The club are pleased to be backing Merton Council in supporting Movember and our Foundation Director Philip Rudling provided details in Saturday's programme about how you can support the annual initiative.
The article about raising awareness of men's health problems is reproduced in full below.
This month the AFC Wimbledon Foundation and the club are delighted to be joining Merton Council in supporting Movember, the annual national campaign which aims to raise funds for and awareness of men's health priorities, including prostate cancer, testicular cancer, mental health and suicide prevention. Foundation and club staff will be attempting to grow moustaches and also encouraging all club supporters to get involved in the campaign by joining them and encouraging everyone to get more active in "Moving for Movember".
To launch the project, Merton Public Health staff visited The Cherry Red Records Stadium last week to meet Foundation Director Philip Rudling and Haydon the Womble – who sported a particularly fine moustache for #mertontachetag.
"The Foundation wholeheartedly supports the Movember campaign to improve men's health, raise awareness of testicular and prostate cancer and reduce suicide rates among young men," said Philip. "This initiative fits in nicely with our wider health projects such as walking football and Dons FIT and work we did earlier in the year on mental health with the Healthy London Partnership. The Foundation will be working to improve health outcomes across our local communities, and we are very pleased to be working closely with Merton Council and their Public Health team on this project."
Throughout November, Merton Council and its partners will be supporting the Movember campaign via Twitter, using the hashtag #mertontachetag. There will be giant moustaches on display in key places across Merton, and the Council are asking people to get moving by hunting down the moustaches, either individually or in teams, and posting photos of themselves with the moustaches on Twitter with the hashtag #mertontachetag. Every tweet with #mertontachetag will then link together via the Twitter search engine.
During November you can search on Twitter for #mertontachetag to find the locations of the Merton moustaches. For more ideas on how to get moving, visit https://www.oneyoumerton.org/moving/ .
Did you know?
• In Merton, men die on average four years earlier than women.
• 3 out of 4 suicides are men.
• 1 in 8 men in the UK have experienced a mental health problem.
• When detected early, prostate cancer survival rates are better than 98%. Find it late, and the survival rate drops to below 26%.
• Almost half (47 per cent) of men diagnosed with testicular cancer in the UK each year are under 35.
To find out more about men's health priorities, visit https://uk.movember.com/ .