The Handiest Girlie Of All

Nominate a everyday hero for the 2011 Presidential Citizens Medal

 

Last year, President Obama honored several individuals from the disability community, including Kimberly McGuiness for her extraordinary service to deaf students and deaf education. Kimberly wrote letters to, called and visited state legislators, and her persistence helped spur the passage of Georgia's Deaf Child's Bill of Rights. Visit http://www.whitehouse.gov/citizensmedal/2010 to watch Kimberly's inspiring story.

To learn more about another Citizen Medal recipient from the disability community, watch the story of Mary Hoodhood who started the program Kids' Food Basket to feed the thousands of hungry children in the Grand Rapids, Michigan area.
 
For the 2011 Presidential Citizens Medal, we are asking you to look to your community and nominate those everyday heroes who have performed exemplary deeds of service, including those who have demonstrated commitment to service in their own communities or in communities farther from home, who have helped their country or their fellow citizens through one or more extraordinary acts, whose service relates to a long-term problem or whose service has had a sustained impact on others' lives and provided inspiration for others to serve. Last year over 6,000 incredible leaders were nominated for their service, which often goes unrecognized. The Presidential Citizens Medal offers a chance to thank those extraordinary stewards of service from across the United States.

For more information on the Citizens Medal, as well as how to nominate an outstanding citizen, please visit WhiteHouse.gov/citizensmedal (http://www.whitehouse.gov/citizensmedal) to watch the announcement video. To nominate someone for the 2011 Citizens Medal, please review the criteria for this year's medal by visiting http://www.whitehouse.gov/citizensmedal/criteria.

 

Disability.GOV

Spread the Word to End the Word campaign! New PSA "Not Acceptable."

From "handie"

Be a leader and help stop using words that hurt individuals. Sign this pledge,send it to your friends,family,co-workers. Post it on Facebook,Twitter,your blog, your school newspaper. Its time to stop using and become educated about who people are and  with OUT the label. I have had friends I have honestly stopped communicating with because the "R" word was contently said and they were absolutely aware of what i am told daily.

211,012 people have Pledged to STOP

The Spread the Word to End the Word campaign is pleased to announce the release of a new hard-hitting public service announcement (PSA) called "Not Acceptable."

This 30-second television PSA gives voice to a variety of diverse communities, each of whom expresses that it is not acceptable to call them by what were once common words, but are now recognized as offensive slurs. It culminates in actress and self-advocate Lauren Potter from “Glee” stating that it is not acceptable to use the word ‘retard.’ She and “Glee” co-star Jane Lynch make a call to action to stop using the R-word and to promote the acceptance and inclusion of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

One constant challenge with raising awareness about the hurtful nature of the R-word is that most people do not view it to be as hurtful as other common epithets that our society has consensually removed from our lexicon. The PSA “Not Acceptable” tackles that challenge head on in a hard-hitting and impactful way in an effort to educate our society that for people with intellectual disabilities and those that love them, the R-word is just as hurtful as any other slur. You can make a difference today by taking the pledge to stop using the word 'retard' and replace it with a new R-word: Respect.

 

“Not Acceptable” has been previewed by and received support from multiple advocacy organizations including the Anti-Defamation League, Special Olympics, GLAAD, Best Buddies, The Hispanic Federation, National Puerto Rican Coalition, The Asian-American Foundation, AbilityPath.org and the NAACP.

To date, multiple networks have committed to airing this powerful and compelling PSA including Fox and a majority of their cable channels and regional sports networks, MTV, USA Network and Turner networks including TNT, TBS, truTV and CNN.

"Not Acceptable" was executive produced by Jim Serpico and Tom Sellitti of New York based Apostle, and shot, produced and directed by Spot On from City Island, NY.

