Inspired by a friend with ALS, NBC News’ Natalie Morales joins forces with the Muscular Dystrophy Association’s Muscle Team, a group of celebrity ambassadors dedicated to building awareness for the MDA.

As national correspondent and co-anchor of the third hour of NBC’s Today, Natalie Morales has covered everything from the 9/11 attacks to presidential elections — and has met some of the world’s most interesting and inspiring people along the way.

But she was more than struck when she interviewed Life Fitness founder Augie Nieto in 2006 for Today, just after he was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, (ALS), better known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. In the years since Morales first met Nieto, the disease has robbed him of his ability to talk, walk and eat. Despite the challenges he now faces, he is living a full life, surrounded by family and friends — and raising millions for research for ALS through his charity, Augie’s Quest.

“To this day, he is the most inspirational person I have ever met in my life,” Morales tells Tonic. “People always ask me who’s been the best person I’ve ever interviewed and which celebrities I’ve liked interviewing. I tell them that it’s the people who show you that you can rise above and beyond what life hands you who impress me the most — and Augie is a true example of that. He has so much courage.”

Nieto is also the most positive person Morales says she has ever met. “He has said to me, ‘A lot of people would say this is a death sentence, but to me, this is a life sentence,” says Morales. “He said that he wants to show people with ALS how they can live a full life and do a world of good knowing they have this disease.”

Morales: Lending a Powerful Helping Hand

With Nieto as a powerful role model, Morales is doing her part to help find a cure for ALS and other debilitating diseases. Not only has she done several stories on Nieto and Augie’s Quest for Today, she recently joined the Muscular Dystrophy Association’s Muscle Team, a group of celebrity ambassadors dedicated to building awareness for the MDA, which is trying to raise funding for research for 43 neuromuscular diseases including ALS.

On the August 6 edition of Today, she unveiled her new print ad for MDA’s Make a Muscle, Make a Difference campaign — the same day it debuted in USA Today. Like former Access Hollywood host Nancy O’Dell, who lost her mom to ALS, The Biggest Loser host Alison Sweeney and Dancing with the Stars’ Tom Bergeron and other celebrities, Morales shot a public service announcement for the MDA campaign. On top of that, Morales is also taping a special appeal for Jerry Lewis‘ upcoming MDA Telethon.

“Natalie knows how important our lifesaving mission is, having previously interviewed athletic equipment pioneer Augie Nieto,” said MDA President & CEO Gerald C. Weinberg on MDA.org. “Augie has remarkably raised more than $23 million for MDA-sponsored ALS research since being diagnosed with the rapidly progressive muscle disease.”

Morales hopes the campaign will inspire others to help. “I am hoping to raise awareness for all of these various neuromuscular diseases,” she says. “I have seen and covered too many stories where sadly, you see what parents are going through when a child is sick, and even later in life, you see what adults, like my friend Augie, go through with these diseases.”

Augie Nieto: One of the World’s True Heroes

Morales is impressed not just with all the good that Nieto has done to try to find a cure for ALS — but his indomitable spirit in the face of a devastating diagnosis. “It’s amazing to see everything he has been able to do,” she says. “I admire him so much.”

Nieto, a self-described fitness buff, was vacationing with his family in 2005 when he lost all feeling in his arms. His doctors ran all kinds of tests before giving him the most devastating news he had received in his life: that he had ALS. “He said to me at the time: ‘That’s the one time you wish you were diagnosed with MS,’” says Morales.

Patients who are diagnosed with ALS are given just three to five years to live. “It’s a death sentence,” says Morales. “There’s nothing you can do when you get the diagnosis. His doctor told him to spend as much time as he could with his family and to get his affairs in order,” says Morales.”He said, ‘I’m not going to spend my life that way.’” For him, it was a call to action.

“He is spending time with his family and his wife, Lynne, who is a pillar of strength, but he also wants to get everybody involved in this initiative because to him it’s unacceptable that they don’t know anything about ALS. They don’t know what causes it. And there’s no cure.”

