FEATURE FRIDAY

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Oops missed this baby last week so you get a double feature today! I have two beautiful causes that I want to share with you this week and both are organisations that I have chosen to donate to within my Lenten donation plan! They are both quite different but each support a cause that is very near and dear to my heart so without further ado - let me shed light on some of the fantastic projects that are happening both in our local and global communities. 

1. Special Aussies Foundation
The Special Aussies Foundation is an Australian children’s charity and not-for-profit organisation founded in 2007 by Lee-Anne Heron and Charmaine White. Their mission is to ensure that children with special needs have access to the equipment, resources and information they need to actively experience their world and realise their full potential. Their aim is to support projects that better the health and well being of children with special needs and disabilities and promote their inclusion within the community in which they live, enabling them to live a life they love.

2. Stand Up to Cancer (SU2C)
I have donated money to 'Launch a Star' in honour of my darling grandfather (diagnosed with Leukaemia in 1998 and still living a wonderful life with my gorgeous grandmother!). The Constalation appeal involves purchasing a star (with monetary donations as little as $1!) in honour of a loved one, family memory, friend or colleague who has somehow been touched by cancer. All profits go towards scientific research and support the 'search for a cure' for cancer. I thought I'd share with you the SU2C Manifesto that encapsulates their mission and sentiment so perfectly:


We used to have such crazy dreams,
The kind of dreams that brought us together, made us not mere mortals, but a movement.
We used to dream we’d get to the moon.
And we were crazy enough, fanatical enough, relentless enough, to get there.

We dreamed we’d split the atom.
Make smallpox and polio whispers from forgotten history books.
Make technology infinite, individual.
Connect the world.

All the unbelievable and the impossible,
all the can’t do and the never will, we overwhelmed them, we overpowered them, we conquered them.
They said no and we, well,
We said yes.
We stood up.
We stood up and changed the world.

Stand up when everybody else sits down
Stand up when it’s easier to turn away
Stand up for everyone who can’t rise anymore

When the answer seems impossible, stand up
When the dream is right within our reach, stand up
When the powerful refuse your call, stand up

The moment is now and the time has come to stand up.
One out of every two men
One out of every three women
will face these diseases we call cancer.

Our sisters, our brothers, our fathers, our mothers,
our husbands, our wives, our children.
Our very best friends and those we’ve yet to meet.
One person every minute, one person in a moment gets lost, gets stolen, gets taken away.

We are a tapestry of lives touched and brought together by a terrorist we can actually find.
And in the time it’s taken to read this, three more Americans have died.

Unforgivable.

This is where the end of cancer begins.

When together we become a force unmistakable.
A movement undeniable.
A light that cannot dim.

When we take our wild impossible dreams
And make them possible
Make them true

When together we rise as one
When we stand up
When we Stand Up To Cancer.

Blessings from my ever grateful and ever loving corner of the world x