Statements of Support

Spread the Word to End the Word

One constant challenge we face with raising awareness about the hurtful nature of the R-word is that most people do not view it to be as hurtful as other common epithets that our society has consensually removed from our lexicon. We believe the public service announcement “Not Acceptable” tackles that challenge head on in a hard-hitting and impactful way in an effort to educate our society that for people with intellectual disabilities and those that love them, the R-word is just as hurtful as any other slur. We hope everyone who sees this public service announcement will go to www.r-word.org and take our pledge to stop using the word 'retard' and replace it with a new R-word: Respect.

Anti-Defamation League

"This PSA compellingly and succinctly reminds us that words have power. When they are used to denigrate any group of people, including people with intellectual disabilities, people and institutions have the responsibility to communicate that such behavior is unacceptable. ADL is proud to endorse this PSA."

David Waren, Director, Education Division 

GLAAD

"We applaud your campaign, "THE R-WORD," and the impactful public service announcement. The slurs used in the PSA are words most Americans do not want to hear. Unfortunately, these damaging words are said every day, but this message reminds us all that we must choose our words carefully and always remember that words are powerful and can potentially hurt others."

Jarrett T. Barrios, President

NAACP

“In 2006, the NAACP buried the use of the ‘N’ word with the goal of removing this derogatory word from modern usage. Although we wish to register our concern for the use of this and other historically racist speech, we support the spirit of your Public Service Announcement regarding the ‘R’ word.”

Roslyn M. Brock, Chairman

AbilityPath.org

"This PSA is a powerful step forward in our quest for respect and equality for people with disabilities. Language and dismissive remarks of someone’s worth, in this case those with varying abilities, is often the precursor to bullying. As one of the largest online communities for families of children of and professionals serving children and youth with disabilities, AbilityPath.org endorses without reservation, your PSA featuring Lauren Potter and Jane Lynch. Thank you again for your tireless efforts in creating champions and for being one for people with intellectual disabilities." Sheryl Young, CEO 

Special Olympics

"This PSA puts forth critical messages that words have tremendous power to hurt or to heal, that language can evolve and we all have a responsibility to speak out against injustice in any form. Equating people with intellectual disabilities to all other minorities is an important first step to make in the minds of many people as they choose the words they use in their everyday lives. This PSA brings that equality to the forefront in a way that cannot be ignored. Special Olympics proudly endorses the PSA." Tim Shriver, Chairman & CEO

Best Buddies

"This innovative PSA drives home the messaging that Best Buddies and Special Olympics have been trying to convey through our Spread the Word to End the Word campaign: words can hurt, especially when used in a derisive fashion. Hopefully this PSA will help others learn to see people with intellectual and developmental disabilities the same way we at Best Buddies do – as classmates, as colleagues, as friends, and most importantly, as equals."Anthony Shriver, Founder & Chairman

Susan Senator

"This spot is a new approach to spreading the word, and it kept me watching because of its directness, its in-your-face honesty. This clear and inclusive PSA, as well as the ethnically inclusive content of the ad, succeeds in sending the message far and wide, and should really open some eyes and minds."  Susan Senator, mom and author of “Making Peace with Autism” www.susansenator.com. 

Laura Pope

"As the mother of a precious, gifted child with Down syndrome, not a day goes by that I do not hear the R-word used in a way that was not initially intended (to designate a medical diagnosis). And most often, it is in the media, more precisely network television. And as hard as we, as parents, advocates, and organizations as well respected as the Special Olympics, try, we can’t change this without the support and proactive participation of the media and its influential and powerful voice. This PSA clearly illustrates that words have enormous power to hurt or heal, that language can evolve – that people can evolve – and that we all have a responsibility to speak out against injustice. As Dr. King wrote, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” Your PSA brings this truth to life. On behalf of myself, my child, and our many friends and fellow advocates, I thank you for your efforts to eradicate hurtful, demeaning language toward people with intellectual disabilities and I proudly endorse this PSA."

Laura Pope, mom and blogger @

Miss Fancy Pants’s World. 

