Chillin'Competition

We tried to put an end to the 2020 nightmare with a bit of humor, and with an award in memory of someone we lost. Chillin’Competition now wants to follow up with a bit of hope, and with a challenge.

We have often claimed that the competition community is special, and that the people in it are special too (mostly in a good way ;-)). We would now like to prove this. When we ran our meme contest, Isabelle de Silva (President of the French Competition Authority) suggested that we should again use the best memes to produce mugs. This gave us the idea to refocus a light hearted contest – and actually to leverage whatever reach this blog may have – towards supporting other much more serious, important and worthy initiatives, like KickCancer.

KickCancer is a public interest foundation devoted to combatting childhood cancer. KickCancer finances these innovative research projects aimed at understanding and curing paediatric cancer. Their cause could not be more important, or more fitting given the various extraordinary colleagues we sadly lost to cancer this past year. KickCancer is also an organization that is doing its best to turn an adverse event into a force for change (which in a way symbolizes what we want to get out of this pandemic too). It is an organization that finances projects with a European scope. It is an organization that approaches the most serious possible cause with humour. And since no organization is perfect, this one is largely run by lawyers 😉 

Chillin’Competition has partnered with KickCancer to sell customized mugs featuring the winners of our meme contest, as selected by our devoted jurors (Foo Yun-Chee, Lewis Crofts, Javier Espinoza, Thibault Larger and Aoife White).

YOU CAN NOW BUY THE WINNING MEME MUGS HERE

All funds will go directly to KickCancer, and the (evident) overprice will be devoted to financing paediatric cancer research.

We would encourage you buy mugs for your colleagues, employees, clients, students, friends or for yourselves. It will cost you little, and it would help a lot. To facilitate logistics, we would also encourage you to collude, make a joint purchase and set a single delivery point for various mugs (shipping costs are free if you buy more than 10). You will be able to buy these mugs until 19 March.

The mugs are obviously nothing but an excuse. You can contribute to KickCancer in any way you can, also through direct donations (which will get you a tax deduction instead of a mug). You can do that in less time than it would take you to read one of our posts, for less than the cost of a takeaway meal (or for a very small fraction of a billable hour), and it will have a much more positive impact than either of those 😉

It would be nice to demonstrate that the competition community can beat all others not only in numbers of conferences, webinars and awards per capita, but also at joining forces in support of something that truly matters.