Posted on 23-October-2013   by Dee Ward

2013 SHINE Walk | Supporting Cancer Research

As a prequel to this year’s IPS Conference, I, along with some infection prevention professionals, customers and other fellow suppliers took part in an annual charity walk which happened on the week-end before Conference started.

On the Saturday evening we took part in a HALF MARATHON walk (13.25 miles) – not a stroll I assure you! Many people took part, in fact there were approx 16,000 entrants, and needless to say Daniels and a team of DANIbears were involved (aptly called Team DANIbear).  Over the last year DANIbear, in conjunction with Facebook and Twitter, have helped to motivate our customers in (1) engaging with us and in (2) really enhancing the relationships we have with them. Over the conference and particularly on this walk – I really appreciated the true value of “connectivity” we have with social media and how it facilitated everyone on the walk and we got to share so much with each other while doing it!

It was so beautiful walking through London at night and along the river. I had some really great conversations with some Infection Prevention professionals and it was a superb opportunity to have some social time and get some exercise in before the big three days of work.

The walk was in aid of SHINE – a fundraising initiative of Cancer Research, where participants were ‘walking all over cancer’. To date our team has raised approx £4,000 which is great! Having just looked at their website, I see that Cancer Research raised more than a whopping £4million as a whole from everyone who took part. This money will help fund research into new treatments and bring more tomorrows for cancer patients, their friends and family.

Thank you to all who sponsored and supported us.  I have uploaded an album on our Facebook Page if you joined us on the walk and you want to tag yourself in the pictures! (Click here) In the picture below – we are all wearing DANIbear masks and, as the walk took part overnight, commencing at 10:30pm we wore our pyjamas so we were ready for bed when we got back to our hotel rooms at 4:30 in the morning!

Team DANIbear

Team DANIbear

There were so many highlights of this walk, I hope the pictures speak for themselves, most participants were asked to write a message on their t-shirts explaining why they were taking part and I have to say that many of the messages were very emotional, I believe that everyone taking part will have been affected in some way by cancer so any monies raised towards researching this disease can only be a good thing.

We have our own reason for participating in SHINE and that is that one of our own team has recently been diagnosed and has just started chemo treatment.

If you would like to know more about SHINE or Cancer Research – please have a look on their website. If you haven’t read our other blog post that tells you a bit more about the conference itself – please click here

Dee is the Customer Support and Marketing Manager at Daniels. She is the key force behind a motivated and responsive team who support the Daniels customers and sales representatives day in and day out.