09/19/2019
kevin’s a legend, please help keep him keeping on
Friends.
Kevin’s a legend. If not already in your world, with absolute, unequivocal certainty in ours. Kevin O’Neill has been foundational to RVNG’s label architecture, and Beats In Space, Freedom To Spend, and Commend’s adjacent engineering, devoting his wonderful and wildly diverse design to (almost) every visual moment that has happened within and surrounding our catalog / cosmos.
Earlier this year, AIGA published a piece reflecting on the symbiosis of Will Work For Good, the design studio that Kevin co-helms with his creative and life partner Karisa Senavitis, and RVNG, which congeals around our formative immersions in punk rock / DIY ethics and our shared interest in communicating consciousness through art but also levity. Without Kevin, we’d surely be lost, not only for the creative collaboration, but also of a dear friend and brilliant mind.
That’s a startling reality that we face. Kevin was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis in 2015. The onset of the M.S. was as mild as M.S. can be, but still a serious life adjustment while Kevin underwent numerous diagnoses and test. The real impact of the disease came last year, when Kevin suffered a relapse and a loss of mobility. While he was able to rebound from an earlier relapse, this more recent regression left Kevin to a long rehabilitation process, dependent on trekking poles to walk, and with a deep scare that another relapse may have even more severe physical impact.
Karisa, ever an enduring, compassionate force (she also helped with our successful Pauline Anna Strom rehabilitation efforts not so long ago), has launched a GoFundMe for Kevin to raise funds for Kevin to receive a Multiple Sclerosis treatment called HSCT (hematopoietic stem cell transplantation). From Karisa, “this treatment has been shown to halt the progression of M.S. for many patients, but it has only been available in U.S. clinical trials (which are extremely hard to be accepted into) or outside the U.S. — making it expensive and not covered by insurance.” Heeding his doctor’s ominous warning, this is a critical juncture for Kevin to receive the stem cell transplant, while he can still physically recover from the process.
M.S. is a chronic disease of the brain and spinal cord that affects about 400,000 people in the US alone. Probably people within your family, or that you know. We know that contributing to fund this treatment for Kevin represents one person’s journey with this terrible disease, but we hope it raises a general awareness around M.S., too. This is a first of a few measures that we have in mind to move this fundraising effort along, and one that is immediately impactful. It’s an ambitious goal for an ambitious treatment, but we are dedicated to meeting it so Kevin can make the trip to Mexico in January 2020.
If you’ve appreciated RVNG’s design, and a core essence of our releases over the years, or are just interested in seeing an excellent human being achieve this potentially life-changing event, we can’t thank you enough for supporting this campaign:
https://www.gofundme.com/f/ms-is-a-mess-but-kevins-the-best
With total love / light ~
Matt
RVNG Intl.