Terri Mauro

"It's disappointing that people need to be told so directly that the R-Word is an unacceptable slur. You'd like to think that, with so many other hateful words having been recognized and removed, it would only make sense to extend the same respect to people with intellectual disabilities. Yet time and again, we see people treating the R-word as something fun and harmless, free speech rather than hate speech. Perhaps putting it just this bluntly is what it takes to make the connection. Do you hate hearing those slurs coming out of your TV? Do they sting your ears and make your heart race? Good. Feel the same way about the R-word." -  

Terri Mauro, mom and author of About.com guide to

'Parenting Special Needs'

Ellen Seidman

"As the mom of a young child with disabilities, it pains me to hear people using 'retard' or 'retarded' in any context. My son is unaware of the words' meaning right now but I worry that someday, they will pain him, too. He has enough challenges to overcome in life; I do not want the stereotype of 'stupid' following him around, which is exactly what happens when people perpetuate the use of the word 'retard.' Even if they use it in a self-deprecating way or they're joking around with friends.

When I raised awareness about the rampant use of the R-word in a personal campaign on my blog, I got a flood of support—along with people who defensively claimed freedom of speech or who said there was nothing to get upset about. Which is exactly why this pointed, powerful, shocker of a PSA is so timely, and so necessary. People need to keep getting the message that the R-word is offensive, derogatory, and just plain wrong to use." -Ellen Seidman, mom and blogger @

Love That Max 

Carrie McLaren

"This PSA is a great representation that harmful words can impact all walks of life, not only those with intellectual disabilities, but all minorities."Carrie McLaren, mom and blogger @

Carrie with Children

 

 

PLEDGE NOW TO STOP USING THE R word

 

"R" Word website

 

Spread the Word to End the Word on Facebook

Swimming for Max and UCP ( please donate to a great fundraiser)

 

BENEFITING: United Cerebral Palsy, Inc.

Want to help Fundraise or Volunteer for this Project? JOIN THE TEAM

HERE'S THE STORY:

Mr. Harry Boucher a devoted father to his son Max, who has cerebral palsy, will be swimming in several events this year to benefit United Cerebral Palsy. Harry is a stay at home father who devotes all his time to the care of his son, by taking him to all of his doctor and therapy appointments and volunteering in his classroom. Harry gains inspiration from his son's fighting spirit, and his unending happiness.


Max is fighting to live a life without limits, as he goes to mainstream school and socializes with his friends like any other kid his age. He spends most of his time in a wheelchair, but does manage to walk using a walker at lunch and recess. As Max fights to live a life of his own design, his friends are always there to cheer him on. Now you can cheer him on too by making a donation.

Click to donate

UCP.ORG

Los Angeles muralist, 94, paints the seasons of her life

This is not my usual type of story i post, I just loved Erma's attitude at 94!

Mid-City Artist Erma Winfield is a self-taught artist who celebrates life with paintings based on photos and her memories. She spent eight months completing the mural at her home. “It turned out great,” a neighbor says.

The mural outside Erma Winfield's Mid-City home has a Grandma Moses look to it. And not just because the artist who painted it is 94, either.

The artwork stretches across a 40-foot fence and depicts the four seasons in a linear, primitive folk-art style that captures scenes from Winfield's past, just as Grandma Moses' work did when she took up painting in her 70s.

Like Moses, Winfield was raised on a farm and is a self-taught artist whose paintings are based on photos as well as her own memory.

And like Moses, she paints on unexpected surfaces: Moses favored cardboard, and Winfield used corrugated fiberglasspanels as her canvas.

"I started this in March and worked on it about 11/2 hours a day for eight months," said Winfield. "The panels weren't easy to paint on."

Along the way, Winfield used up $150 worth of exterior house paint.

"You try to mix house paint. It's not easy," she said.

Born in Natchez, Miss., Winfield is the great-granddaughter of a slave. In 1994 she wrote a 261-page biography of great-grandmother Savannah Brown, who had three children fathered by the owner of the Wildsville, La., plantation where she lived.