Shortly after his diagnosis, Nieto teamed up with the MDA and founded Augie’s Quest to raise much-needed funding for ALS. “Since ALS is an orphan disease (5,000 to 6,000 people a year die from ALS), a lot of pharmaceutical companies won’t touch it or do research on it because they know within five years their subjects — whoever they are studying — aren’t going to be there,” she says. “And the likelihood of a drug being profitable for an orphan disease is very slim.”

Nieto, who announced on Today in 2009 that he and his wife, Lynne (the couple, above left), are aiming to raise $30 million for ALS research by 2014, has been given numerous awards for his work with Augie’s Quest, including the National Association of Hispanic Journalists‘ prestigious President’s Award in 2008. Then-NAHJ President Rafael Olmeda cited Nieto as someone who, without fanfare, put a “Latino face on an American story.”

In 2009, Five for Fighting wrote a song in Nieto’s honor to help raise money for Augie’s Quest.

Nieto is the kind of guy who can tell you what the true meaning of life is, she says. “He said to me, ‘I’ve never felt more loved or more needed,’ says Morales. “Sadly, he said, you don’t realize all that you value in life until you have it almost taken away from you. This has been a long goodbye that has allowed me to tell everybody I love and know how much I treasure them.”

Indeed, in Nieto’s most recent interview with Morales on Today in 2009, he told her that he has never felt happier in his life than in the five years since he received his diagnosis. “When your family and friends think you’re at the end of your life, they say things normally reserved for your eulogy,” he told her. “When they say these remarks, it makes you feel proud of the impact you had on family and friends and people you’ve worked with.”

But since Morales’ first interview with Nieto four years ago, she has sadly seen his condition rapidly decline. When she first interviewed him, he was able to walk and talk, though his speech was slurred. “He can’t type or talk anymore, so he communicates with a retinal eye scanner from Dynavox. This new technology reads the retina of his eyes when he is looking at a computer screen and can tell what letters he’s looking at. When I send him an email, he sends one back in an hour or so.”

Despite his deteriorating condition, he remains as busy as ever. He joined the board of directors of Dynavox in 2009, because of his business acumen — and because he has seen firsthand how much it has helped improve his quality of life.

Since his diagnosis, Nieto has also written two books since his diagnosis: Augie’s Quest: One Man’s Journey From Success to Significance, with co-author T.R. Pearson and a forward by Tuesdays with Morrie author Mitch Ablom, and Reciprocity, Incorporated: Give Versus Take: The Secret of Successful, with a forward by Lance Armstrong. “In that book, he interviewed more than 30 CEOs, talking about the importance of giving and how when life deals you its biggest blows, you can make it a true blessing.”

With all that Nieto has accomplished — and is still accomplishing, “he is showing people that you don’t have to go silently,” says Morales. “He hopes that by showing others how to live life to the fullest, more drug companies will invest in research more and look for a cause and a cure for ALS and other neuromuscular diseases. He is trying to make sure that our attention doesn’t go away from these diseases.”

So is Morales. She teamed up with MDA because she says, “it’s important to me that we remind everyone that their charitable dollars do go a long way. Not much was known about any of these diseases 50 years ago, but because of the MDA, look how far we’ve come and how much the quality of life has improved for so many people.

“All of the research for any muscular or neuromuscular diseases that you read about or that they teach in med school comes from the support of the MDA. Jerry’s Kids and all of the MDA campaigns have done a world of good, but there’s still no cure for many of these illnesses.

“My goal is to continue to shine the spotlight on these diseases and encourage people to continue to make donations because it is their dollars that have allowed the MDA to make such strides.”

Photo courtesy of MDA.

Article by KC Baker Originally published on Tonic

Saran Kaba Jones believes in the dynamic, prosperous Liberia she left behind as a child when her homeland was on the cusp of war. Twenty years later, she returns with the belief that everyone deserves clean water, at the very least.

Saran Kaba Jones (at right) is the daughter of a professor father, Brahima, and entrepreneurial mother, Fatima, who remembers her childhood in Liberia with a large four-bedroom, two bathroom home as bucolic as it was peaceful. There were fields growing tomatoes, peppers, cassava leaves and potato greens. There was a large yard where she played with her brothers Omar, Abass and Mousa among the chickens and goats that roamed freely.

