Tim Jones Remembered: FundRazr’s Cause of the Year
Crowdfunding Advisors, FundRazr Team
It is with great care and consideration that FundRazr makes its pick, each year, for the campaign that will stand as its “Cause of the Year.” Here, we look for crusades that are passionately pursued, that capture the enduring challenge of our shared humanity, that invite us to celebrate the communal joy and sorrow that attend the efforts of one soul to improve conditions for the rest of us.
How profoundly meaningful it is that our choice, already locked in for 2014, was so dead simple this year.
On January 19, Tim Jones, a paramedic and search-and-rescue leader from British Columbia who dedicated his turn on this planet to saving hundreds of lives, died suddenly on a mountain that had borne witness to dozens of his own heroic turns. Our campaign seeks to raise funds to ensure that Jones’s legacy lives on. In its first 29 days, the phenomenally well-attended effort raised almost $240,000 from 1,053 contributors for North Shore Rescue, a mountain search-and-rescue team of which Jones was a prominent member.
The 57-year-old first responder spent 25 years volunteering with North Shore Rescue, whose 40 or so volunteer members are skilled in search-and-rescue operations in mountain, canyon and urban settings.
Jones, who was a North Shore leader who also served as a spokesman for the organization, died on Mount Seymour of an apparent heart attack. He was remembered as a compassionate man who would put his own life on the line to help others. In 2011, he was awarded the Order of British Columbia in acknowledgement of his good work.
In a heartbreaking eulogy at his tear-streaked funeral — a full military-style procession and memorial attended by thousands in North Vancouver — Jones’s pal Ross Hallaway bid him farewell. “Tim, your work is now done here and all would agree it was done exceptionally well,” he said. “Go peacefully, good buddy.”
Following the service, Jones’s remains were placed aboard a rescue helicopter for a final flight.
By selecting this campaign as our “Cause of the Year” and granting it a fee-free run, we seek to honour a genuine superstar, a man with whom we had a personal connection, a true local hero whose good deeds galvanized the community that so gratefully claimed him as their own.