Winfield moved to Chicago as a young adult to attend secretarial school. She eventually landed a job in the governor's office and enrolled in night classes at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts with an eye to becoming a fashion designer.

When her late husband, Martin Winfield, was transferred in his U.S. Army job to California, however, Winfield went to work at a Los Angeles title company.

At the time, the company was segregated. Because of her light complexion, Winfield's employers figured she was white.

The title firm found out differently when Winfield was injured in a 1962 auto accident and her husband picked up her paycheck.

"After that, they fired me," she said. "They claimed it was for medical issues, but it was because they found out I'm black."

Winfield began dabbling in oil painting after that. Several of her paintings are displayed in the living room of her Spalding Avenue home, and that's where they caught the eye of professional artist Sylvia Bennett during a visit.

"Her work is very meticulous. Anyone who is self-taught and can develop that talent is a gem," said Bennett, a Mid-City resident who specializes in pen-and-ink and watercolor greeting cards and collages.

It was Bennett who suggested Winfield paint a mural on the fence next to her driveway. "That wall needs something on it," she told her.

Those in the neighborhood kept regular tabs on Winfield's progress during the mural's lengthy execution. Among the onlookers were Los Angeles police, who often circled overhead in a helicopter to watch.

"I knew she would finish it, and it turned out great," said neighbor Hazel McClenon. "Erma incorporated houses she's lived in and her church in the mural. My favorite part is the winter season section."

That snowy scene depicts ice skaters on a frozen pond with the Chicago skyline rising in the background.

The mural's other sections include a church, a Mississippi Indian burial mound and a setting sun for autumn; childhood scenes including a river and the house she grew up in represent summer; and a lush landscape and the churning water wheel on a grist mill illustrate spring.

The Spanish revival-style home where she has lived for 54 years is also depicted in the summer section. "I stuck it in to shut up my friends who said it should be here somewhere," Winfield said with a laugh.

Marinella Miller, a friend who considers Winfield a godmother, pointed out that the nonagenarian muralist completed her artwork by cementing a row of small rocks along its bottom. Then she painted the rocks a glistening white.

"Nothing she does surprises me," said Miller, a retired nurse who lives in the Wilshire district. "She's 94 and she's always got something going on."

LA TIMES

Overcoming Difficulties, One by One, With a Little Aid

Melissa Razick, center, in Cypress Hills, Brooklyn, with her mother, Digna Razick; her brother, Omar Razick; her sister-in-law, Jasmin Razick; and her niece, Jaelyne Razick.

When Melissa Razick was 7 months old, doctors told her mother that she would never speak, but her mother did not believe them.

“I said, ‘She is going to talk,’ ” Melissa’s mother, Digna Razick, 55, recalled as she sat in her airy, plant-filled living room in Cypress Hills, Brooklyn. “When she was 6 months old, she said ‘Mama.’ She never said it again, but I knew she was going to talk.”

And she did. It took four years of relentless tutoring, but Melissa Razick, who was developmentally disabled, can express herself relatively clearly. A tall, slim brunette with dark, searching eyes, she occasionally stumbles, lapsing into silence and smiling self-consciously.

“I worked with her so much,” her mother said. “I used flash cards. I made everything into a game.”

If Melissa, who is now 26, wanted something, she would point to it, but her mother insisted that she say something, anything, even the beginning of a word.

“She’d cry trying to make the sound,” Digna said, and her own eyes filled with tears. Melissa fetched a tissue and handed it to her mother.

“It was hard at the time, trying to talk,” Melissa recalled. She could form full sentences in her head; it was getting them out that confounded her.

Digna raised Melissa and her brother, Omar, 28, as a single mother after her husband left her in 1991. Without spousal support, she worked on and off and received public assistance until seven years ago, when she got a job as a school-bus matron, assisting handicapped children.

