Colleges and Universities for Student Engagement aims to spread awareness of cancer prevention

By Graham Cook

Photos by Mark Burnham

Terry’s CAUSE (Colleges and Universities for Student Engagement), a group promoting awareness about cancer prevention at both the student and university level, is working on getting more post-secondary institutions involved in the Terry Fox Walk/Run.

Terry Fox, who was an SFU kinesiology student and played junior varsity basketball for the Clan, attempted to run across Canada to raise money for cancer research. He made it as far as Ontario before succumbing the cancer, which he was diagnosed with at 19. Every year runs are held in his memory to raise money for the Terry Fox Foundation.

“The goal is to have as many colleges and universities having a Terry Fox run as possible,” said Tim Rahilly, SFU VP students and international, associate to The Peak. Describing how SFU came to be involved in this, Rahilly said, “Because SFU has a long history doing the Terry Fox Run, a lot of the other schools wanted to know . . . how to run a run.”  He said that they “were approached by Victor Ling of the Terry Fox Research Foundation and Darrel Fox, who is Terry’s brother . . . and they asked us if we would be willing to help them to try to make this a national event, and we fairly quickly said ‘yes.’ ”

Rahilly stated that they were happy to help because Terry Fox had been an SFU student, and because, ine one way or another, many people have had exposure to cancer. Though he did not know the exact count, he said “about 10 other schools got involved . . . and the governor general of Canada agreed to be the patron for the Terry Fox Foundation, and actually recorded a message for us to promote the run.”

Tim Rahilly said that in the future they “really want to add Canadian institutions and, primarily . . . we want more colleges, because we don’t have a lot of colleges.”  In addition, “there’s so many Canadians studying abroad . . . we would love to see more international activity around the Terry Fox Run and Terry’s CAUSE on campus.”

Rahilly concluded by saying that he hopes, “SFU students will feel proud to have been a part of a long tradition here as well as . . . participating in something that is now going coast-to-coast.”

SFU’s 2012 run took place on Tuesday, Sept. 18, and was a success by all accounts.  Though attendance numbers for this year’s event were not known at the time of printing, the 2011 event saw 1,100 attendees across all three campuses with donations totaling over $16,000.

Carleton University, Dalhousie University, McMaster University, Memorial University of Newfoundland, Queen’s University, the University of Calgary, and the University of Toronto all held similar runs this year, with more expected in the future.