*Continuing in their tradition of raising crucial funds to benefit St. Jude patients battling cancer and other life-threatening diseases, Urban Radio Cares hosts what is now the 13th annual Urban Radio Cares for St. Jude Kids® event. The campaign kicks off today, March 11, and again, tomorrow, the 12th as a fundraising broadcast on Urban One stations across the country.
Celebrity supporters such as Anthony Hamilton, Cece Winans, Donnie McClurkin, Erica Campbell, Kirk Franklin, Ledisi, MAJOR, Maranda Curtis, Marvin Sapp, Q Parker and the Winans Brothers are among other luminaries and radio personalities that are galvanizing listeners across the nation to donate to the cause.
The event is allowing thousands of radio listeners to interact with the campaign by calling 1-800-411-9898 as well as go online to join the #StJudeWontStop movement. With a monthly pledge of $19 or more, donors become “Partners in Hope” joining other benefactors for the St. Jude mission.
The funds raised serve families who would otherwise be saddled with excessive burdens while attending to the needs of the loved one receiving care. This support includes St. Jude ensuring that families never receive a bill for treatment, travel, housing, or food. Since 2008, the event has raised over $13 million in cash and pledges with $1.5 million raised in 2020 alone.
For years, Urban Radio Cares has stimulated attention via the media for the cause which lies deep in the hearts of those who vocally support it. St Jude’s motto remains consistent and clear: ‘Finding cures. Saving children.’® In its own words it is, “the only National Cancer Institute-designated Comprehensive Cancer Center devoted solely to children. Treatments invented at St. Jude have helped push the overall childhood cancer survival rate from 20 percent to more than 80 percent since the hospital opened.”
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They offer unique ways for donors to lend a hand via memorials and dedications where you can memorialize the life of a loved one by making a donation in their memory, creating a fund, or leaving them a legacy. The AmazonSmile charity, where Amazon will donate 0.5% of your eligible purchases and more.
What is of note is that St Jude has a unique historical background when it comes to the Black community, as they made noteworthy strides towards racial equality for their patients and within the medical establishment. If anything underpins the value of St. Jude the most, it is its staunch advocacy of the rights and dignities of its patients and their families. Such beliefs made it the first fully integrated children’s hospital in the region during the height of southern segregation.
Opening February 4, 1962 as St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, in Memphis, Tennessee, it distinguished itself as the only hospital that would treat children with catastrophic diseases—and look for cures for them as well. Because its founder, actor/musician/advocate Danny Thomas kept the heart of his mission aimed at helping all children, regardless of a family’s race, religion, or ability to pay. His views included ideas that despite segregation being common in the South, sick children could and should be excluded from such limiting discrimination. This meant the hospital’s patients were treated in the same rooms, dined together, and all facilities were integrated regardless of race/ethnicity. St. Jude, hired Black researchers and nurses including Rudolph Jackson, MD, who was one of their first African-American doctors and who helped establish the sickle cell program there in 1968.
At the time, the hospital’s director, Donald Pinkel, MD, by ultimatum, declared that if Black children and their families could not stay in the hotel, then it would not be accessible to any of the other patients and kin. This resulted in the hotel changing its policy but with a provision African American families eat in their rooms instead of the dining facility. Yet Dr. Pinkel maintained his position until they relented. By 1985, in recognition, President Ronald Reagan awarded Danny Thomas the Congressional Gold Medal for his humanitarian work.
St. Jude continued to make renowned moves toward bettering the treatment of the desperately ill as well as exploring treatments and even cures for them. Organizations and campaigns such as Urban Music Cares and others remain steadfast activists on behalf of healthier children and the life-saving advancements St. Jude strives for.
Join the nation on March 11-12 by dialing 1-800-411-9898 or going online to join the #StJudeWontStop movement. Add your monthly pledge of $19 or more, and become one of the many “Partners in Hope” donating to the mission.
Learn MORE at https://www.stjude.org/
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