Being out of work before finding that job allowed her to devote nearly all of her time to her daughter as she tackled physical therapy, speech therapy and a challenging special education curriculum at the Milestone School for Child Development in Brooklyn. Melissa has completed many programs and courses of study, but her mother said a special education diploma had no value. “You take it somewhere and it doesn’t have the value a regular diploma has,” Digna said.

Melissa is at a second-grade reading level and needs to advance to an eighth-grade level before she can get a high school equivalency diploma. Her dream is to teach in a preschool, instructing children to read and speak, much as her mother did with her all those years ago.

“They’re funny,” Melissa said of preschoolers. “They keep you entertained.”

Cynthia Quintanilla, the Medicaid service coordinator at the Day Habilitation program at Brooklyn Community Services, which Melissa attended for two years, estimated that she could reach her goal of teaching preschool in five or six years. Brooklyn Community Services is one of the seven social service agencies supported by The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund.

To help her in her quest, Melissa decided to focus on raising her literacy level at the Brooklyn Adult Learning Center

“So many of them give up when the going gets tough,” Ms. Quintanilla said. “She takes literacy so seriously. It’s so nice to have a client with a goal.”

The course of study required books, which Digna, who has been unable to work since April because of a herniated disk, could not afford. She receives $137 in workers’ compensation every two weeks.

“That’s when the angel helped us,” Digna said, nodding in the direction of Ms. Quintanilla, who procured $142 in Neediest Cases Fund money to pay for books and Melissa’s prized possession, a talking dictionary. It looks like a scientific calculator, but typing in a word yields a definition and a voice offering the correct pronunciation.

Until she can teach preschool, Melissa dotes on her 2-year-old niece, Jaelyne. “I don’t know which one is crazier about the other,” Digna said.

Though Melissa has no plans to leave home, she has few problems functioning in the world. It is a far cry from her doctors’ predictions.

“If we’d given up, she wouldn’t be talking, she wouldn’t be walking, any of it,” Digna said. “My baby’s come a long way.”

 

Every year since 1911, New York Times Neediest Cases Fund has provided direct assistance to children, families and the elderly in New York. Articles will appear daily through Jan. 30, illustrating the difference that even a modest amount of money can make in easing the struggles of the poor.

Last year, 10,428 donors contributed $6,280,242, which was distributed to those in need through seven New York charities.

Donate Now »

Read more at nytimes.com/neediest.

 

 

NY TIMES

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Woman fighting sex slavery named CNN Hero of the Year

A woman whose group has rescued more than 12,000 women and girls from sex slavery has been named the 2010 CNN Hero of the Year.

Anuradha Koirala was chosen by the public in an online poll that ran for eight weeks on CNN.com. CNN's Anderson Cooper revealed the result at the conclusion of the fourth annual "CNN Heroes: An All-Star Tribute."

 

"Human trafficking is a crime, a heinous crime, a shame to humanity," Koirala said earlier in the evening after being introduced as one of the top 10 CNN Heroes of 2010. "I ask everyone to join me to create a society free of trafficking. We need to do this for all our daughters."

Koirala was introduced by actress Demi Moore, who along with her husband, Ashton Kutcher, created DNA, The Demi and Ashton Foundation, which aims to eliminate child sex slavery worldwide.

"Every day this woman confronts the worst of what humanity has to offer," Moore said of Koirala. "She says, 'Stop. Stop selling our girls.' By raiding brothels and patrolling the India-Nepal border, she saves girls from being sold into the sex trade, where they are being repeatedly raped for profit, tortured and enslaved.

Since 1993, she has helped rescue more than 12,000 women and girls. Through her organization Maiti Nepal, she has provided more than a shelter for these girls and young women, she has created a home. It is a place for them to heal, go to school, learn a skill, and for some who are infected with HIV/AIDS, it is the place where they can spend their days surrounded by love."

Koirala will receive $100,000 to continue her work with Maiti Nepal, in addition to the $25,000 awarded to each of the top 10 Heroes honored.

