Toon Boom Cares

iheed promote innovation in health education and next generation training content. They identify, invest in and promote innovative health solutions for Community Health Workers (CHW) in developing countries. They constantly promote new knowledge of CHW training via the utilization of animation and New Generation content creation, and the utilization of mobile platforms. iheed have published significant research for the sector and have assembled a community of leaders and practitioners who collectively work to enhance CHW capabilities, mobilizing information, next generation content and technology to promote community health practice and intervention. For more information visit www.iheed.org and www.iheedCrowd.org

Why?

A billion people have no access to a community healthcare worker and at least 1.5 million workers are needed to fill this gap. By providing innovative training and health information, especially via animation, workers can be trained and the 9 million children and 350,000 mothers who die every year from preventable and treatable conditions can be saved.

How?

iheed have created an online animation platform iheedCrowd which encourages the animation community to to create the next generation of health education content. This provides the opportunity for digital designers and animators the opportunity to contribute to health education and training, making a difference for those whose access to healthcare is non-existent.

Toon Boom Animation is committed to add their name to such an exciting initiative to support communities in the developing world. iheedCrowd will encourage the development of animations which will be customized in many languages to be widely and freely distributed via multiple platforms, including mobile technology, therefore overcoming education and literacy challenges in the field.

In 2000, Sarah Cook was diagnosed with Ewing’s Sarcoma, a rare form of cancer, and one uncommon in young children. She was 8 years old. Over the course of a year, she received chemotherapy and radiation at the Montreal Children’s Hospital. She also underwent numerous surgeries, one to remove the fibula bone, where the cancer had originated, and two others to correct the alignment of her foot, including a tendon transfer and the fusing of her foot. She and her family are very grateful to the many wonderful doctors who took care of her throughout the years: Dr. Mitchell, Dr. Kavan, Dr. Isler, Dr. Fassier, and Dr. Freeman.

One night in her hospital room, Sarah decided that when she got better, she wanted to raise money to buy new pillows for the other children on the floor. “I was faced with this illness, but I was inspired to look past my own challenge and try to Making a Difference in the lives of the other children. I understood how hard it is, so I wanted to make it a little easier for other people in similar experiences,” explains Sarah.

This is how Sarah and her parents, Lorena and Norman Cook, founded the Sarah Cook Fund at the Cedars Cancer Institute for Children. Through their special events, personal and corporate funding, as well as donations from local communities and friends, the fund has raised over $5 million. The most touching gifts have come from children who know Sarah, using their birthday parties, lemonade stands, puppet shows, races and events to raise donations for Sarah’s cause. The fund has directly supported the Hematology/Oncology Division, with remarkable results including state-of-the-art upgrades of treatment rooms, research labs, the creation of “Sarah’s Floor” with single rooms with bathrooms for patients, a family room, art therapy programs, a special fund for families in need, and the new Hematology/Oncology in-patient division at The Children’s. “The Sarah Cook Fund is now a branch of the Cedars Cancer Institute for Children and I am very much part of it. I will be forever involved,” comments Sarah.

Sarah attends Queens University in the four-year Arts and Science program, and is now entering her third year. Toon Boom is a very close friend of Sarah’s, and offered her a summer internship to give her the perfect opportunity to practice her new computing and creative arts skills. “I started watching the online video tutorials for Storyboard Pro and Animate Pro to get familiar, step-by-step, with the technology,” states Sarah. Once she got comfortable, she decided to animate her project using Toon Boom Harmony.

Watch the Making a Difference Video

Working closely with Toon Boom’s Lilly Vogelesang, Sarah embarked upon the creation of her first animation project, a very touching animated video created to promote awareness for the fund. She started drafting her characters and learnt how to build them, taking into consideration their movements and actions. “I learned the Deform tools quickly. The deformation process is very easy to use and makes animating really fast. It is nice to see the original storyboard and then the final animation. I am very pleased I created something and that I was involved from concept to compositing and final editing. It was a wonderful learning experience for me, as I have never done animation before,” enthuses Sarah.

If you liked reading about Sarah’s story, please share the link of her video with all your contacts. Help give the fund as much visibility as possible; it is for a very good cause!

OneProsper International is an Ottawa-based Canadian charity. Their mission is to reduce world hunger and improve nutrition by strengthening the capacity of small farmers.

Why?

In India, 500 million people are part of small farmer families. Water scarcity is the key challenge to increasing the productivity of small farmers.

How?

OneProsper International provides small farmers in India with drip irrigation kits; enabling them to significantly increase their crop yields and incomes. Small farmers, on average, increased their incomes by 116% within one harvest while saving 30% water. As a result, they are able to feed their children more nutritious food, milk and spend more on their books and schooling. The crops under cultivation include chilli, tomato, onion, egg plant, okra and other vegetables.

