“You can never know a person until you walk a mile in their shoes.”
This is the idea behind our Fall Fundraiser: A Walk In Their Shoes. John Dunn, our Community Service Coordinator, came up with this idea! Here are some words he wrote about our first annual A Walk In Their Shoes:
"This event has been something I have wanted to see Matthew 25 put on for a long time. When I was first hired in my position as Community Services Coordinator, responsible for organizing and creating public events, one that I had talked about from the very start was organizing some kind of walk, like we used to have (the AIDS Walk was once a huge event that Matthew 25 and ARG put on, but haven’t in some time).
I also felt the desire to help our patients tell their stories. It breaks my heart knowing that there is still so much stigma and judgment around these individuals, for a disease that anyone could contract. HIV/AIDS is not a disease for bad people, or some divine punishment. When someone tells others they have cancer, instead of judging them for smoking their whole life, or never putting on sunscreen, etc., they immediately are recognized as a real person facing a hard disease. But often, when someone who is HIV(+) tells their status, they immediately are judged, attacked, and more. These are real people with a real illness that can be acquired in more than one way, so assuming you know anything about them from their status is so ridiculous, nor does it matter at all.
I feel that giving our patients a platform to tell their life story is important for so many reasons—It allows them to fight the stigma surrounding their illness, showing others that they are just a real person with an illness. It gives them the ability to share information with others who are at risk, to help them learn from any mistakes they had made and what not to do.
When it comes to the actual Walk, I had the idea when seeing that so many 5k’s and other events were switching to a Virtual format due to the pandemic and isolation orders. One in particular was a run/walk I saw that had multiple routes and offered a Hard, Medium, and Easy route. And somewhere in my mind, I made the connection between that, the stories from our patients, and the phrase “You can never know a person until you walk a mile in their shoes.” And that is where this all came from! I wanted to challenge others to “walk the walk” of our patients, to walk to our clinics across the Tri-State like they do. Of course, asking others to walk between all four clinics is difficult, but we CAN ask them to walk equivalent distances! So that’s what we’re doing!
From October 5th-November 2nd, we are challenging you to choose to walk the Easy, Medium, or Hard routes, corresponding to the distances between our main clinic in Henderson and our clinics in Evansville, Owensboro, and Bowling Green respectively! During that time, each day, we will be posting and sharing a story or an excerpt of an interview with a patient of ours who was gracious and brave enough to share their experience with us! We hope that this will help everyone get a feel for the difficulties our patients experience and learn more about them and help us in the fight to end the stigma.
With the walk, entrance fees are $25 standard, and you will receive a prize when you enter! You can enter as an individual or a team (2-3 people). If you sign up for the Hard route (111 miles), you automatically receive a commemorative T-shirt! The T-shirt is available to Easy and Medium route participants for an extra $5. Extra prizes are available to the fastest individuals and teams completing their routes and age categories! We encourage you to share the event on your page, your timeline, anywhere and invite your friends and family to “sponsor” you and your walk or run! Challenge them to race you! Or bet them money that you can beat your chosen route by a certain date and have them put their bet down in the form of a donation to Matthew 25!
ALL funds from this event, through entrance fees and donations from sponsorship(s), bets, etc. go immediately into our General Fund. This fund helps us to provide extra services to our patients in the form of transportation assistance, extra food pantry supplies, family support if and when needed, and so much more! Without our General Fund, our ability to help our community would be greatly impeded, so it is critical that we are able to raise these funds.
Thank you all so much!"
Sound like something you and your friends or loved ones want to be a part of?! Check out our Facebook page to get signed up! You have a whole MONTH to complete these routes. You can even use your daily steps towards meeting your teams goal mileage. And don't worry if you don't have a smart watch to keep track, you can either download an app on your smartphone to help you track it or just use some good old fashioned pencil and paper. Not a big fan of running/ walking? You can use your bike as well!
Here is a list of our "routes" these are the distances from our Henderson office to our other clinics! We have an easy, medium, and hard option so choose whichever you are most comfortable with:
Easy: Henderson- Evansville (15 miles total)
Medium: Henderson- Owensboro (36 miles total)
Hard: Henderson-Bowling Green (111 miles total)
Remember you are not expected to complete this in one day!
Big shout out to John Dunn for putting this together. The challenge starts on October 5th - get you tennis shoes ready!
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