While in October women’s health was our main focus as part of Pink October, in November we turned our attention to men’s health. As a tradition, we held a Movember fundraiser, and this year we also had our very own guest speaker, the founder of LoveYourNuts to raise more awareness.
Movember has been around since 2004 and it hasn’t lost its popularity and charm with moustaches taking the spotlight on some of our Teams meetings. This year some of our Raketech colleagues picked up their blades and shaved their faces clean to start their Movember journey to raise funds, awareness, and eyebrows on team meetings in the name of men’s health.
While the movement originally started to raise awareness about prostate and testicular cancer, today it is also about other health risks affecting the men in our lives. In recent years Movember is not just focusing on physical health, it is also an opportunity to talk about mental health issues.
At Raketech we believe that taking part in good cause initiatives can help our employees and their families in creating conversations and raising important questions about sensitive topics and the help available to them.
We were delighted to partner up with LoveYourNuts.org, an organization dedicated to raising awareness around testicular cancer which is the most common cancer in men 15-40 age group, so it was important to talk about the symptoms in all age groups. Torben Koehler and his organization also focus on educating teens to help to remove the embarrassment of talking about cancer since early detection is key in survival.
Talking about taboos that need to be broken down: one in four adults experience mental health issues and the highest rate of depression is among men ages 40-59. There has been lots of talk about mental health in the past few years, but there is still a long way to go in raising awareness and providing help to all those affected.
We hope that by openly talking about the issue and providing free counselling and support services to all our employees through the Richmond Foundation we can take one step closer to being part of the solution.
We learned a lot this month and while some of us are looking forward to the moustaches disappearing in December and handing over the stage to the big white beard, some of us can’t wait for them to return next year!
