In March of 2010, Conor Flannery, a biomedical engineer in Santa Monica, California launches Cause to Paddle, a 2,500-mile kayaking journey from Seattle, Washington to Anchorage, Alaska that will ultimately provide medical supplies to thousands of patients in need. Flannery will kayak about 15 miles each day and camp along the Pacific Coast with leave-no-trace principles. He estimates it will take him five months to kayak all 2,500 miles to Anchorage.

With his career as a medical device engineer and his passion for community service, Flannery is using Cause to Paddle to raise $8 per mile and a minimum of $20,000 for MedShare. This will sponsor one 40-foot container filled with surplus medical products to an under-resourced hospital abroad serving approximately 100,000 patients. These medical supplies and equipment, collected from local and national hospitals and manufacturers that would otherwise be discarded to landfills, will go to serve patients without this basic medical care. 

“I love MedShare’s combination of humanitarian purpose with environmental impact and I hope my expedition paddle can bring attention to their cause and first world stewardship for those in need of basic medical resources”, said Conor Flannery, Founder of CauseToPaddle.org

MedShare has recycled over 1 million cubic feet of medical supplies, which is a tremendous environmental impact, and recently shipped 5 containers to earthquake victims in Haiti and plans to send another 20 containers in the coming months.

Conor has performed 13 round trip ocean crossings to the Channel Islands off of Southern California and has paddled 275 miles in Glacier Bay National Park in Alaska. This five month expedition to Alaska will be nine times the length of his Glacier Bay trip and will be chronicled via the www.CauseToPaddle.org website, Facebook, picture and video blogs, Twitter, and YouTube as he passes through the dramatic scenery of the San Juan Islands, British Columbia, the Alaskan Inside Passage, Prince William Sound, and around the Kenai peninsula to Anchorage.

About MedShare
MedShare is a US 501c3 organization that bridges the gap between surplus and need to improve healthcare and the environment through the efficient recovery and redistribution of surplus medical supplies and equipment to those most in need.