“Melinda and I believe that helping the poorest smallholder farmers grow more crops and get them to market is the world's single most powerful lever for reducing hunger and poverty.”

Bill Gates

OneProsper International has been featured in The Globe and Mail, CBC Radio and Desi News.

You can read about this great initiative here. www.oneprosper.org

Action Against Hunger is a global humanitarian organization committed to ending world hunger. Recognized as a leader in the fight against malnutrition, ACF works to save the lives of malnourished children while providing communities with access to safe water and sustainable solutions to hunger. With over 30 years of experience in emergency situations of conflict, natural disaster, and chronic food insecurity, ACF runs life-saving programs in over 40 countries benefitting some 5 million people each year.

Why?

Toon Boom’s values rely on respect, integrity and honesty. As the worldwide leader of animation technology, Toon Boom caters to a great variety of users living in all parts of the world. It is its duty to contribute to the success of such honorable initiatives as the ones carried by ACF.

How?

Toon Boom is directly involved with Action Against Hunger Canada and has assisted the Montreal Desk in setting up and contributing to several fund raising activities. In addition, Toon Boom has facilitated the introduction of Singapore’s Institute of Technical Education (ITE) with ACF to create a series of promotional videos that enable students to increase awareness of supporting meaningful societal causes.

You can read about this great initiative here.http://www.actionagainsthunger.org/

In 2008, Toon Boom Animation began a campaign to save the man behind the voice of the Toon Boom Animation tutorials at the time, Emru Townsend. He was diagnosed with an aggressive form of leukemia in December 2007, and in early 2008, he discovered he needed a bone marrow transplant. His only sibling was not a match, and he quickly learned about the unrelated registries of donors worldwide, and the lack of visibility of accurate information about registration as a donor and the donation process if someone proved to be a match.

Emru found a potential match in June 2008, and in September, the donor was still committed to providing a donation. Emru received a transfusion of the donor's stem cells the day before the Ottawa International Animation Festival, fittingly, at the Ottawa Hospital 10 minutes away. For this reason only, he missed his first Ottawa festival in 20 years. Despite his transplant successfully engrafting to his body, his cancer proved to be too resistant to chemotherapy and stem cell therapy, and he died peacefully on November 11, 2008 in the presence of his family.

Why?

Emru has asked that people learn more about becoming registered donors, and sign up if they can. Toon Boom Animation is committed to helping get Emru's message across, even though his voice is now silent.

How?

Here are some common facts about stem cell registration and donation that are often unknown or misunderstood.

1. 70% of people requiring a stem cell transplant need an unrelated donor. The first choice is a family member, but more people will have to rely on a stranger.
2. Register by providing a blood sample in Quebec or the UK, or a cheek swab sample in the rest of Canada or the US. In the US, UK and most of Canada, you can even fill in your registration online and get a kit sent to your home. This is a free service in Canada and the UK as well as many other countries. In the US, there are ways to register for free.

   Resources: OneMatch (Canada): www.onematch.ca National Marrow Donor Program (US): www.marrow.org Anthony Nolan Trust (UK): www.anthonynolan.org.uk Other registries: www.healemru.com

3. Donation is safe, fast, and not risky.

   You never donate stem cells or bone marrow at risk to your own life.

   Whatever is donated replenishes itself naturally in the body. There is a myth of extreme pain, which is one of the major reasons people do not donate. In fact, the donor may feel achy and sore, and possible flu-like symptoms before or shortly after donation, depending on the process used.

4. There are 2 ways to do it.

   70% of people will donate in a process that takes a few hours and is similar to donating blood. For a few days leading up to the extraction process, the donor receives injections to produce additional stem cells in the body.

   30% of people will donate by having liquid marrow extracted from within the back of the pelvic bone. The donor will be under general anaesthetic or an analgesic will be applied in the area of extraction.

5. Many people cannot find matches.

   There are 8 blood types, but for a stem cell match there are several million combinations of possible human leukocyte antigen (HLA) profiles - 150 billion different possibilities in theory.

Blood type does not affect a matching. When a donor has a different blood type, if the transplant works, the recipient's blood type will change! Even though blood is important, and people who need transplants (in addition to many other people) need donated blood to survive, people with a rare blood type can probably find a match in a room with 100 people of different ethnicity. For someone looking for a stem cell match, they may need a stadium of 20000 or 50 stadiums (or more) to find a match.

Then they have to hope that person is on the registry.

The most likely match within the general population is someone of the same or similar ethnicity. Many donor pools are severely underrepresented, including donors of African, Aboriginal, Asian and Latino descent. It is vital for these numbers to increase to help more people find matches.

So far due to the efforts of many people who have continued to support this awareness campaign by spreading the word and getting registered, two matches other than Emru's have occurred.

To learn more, go to www.heal-emru.com. Questions can be directed to info@healemru.com.