Last week, the MINDS lab was honoured to receive the $15,000 proceeds from the #VaxTheIllawarra campaign to further our research into mental illness. You can read the Illawarra Mercury write up here.
If you haven’t heard of the campaign, it was founded in August last year by a group of community and corporate leaders while we were in lockdown. #VaxTheIllawarra was backed by business leaders and famous public personalities to encourage people to get the jab, get our community up to an 80% vaccination rate, as well as help ease the burden on the health system.
The campaign was an overwhelming success, boosting the region’s vaccination rate from around 30 per cent to more than 90 per cent in just a few months, raising funds through corporate sponsorship in the process.
Now that the campaign has wrapped up, the proceeds were donated to our research group via IHMRI to help us continue our work into understanding how stress impacts the brain to trigger mental illness.
Medical research funding is a major bottle neck in Australia right now, and community based funding is playing such an important role in ensuring that we can continue to make medical discoveries that enable us to improve the way we treat illness and disease, and ultimately improve individual’s quality or life and collectively, our communities.
The MINDS Lab thank the organisers and contributors to the campaign so much for their generosity.
You can read more about the event and campaign here:
https://www.ihmri.org.au/vaxtheillawarra-supports-mental-health-research/
