MOVEMBER 2011

CHANGING THE FACE OF MEN’S HEALTH, ONE MUSTACHE AT A TIME!

Another year and the MO charity movement starts. Just like last year I will let my mustache grow as a reminder of the killer Prostate Cancer in men, equality to the Breast Cancer in women!

Movember (a neologism that is a portmanteau of the slang word "mo" for moustache and "November") is an annual, month-long event involving the growing of moustaches during the month of November. The event was conceived in 1999 by a group of Australian men from Adelaide.
Since 2004, the Movember Foundation charity has run Movember events to raise awareness and funds for men's health issues, such as prostate cancer and depression, in Australia and New Zealand. In 2007, events were launched in Ireland, Canada, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Greece, Spain, the United Kingdom, Israel, South Africa, and the United States. (Wikipedia)

Origins:

Seven Nightly News aired a story in 1999 featuring a group of young men in Adelaide who claimed to have come up with idea of growing moustaches for charity in what "snowballed into a Mo-phenomenon, with people across Australia joining up". In the news report, members of the Adelaide-based "Movember Committee" explained how they came up with the idea for Movember one night in the pub. The group was said to have 80 men from Adelaide and interstate involved in the event, and aimed to raise money for the RSPCA through selling T-shirts in what they termed "Growing whiskers for whiskers".
Seven News also reported that the committee had received legal threats from a San Francisco-based group called the "Moustache Celebration Federation" that had claimed they had trade marked the term "Movember" in 1977. A 2007 statement on the Committee's website states that upon following up on these threats it was discovered that neither the federation nor its alleged president, "Charles Kies III", actually existed. The committee still holds that its claims of having coined the term "Movember" in 1999 are "100% true".

In 2007, Prostate Cancer Canada (then Prostate Cancer Research Foundation of Canada) was approached by Movember and introduced to the “Mo”. The first year saw 9,400 Mo Bros and Mo Sistas raise $545,000 across Canada. Fast forward three years and the 2010 Movember campaign saw almost 119,000 Mo Bros and Mo Sistas raise a staggering $22.3 million for prostate cancer research, education, support and awareness initiatives. It is clear that Canadians are embracing the Moustache and making a difference. Prostate cancer is the most common cancer to afflict Canadian men. In fact, rates of prostate cancer in men are comparable to rates of breast cancer in women, yet, until recently, little had been done to bring awareness to the disease.