate using colourful stamps.
A reminder to anyone who picked up an ORIGINS colouring in sheet, you have until 2 November to email your children’s completed sheets in for a chance to win a $200 Coles voucher plus a personal chef to come to your house and cook your meals for a week.
*For full terms and conditions visit www.telethonkids.org.au/origins-comp-tcs
