If you are navigating the streets in the downtown core this week, keep an eye out for a thirty-person bike hot on your tail. Starting Tuesday morning through Friday, the Heart & Stroke Big Bike event will be sending out forty-five teams on the streets of North Bay, from their launching point of the North Bay Discovery Museum Square.
Presented by Dairy Farmers of Canada, the Heart & Stroke Big Bike is one of the primary community fundraising events for the Heart & Stroke Foundation. This fun-filled event features a bicycle built for thirty, with teams of energetic riders pedaling through two hundred communities in nine provinces – raising awareness and funds along the way.
Teams, made up of twenty-nine riders plus a driver, work together to raise funds for life-saving heart and stroke research, and celebrate their success by pedaling through their communities on the biggest bike in Canada. This year the Foundation aims to raise $8.36 million across the country, $88,567 (last year's total) within the North Bay community. Together with the Big Bike team riders, The Heart & Stroke Foundation is transforming how communities think about, prevent, manage and live with heart disease and stroke.
Visit www.bigbike.ca to learn more.
Heart&Stroke Area Coordinator for North Bay and Nipissing, Julia Tignanelli told Baytoday.ca that "It's all about promoting healthy living, including in the workplace, too."
Teams raise funds and contribute to the foundation's mission, including research, public health tools, increased education, and placing AEDs in communities.
"We've got companies like KPMG, BDO, Redpath, as well as provincial government staffs, big groups like that come out, and it's a team-building activity for their staffs, as well as promoting health and wellness in the workplace, because they are getting outside, getting some exercise, being active," Tignanelli said.
Eight-year-old Cassy Clausen, accompanied by her mother, Shannon, are volunteering outside the North Bay Discovery Museum for the second consecutive year. They lost their father, and husband, Marc, to a stroke three years ago.
In the time since her father's unexpected death, Cassy has raised in excess of $2000 for another Heart & Stroke fundraiser, the Jump Rope for Heart. Young Cassy says the Big Bike event is just as dear to her, when proudly talking about her father. With energetic volunteers like Cassy, the Heart & Stroke Foundation has a strong ally in its quest to save lives and to create more survivors.
