Approximately 465 people suffer from brain injuries daily in Canada, resulting in a brain injury every 3 minutes. The extent of brain injury outnumbers breast cancer, spinal cord injury, multiple sclerosis and HIV/AIDS-combined. Traumatic brain injury is a major public health concern yet it does not receive a lot of attention. Brain Awareness Movement (BAM) club is a group at the University of Alberta comprised of students who are determined to reduce the prevalence of brain injury. BAM club was started in 2009 with a mission to educate the public about the preventive measures of brain injuries, support brain injury survivors and their families, and to advocate for brain awareness throughout our community. Acquired brain injury is the leading cause of death and disability for Canadians under the age of 35. It is clearly the number one killer of young adults. The fact that brain injuries can be prevented made the Education Program the main focus of our group’s mission. As the BAM club, we want to inspire our community to be safe and aware of the risks associated with brain injuries. We do this by delivering presentations to schools and explaining the importance of protecting the skull by exposing our audience to varying degrees of brain injuries. Brain injuries can happen to absolutely anybody. They can happen to people of any gender, any age, any ethnicity, your neighbour, or even your child. We focus on supporting brain injury survivors and their families. We work directly with support centres for brain injury survivors like the Brain Care Centre (BCC), and Networks Activity Centre (NAC), by providing volunteers to both these centres. Our volunteering experience is unique because our volunteers gain knowledge of what it is like to be impacted by brain injury as they work one on one with brain injury survivors. They take that experience with them and educate others about how brain injuries can have a huge impact on one’s life. Our volunteers also get to raise funds to donate to the BCC and NAC. We also hold fundraising events, and our main annual fundraising event is the Big BAM Fundraising Gala, which provides an opportunity for the brain injury survivors to share their experiences in order to educate our volunteers and others. Because our focus is to reduce the occurrence of preventable brain injuries, one of our values is to advocate for brain safety by campaigning on campus and throughout our community. We do this through advertising campaigns for example we participate at STEM (Science Technology Engineering and Math) oriented events in Edmonton, such as the TELUS World of Science and the School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Even though our members have always sustained the group’s core values, which are to educate, support, and advocate, we have faced challenges. And that is because when we talk about brain injury we lack that deep understanding of its severity. We continue to face a main challenge of getting a lot of members who share the same vision as us. Initially the members were mostly from the Science background, but we have increased our scope of members by participating in the campus clubs fair as we continue to reach out to people who are moved by our cause. Our desire is to have more organisations that are raising awareness on brain injuries. TOGETHER WE CAN SAVE LIVES: JOIN THE BAMILY!!!!! Ruvimbo Maranga Director of Education Brain Awareness Movement University of Alberta
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