The tenth and final Imagine Run added some colour Saturday afternoon at Hespeler Park in Niverville.

Jeff Stott and his wife Mona founded the Imagine Run after their son Joey died by suicide. He notes the goal has always been to get people talking about mental health issues so that no one else has to think about anniversaries like this.

Stott says the 2017 Imagine Run was a colour run with participants getting showered in coloured powder as they walked or ran the circuit.

"All the young kids that are here are really eating it up and then they drag the parents into it and the parents will talk about this and the kids will remember it and so the message will still get across. It’s not just about fun, it is a community event and it is about health and it is about mental health."

Stott says the Imagine Run is a family event full of fun activities but for many, there are solemn moments as they remember loved ones that died by suicide.

"People are walking down the sidewalks here and they are walking by signs and all of the signs indicate a loved one that has been lost. There are a lot of people that are walking for somebody so they have taken a pen and wrote on themselves that I am walking for this person, they are admitting that this person was lost to them through a senseless mental illness that went untreated."

Stott explains why the Imagine committee decided to make the tenth annual Imagine Run their last one.

"For a long time we were known as an athletic event, as a run, and that is not what we are about. We are an awareness event so we are changing it up so that people re-notice us. It takes a lot of energy to do this and there has been a lot of people doing it for ten years. We will see what we come up with next."

Stott says Imagine Mental Health will continue to put on a variety of mental health awareness events including the annual One Big Day for Imagine. He notes One Big Day for Imagine is a bit of a test run for people. It puts them in a situation where they need to reach out for help from whoever they know hopefully they never need to.

Imagine Run 2017 had approximately 500 participants with many more people showing up for the rest of the festivities in Hespeler Park.