Off-Roading Community Joins the Fight Against Blindness

Last spring, Frank Keane and the members of a RZR Off-Roading Forum rallied together to generously support one of their fellow members, Chad Johnson. Chad’s son, Cody, suffers from a rare disease known as Usher syndrome, a devastating condition causing both deafness and vision loss. They raised almost $20,000 for critical research through the Foundation’s Race to Cure Blindness Program.

Chad had learned a few years earlier that Usher syndrome was a progressive disease without a cure. He was terribly scared, but immediately took action. “When Cody was diagnosed, I spent the next 16 hours searching the Internet to try to find a cure or what we could do, and at some point in those 16 hours, I came across the Foundation Fighting Blindness,” says Chad. “I spent a lot of time in chat rooms there, which are a great tool because there were people there that had already been through what I was going through.”

Chad recently started his own business selling high-performance parts for the Polaris RZR, a vehicle similar to an ATV (all-terrain vehicle) where riders can sit side by side. Being a member of the RZR forum and having worked within this industry for his entire career, Chad made several friends along the way. One friend in particular, Mike Coffen, decided to take his RZR on a ride across the southern U.S. He announced the plan for his ride on the forum, so that people within the community could come out and ride with him when he was in their area.

Frank Keane

Chad saw Mike’s ride as an opportunity to raise money for the critical research that could help Cody through the Foundation’s Race to Cure Blindness program. After suggesting this idea to Mike and Frank, the Tour for a Cure was born.

Frank, the moderator of the forum, announced the fundraiser and immediately started fundraising by reaching out to the many vendors he knew through the forum, and they came on board by donating items for auction. Frank began organizing individual auctions on the forum for the donated items and that was the start of a huge success. “The response from the RZR community membership was just outstanding,” says Frank. “To see the big hearts of these members was incredible.” Many of the forum’s members who won auctions would pay for their items as a donation to the Foundation and then donate it back to the forum to be auctioned again.

While vendors and even members continued to donate auction items for the Tour for a Cure, Frank also reached out to Polaris, the company who makes the RZR. After some collaboration, Frank was able to secure a donation of a child’s model of the RZR called a Polaris 170 that was auctioned off as a grand prize. Their efforts were extremely successful and almost $20,000 was raised through the Tour for a Cure. “It was a lot bigger effort than I ever thought it was going to be, but having five children of my own, it was well worth it,” says Frank. He and the RZR Forum community were recently honored with the first ever Race to Cure Blindness Participant Award for their amazing generosity and support of the Foundation’s mission.

Chad was pleasantly surprised to see the generous outpouring of support for his cause that came from the RZR forum members around the country. “I don’t want to see my son go blind. I’m going to support the Foundation however I can, no matter what. But these guys who joined in; their only connection to it is me, and when you look at what they did, it’s really amazing,” Chad says. Frank and his team are already planning for the Tour for a Cure for 2011 and are excited to get a head start on fundraising.