DMX Profile- MX for Children Foundation

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Photos by Steve Cox

DMX: Hey Rex, Happy New Year! How have things been going?

Rex Backman: Thanks. Things are well. We’re just getting into fund raising for the 2010 season. We’ll have the MX for Children Inside Line Experience events at the Toronto, Houston and Seattle rounds this again this year. Plus we’ll do a few auctions and the like throughout the year.

How has the Sick Kids fund raising been going so far?

Pretty good so far. It’s still a bit early to see if we’re going to hit our goal of $20,000 for Toronto but we have until the end of February to get there. For Toronto we’ve got a few great families that always help us out. It is amazing to see how much fund raising some of these kids do! Also, Sick Kids has an online donation portal site this year which makes it easy to sponsor a fund raiser of just donate a few bucks.

You can access the Sick Kids site HERE.

How long have you been doing this for?

MX for Children has been raising funds for 5 years and this is our fourth year participating at the Toronto event.

100% of our funds go to local children’s hospitals. For the Toronto race that is Sick Kids.

Chad Reed has donated his time to help out the MX for Children Foundation.

Most of us on the MX for Children team are long-time SX and MX fans. We have all raced or ridden over the years. For me, I have dabbled a bit as well in SX and MX photography and that’s how I first started helping Paul Gross, the Founder of MX for Children.
If you step back and look at things most of us are pretty lucky – we get to ride or attend the races – and enjoy the sports of SX and MX.
For the children that we raise funds for that is not the case at all. Our funds target hydrocephalous, the #1 case of brain surgery in children. Children afflicted with hydrocephalous try to leave normal lives but face the prospect of multiple brain surgeries in their early years.

So, for us on MX for Children it is a chance to give back a bit to people in need and the fun part is we leverage the sport of Supercross in doing so.

In Canada, since Hockey is our national sport, we always say how good professional Hockey players are with charity work. How do you find Professional Motocross riders to deal with?

They are great and they are giving. We’ve had RC, Chad, JS7, RV, K-Dub, Tim Ferry, Shorty, Tedesco, Nate Ramsey and others at our events over the years. The teams are great in supporting us. For example the folks at Joe Gibbs Racing Motocross have really stepped up the past few years in helping us.

I have been lucky enough to see a lot of SX and MX over the past years and my most cherished memory goes back to Seattle a few years back. We had RC and some other racers at Seattle Children’s Hospital on a Thursday before the race. A few of us got to go up to the oncology (cancer) ICU ward and visit children. All of us had to wear gowns, gloves, face masks - it was the real deal in a very serious place. RC was such the champion that day. He pulled around a little red wagon full of gifts for the kids and make sure he spent time with as many as he could. That day he, Chad, Tedesco, and Heath Voss were all champions. They represented the sport as best as it could be and made some very ill kids smile for a few moments.

That is so cool, I love hearing stories like that. Thanks for your time Rex, is there anything else you would like to add?

First, thanks for the chance to spread the word. Second, visit www.mxforchildren.org to learn about raising funds for the Toronto round. Third, hold off a time of two on that visit to Tim Horton’s and instead donate $5 or $10 to Sick Kids via the site mentioned above. A lot of a little adds up to a big something!

Fourth, many thanks to Monster Energy Supercross, the Riders and their teams in continuing to support MX for Children.