In 1989, when she was eight, the family left the country where she was born — considered the America of West Africa — just as a ruinous civil war was heating up, which lasted until early 2005. During that time, more than 250,000 people were killed, thousands more fled and even now, her homeland has no running water, no public electricity, an 85 percent unemployment rate and an infrastructure that remains crippled.

Jones returns to Liberia on July 27 to continue her single-minded goal of helping restore the Liberia she knew as a child, and at the very least, to bring the country clean, accessible water — since only a quarter of the population has access. Through the nonprofit she founded in Jan. 2009, Face Africa Jones previously installed a water purification and pump system capable of pumping 20,000 liters a day—enough to serve an entire village of 600 people in Barnesville (with the help of a Davis Project for Peace grant of $10,000).

After her family left Liberia, they went to Ivory Coast, the Middle East where her father was named ambassador, then to France and then Jones came to the US for college where she eventually graduated from Harvard University with a degree in international relations and political science. She wasn’t able to return until 2008, three years after the civil war had ended, and what she saw upon her arrival jolted her.

“I was shocked. It was very, very different from what I remembered from growing up as a young child,” said Jones. “I had seen reports of damage and devastation caused by the war but what I saw was nothing like what I had in mind. It was a very harsh reality. I got to see that the war had completely destroyed the entire infrastructure. You could see huge holes in roads, buildings, clinics and schools. Everything was destroyed. The level of poverty was incredible. Liberia now has one of the highest unemployment rates — 85 percent. There is no electricity in the entire country — all the infrastructure was damaged — and 90 to 95 percent have no electricity. Those who can afford to have a generator but there is no running water, or sewerage system for that matter.”

While she was still a student, she began working as an investment project manager for the Singapore government economic development board and in the years since she graduated from Harvard in 2007, she married Ainsworth Jones, a Jamaican attorney she met while still a student. But she never lost sight of her mother country of Liberia. So this trip to Liberia was taken with vacation time, as she still works her full-time job for the Singapore economic development board, and all the work she does raising money or planning water purification projects, she does after hours and on weekends.

“She’s doing these amazing things and it challenges you to think of others first. She’s unassuming and completely selfless,” says Zoe Cooper, a native Liberian and corporate attorney in Providence, R.I. who befriended Jones through a Liberian professional network organization. “Just how she’s made Face Africa her everyday is amazing. I remember her telling me three or four months ago that her mother was yelling at her because she hadn’t been eating right and had lost weight. She was just so busy. It’s very admirable, she works day in and day out. This girl will be up late at night doing FACE Africa work. When she has her mind set on something no one can stop her. She makes giving back look good. She’s doing these great things and she remains herself. She’s not pretending, she’s well dressed, very poised and she makes everyone feel at home around her. Her style makes service to others look fabulous — she looks like a runway model but she’s giving back everyday.”

The genesis of her first trip back to Liberia in 2008 has been in the works for a while. Even while she was a college student herself, Jones was sending $150 a month to the son of her mother’s friend so that he could continue his high school education because, for the most part, education has to be paid for by families.

“Initially I thought, ‘This is great. If I can help one person get an education maybe I can start something on a larger scale, get my family, friends and colleagues involved.’ I wanted to do something with education but when I went to Liberia the reality completely changed me,” explains Jones. “I decided to shift my focus a little bit when I saw the challenges and needs there. As much as the education system in Liberia needed to be overhauled, there were so many other areas that needed attention — health, clean water and sanitation — and if kids aren’t healthy enough to go to school, it defeats the purpose. It was then that I decided to start an organization and focus on bringing clean water to communities in the country.”

She began researching sustainable, simple water purification systems and through a Liberian engineer friend learned of a SkyHydrant developed by Siemens which uses a self-contained, gravity-based membrane and hand pump system to provide clean water at a spigot. In May of 2009, Jones and an undergraduate student from Simmons College, Asia Norton, traveled to Barnesville and the project was completed and functional by her second trip last October.

