Ascensia Diabetes Care joins us as Presenting Sponsor at One Walk, Morris County this year. In addition, they’re looking to hold the title of Top Corporate Team at Morris for the 2nd year in a row. Read more about their team, company and goal to support our T1D community.

“We are Only Diabetes” is one of the Ascensia company values and is written across the walls of our offices in Parsippany, New Jersey.

Diabetes is our only focus as a company and this focus is one of the things we think sets us apart. We want to help people living with diabetes, and all our decisions and activities have this goal in mind. It is a view shared by our entire company, and we feel it is central to our culture. That is why we are longstanding supporters of the JDRF and will be participating in the JDRF One Walk, Morris County on October 14 again this year, for the second time. We are delighted and excited to be supporting JDRF again.

Ascensia has been around for a long time in diabetes, but many of you may not know the name. We are the maker of the CONTOUR® family of diabetes management products, including the CONTOUR®NEXT test strips and  blood glucose monitoring systems, and we used to be part of Bayer, before being launched as a new independent company in 2016. We have been working hard to make sure people recognize Ascensia as a trusted member of the diabetes community.

In our first year, we achieved donations of over $19,000 versus our goal of $10,000 in support of the JDRF One Walk, Morris County, which was the result of an incredible effort from our teams and everyone who supported them. We had 133 team members doing the Walk, 240 individual donations, and even a group donation from our Tarrytown office.

For our employees it was so meaningful to be involved in the Walk last year and raise money for a charity that is so important to us as a company. We have many people who have worked in the area of diabetes for years, as well as those who have personal connections to diabetes. It is by participating in events like the JDRF One Walk that our teams get the chance to do something that can make a real, direct impact to people with diabetes.

It also gives them a chance to hear personal stories from people with diabetes that can influence them in their day to day jobs. For a team that is working to develop the next generation of diabetes management solutions, there is nothing more motivating and inspirational than meeting the people they are trying to help.

One example of this was the recent visit from Danny and Keyonna to our offices in Parsippany. Danny and Keyonna are two JDRF Youth Ambassadors who came and spoke to a packed room of around 40 employees about their experiences with diabetes. What better way to help our employees get behind this Walk and go that extra mile in fundraising.

So, we are now gearing up for our second One Walk season. Following last year’s success, we decided we wanted to achieve even more and are going to kick things off even bigger for 2018.

As a start, we are not just organizing a team for One Walk, Morris County, but we are also sponsoring the event. So far we have 162 people signed up to walk and are two thirds of the way to our sponsorship target of $15,000.

One way we engaged our employees in the Walk was to arrange a T-shirt contest to decide what our team will be wearing on the day. We asked our employees to submit their designs and our employees voted on the winner! We had nine entries, and our employees voted for “Walking for a Cure” as the winner. Hopefully these will help you spot our team out on the course.

If you are at the JDRF One Walk on October 14, please stop by our tent. You will have the chance to demo our products, speak to one of our team to answer your questions and get involved in a few fun activities. But we don’t want to give away any surprises of what we have organized just yet.

Working with JDRF is an important partnership for Ascensia, as we know that by fundraising and working with the organization, we are helping to improve the lives of people with diabetes. They do phenomenal work, and we are just delighted to help them do more for people with diabetes.