It’s amazing what a little fur on the face can accomplish.
Thunder Bay Transit workers sprouted moustaches for the past month, helping the municipally owned organization raise nearly $5,000 for prostate cancer research, part of the increasingly popular Movember campaign.
Jon Hendel, a planning and marketing analyst at Thunder Bay Transit, said workers jumped on board eagerly when the idea was first proposed.
It’s all for a good cause, Hendel said.
“This was a month where we had transit operators come together with service people, with frontline staff, with management, with the community, doing a campaign all together,” he said.
“We were able to really engage our passengers with information on men’s health, check-ups, stats on men’s cancer and we were also able to collect donations.”
According to statistics, one-in-four Canadians will die from cancer, and one-in-seven Canadian men will develop prostate cancer.
They also show more men than women are diagnosed with cancer, and prostate cancer figures are comparable to breast cancer diagnoses amongst women.
In addition to collecting donations, transit workers also had pamphlets to hand out that encourage men to have an annual physical, to quit smoking, be physically active and eat healthier.
Hendel said the Movember campaign really seems to have caught on in Thunder Bay. Several Lakehead University athletes have take to the cause, and even Mayor Keith Hobbs shaved his goatee and is sporting a handlebar moustache for the month.
“It seems hip, it seems trendy, and a lot of people are looking at it differently than other charitable events. It really seems to engage every age, and if you go to www.movember.com, you can see men and women of any age on the website – and a lot in Thunder Bay.
“You wouldn’t think in such a small community we’d be participating in such a global initiative, but in Thunder Bay we seem to be surpassing a lot of other communities in engagement, and in fundraising.”
George Romick, a lube technician at Thunder Bay Transit, got a bit of a head start on the competition, estimating he hasn’t shaved his Rollie Fingers-style ‘stache since the Summer Olympics were last held in Canada.
But still he agreed to be the face of Transit’s campaign, allowing his face to be plastered on buses from one end of the city to the other to support a good cause.
“I just expected little postcards, but all of a sudden we’ve got big billboards on the buses. I think it’s great to do something like this for awareness for men’s cancer, and also for cancer for the ladies out there,” Romick said.
“I’ve actually been getting a lot of good PR. People have noticed me on the buses and said it’s a great thing I’m doing for cancer as a whole for Movember.”
Hendel said the organization will most assuredly put away their razors in November 2012.