She is also a master of mustering funds to support her endeavors. In 2009, FACE Africa won a $30,000 a year trust for 30 years from All for Africa by winning more than 54 percent of nearly 100,000 votes that were cast, generated in part by fans on the FACE Africa Facebook page. In March, Jones launched the inaugural FACE Africa Gala, raising $50,000 and the guest list included Liberian Ambassador to the United States M. Nathaniel Barnes, former NBA Star Dikembe Mutombo (at right) and Peter Thum, Founder of Ethos Water and former Vice President at Starbucks. And FACE Africa was one of 200 small charities chosen from 500,000 candidates to receive a share of $2.5 million in the Chase Community Giving Program on Facebook. The program, in its second year, attracted more than 2.5 million Facebook participants who voted and selected the 200 winning charities; FACE Africa will receive $20,000.

Seward Cooper, a fellow Liberian who has a nonprofit One Liberia to promote the restoration of the country, met Jones a year ago. “She reaches out across organizations and that’s definitely a strength. A lot of people have nonprofits and stay within box but she looks at the bigger picture and recognizes that when everything works in concert, she will be better able to fulfill what she’s doing and other people will be able to too. She reaches out constantly and is always trying to see how she can support other people so in the end, everyone is working to one goal of trying to help Liberia in positive manner.”

Photos courtesy of FACE Africa.

Story By Anne Driscoll Originally posted on Tonic.

You couldn’t help but start the day with a smile if you had this Golden Girl posing with cute animals and hot men on your wall.

Who doesn’t love the funny and talented Betty White? Not too many people considering the 88-year-old attracted huge amounts of media buzz and fanfare for her Saturday Night Live performance. And certainly, the last remaining of The Golden Girls still has it. Her comedic ability is outstanding, she’s smart, she’s generous and she still has legions of loyal followers.

In her latest endeavor, the comedienne is harnessing her rebound back into the spotlight –– though true fans would say she never left –– for doing good. Coming in September, the Betty White calendar to raise money for animal wellness will becoming to a retail location near you.

An animal health and welfare advocate, she has worked for years to make life better for animals and wildlife. She serves as a trustee to the Morris Animal Foundation, to which all the proceeds from September’s calendar will benefit.

Based out of Denver, Colo., the Morris Animal Foundation funds research making advances in the health and welfare of companion animals, horses and wildlife worldwide. The legendary actress has supported the foundation for 40 years and has stepped in front of the camera again, this time to help the organization create a healthier tomorrow for animals.

Though it may be a serious cause, the calendar will be purely Betty White material. The month’s will feature photographs of her many accomplishments, adorable animals and, of course, shirtless hotties! She does know how to keep us smiling.

This has potential to go fast, but preorders are available at select online locations.

Story by Katie Leavitt originally posted on Tonic

Photo courtesy of Workman Publishing Company via Amazon.

… But he’s running, biking and swimming for those who do. The former “Bachelorette” suitor (who became Trista’s husband) is competing in 10 races to inspire 10,000 people to give $10 each. Will you be one of them?

When I first heard that former Bachelorette contestant Ryan Sutter was competing in races for charity, I shrugged my shoulders. I’d been covering this season’s show on ABC and seen a wrestler lie to get his 15 minutes of fame, so I thought similarly of Sutter: Here’s another reality TV star clinging to fame in the name of goodness. But when I interviewed the Colorado native, I realized I couldn’t have been more wrong.

It all started when Sutter met professional kayaker Brad Ludden at the Teva Mountain Games a few years ago, and the two immediately hit it off. Ludden is the founder of First Descents, a nonprofit dedicated to empowering young adults with cancer through whitewater kayaking, and Sutter is now an active supporter.

“I started to get to know the campers and saw the impact of the disease. Ethan’s [Tonic contributor Ethan Zohn] a great example of the strength it takes to overcome that,” Sutter said. “Basically, there’s no choice. You’re forced to summon this physical and emotional strength and power that you never knew you had. I realized that you shouldn’t need that. The goal was to try to take on what isn’t ‘normal,’ to get to the depth of my physical strength, to inspire others the way that those at First Descents have inspired me.”

