Olympic Gold Medalist Cullen Jones has joined forces with the USA Swimming Foundation and ConocoPhillips for a second year in an effort to recude drowning statistics among minority youth. Jones will spread the message with a six-city event series, "Make a Splash with Cullen Jones," presented by ConocoPhillips.
Motivated by the fact that African-American children drown at a rate almost three times higher than Caucasian children in similar age groups, Jones, the first African-American male to hold a world record in swimming, is using his fame to raise awareness on the issue and ensure more kids learn to swim, especially in urban communities. As primary spokesman for the USA Swimming Foundation's Make a Splash initiative, Jones will tour the country promoting the availability of low-to-no-cost swimming lessons to give all kids access to life-saving swimming skills, regardless of their ethnic or economic background.
Jones will visit six cities this year: Omaha, Chicago, Washington, DC, Los Angeles, Oakland and New York City. There, Jones will meet with community leaders, parents and children to deliver a stark message: the ability to swim is a life-and-death issue that requires immediate action from parents and kids. Watch Cullen in Houston on the 2009 event series.
Make a Splash, the national, child-focused water safety initiative of the USA Swimming Foundation, began in 2007. In just three years, more than 373,000 kids have gone through Make a Splash swimming lessons, nearly 17,000 of them receiving free or discounted lessons. Make a Splash works by aligning the nation's top learn-to-swim providers in an effort to save lives. Currently, there are 231 Make a Splash Local Partners giving free or low-cost water safety instruction in 42 states. For more information, please click here.
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