The Vail firefighter is definitely entering the realm of abnormal this year by competing in 10 races. His website says it perfectly: “By the end of 2010 Ryan Sutter will have trained for 700 hours, traveled 8,500 miles, and climbed the equivalent of Mount Everest four times. He has taken on this incredible challenge all while wearing the Team FD jersey in an effort to challenge 10,000 people to give $10 in honor of First Descents’ 10th year anniversary.”

So far, he’s completed four races: the Bolder Boulder, Teva Mountain Games’ Ultimate Mountain Challenge, the Adventure Team Challenge in Leadville, Colo. (at left) and the Firecracker 50, a 50-mile, Fourth of July race in Breckenridge, Colo. that’s pretty much all uphill.

“Every couple of weeks, there’s a fairly big athletic endeavor. It creates a mental frustration,” Sutter said. “I’ll feel really good about [finishing a race] and then I have to gear up for the next one. There’s no relaxation.”

To get him through each competition, Sutter remembers his motivations: the First Descents campers, Zohn and a girl named Zoe.

“I had a really difficult call at work that involved a young infant and she didn’t end up making it,” Sutter said. “Life is short and I can do [these races] now.”

To date, Sutter has only raised $7,643 but he’s confident he’ll reach the $100,000 mark by year’s end.

“I don’t want to ask for money at a time when people don’t have it,” Sutter said. “I’m not a big shot. I don’t have a lot of wealthy friends. It’s tough for me to build a grassroots program. It gets frustrating to hand out all those fliers and get 10 people to donate, but we’re not giving up!”

And neither should you, Tonic readers. All it takes is $10 and you can make a teenager forget that they have cancer, even if it’s just for a little while, kayaking the Colorado rapids.

Visit Ryan Sutter’s 10-10-10 Challenge today.

Story by Kathryn Wilson Originally posted on Tonic

Photos by Scott McClarrinon via RyanSutter.com.

ylan Pausch, ‘Last Lecturer’ Randy Pausch’s 8-year-old son, is taking on Washington and speaking out on the underfunded war against a lethal enemy: pancreatic cancer.

You know Randy Pausch. His “Last Lecture” might be both the most heart-breaking and soul-mending life lesson of the YouTube era. You probably don’t know his son, Dylan, though you might remember the youngster as one of three little big reasons his father fought so hard in a doomed battle against pancreatic cancer. Two years after his father’s death, 8-year-old Dylan is now picking up where his dad left off.

On June 22, Dylan appeared with his mom Jai on Capitol Hill, where during his final days two years earlier, Randy asked congress to devote dollars to a desperately underfunded cause. Pancreatic cancer, the fourth most lethal cancer in the United States, is the “least federally funded of all leading cancer killers,” according to the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. It receives less than 2 percent of the National Cancer Institute’s annual budget.

“So many people are dying from pancreatic cancer and the survival rates are so low,” Dylan told ABC News as he visited Congress last month. “If we keep studying, we might be able to change that.”

Dylan’s words echoed those his dad said before the Labor, Health & Human Services Subcommittee. “We don’t have an advocate for this disease because they don’t live long enough.”

The savvy lecturer brought out a photo of his family and pointed his sharpie at Dylan. “He’s six years old and he loves dinosaurs.”

Dylan might still love dinosaurs, but he probably always loved his dad more. Today, he can show it and he did as he took the microphone at the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network Advocacy Day during his recent trip to D.C. Unfortunately his words weren’t recorded, though they probably sounded something like his dad’s.

“Pancreatic disease is a disease that I think we can beat,” Randy said in the same city in 2008. “But it’s going to take more continued courage and funding from our government to help protect us from the things that we can’t protect ourselves from.”

Randy Pausch always said he was just a human face to put attention on the disease. It’s good to know there’s now a fresh face filling in.

Click to donate to the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network.

Story by Sam Brand Originally published on Tonic

Photo by the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network.