"This is another responsibility to me to work with all your support," Koirala told the audience after being named Hero of the Year. "We have to end this heinous crime. Please join hands with me to end this crime. ... Please try to respect the youth. They are the ones who are going to build the next generation. Thank you so much."

Koirala's speech capped the gala event, which was taped November 20 before an audience of nearly 5,000 and premiered Thanksgiving night on the global networks of CNN.

The show opened with a salute to the 33 Chilean miners and five of the people who rescued them last month after the miners spent 69 days underground.

"For 69 days we were amazed by these 33 brave miners," Cooper said in welcoming the miners onto the Shrine stage. "Their ordeal was unthinkable; their rescue, unbelievable. No one has ever been trapped underground so deep for so long and survived.

"They endured a nightmare, experienced a miracle, and in the end became each others' brothers and heroes. On behalf of CNN Heroes, we salute all 33 Chilean miners."

After the miners sang the Chilean national anthem, two of them -- speaking through a translator and holding the Chilean flag -- expressed their appreciation.

"We want to thank the world, and we want to thank God for your prayers," Luis Urzua told the audience in Spanish.

"Our families suffered. Our children suffered, too. But thanks to the prayers of the whole world, we could come out of this difficulty," Mario Sepulveda added.

"Some of our rescuers are here with us tonight," Urzua said. "Thank you for bringing us home. You are our heroes."

CNN brought the miners and their rescuers to the United States to attend the tribute show. The five rescuers were selected to represent the many thousands whose talent and effort led to the dramatic rescue.

The top 10 CNN Heroes, chosen by a blue-ribbon panel from an initial pool of more than 10,000 nominations from more than 100 countries, were each honored with a documentary tribute and introduced by a celebrity presenter.

The program also featured performances by Grammy Award-winners Bon Jovi, John Legend and Sugarland.

Rock legends Bon Jovi performed "What Do You Got?," a new song from their greatest hits album, which came out earlier this month. Legend performed "Wake Up Everybody" along with hip-hop artist Common and R&B singer Melanie Fiona. Sugarland performed "Stand Up," a new song from their album "The Incredible Machine," which made its debut in October.

All three performances echoed the spirit of the CNN Heroes campaign, which salutes everyday people whose extraordinary accomplishments are making a difference in their communities and beyond.

Celebrity presenters included Halle Berry, Demi Moore, Jessica Alba, Kid Rock, LL Cool J, Renee Zellweger, Gerard Butler, Kiefer Sutherland, Marisa Tomei, Aaron Eckhart and Holly Robinson Peete.

"CNN Heroes has illustrated the best of humanity through the telling of stories of selfless acts of kindness, courage and perseverance" said Jim Walton, president of CNN Worldwide. "We are honored to bring these Heroes the recognition they so deserve. It is a program the entire CNN family is proud of and excited to share with our viewers on Thanksgiving night."

Again this year, producer/director Joel Gallen served as executive producer of "CNN Heroes: An All-Star Tribute." Among his credits, Gallen produced telethon events supporting victims of the Haiti earthquake, the 9/11 terrorist attacks and Hurricane Katrina. He won an Emmy Award and a Peabody Award for "America: A Tribute to Heroes."

Here are the 2010 top 10 CNN Heroes in alphabetical order:

Guadalupe Arizpe De La Vega founded a hospital in Juarez, Mexico, that cares for about 900 people daily -- regardless of their ability to pay. Despite the escalating violence in the city, the 74-year-old travels there several times a week to make sure residents get the care they need. Learn more about Guadalupe

Susan Burton was once caught in a cycle of addiction and incarceration. Today, her nonprofit A New Way of Life Reentry Project provides sober housing and other support services to formerly incarcerated women in California. Learn more about Susan

With her weight-loss challenge, Shape Up Vicksburg, Linda Fondren is helping her Mississippi hometown battle the bulge. Through free fitness activities and nutrition classes, residents have lost nearly 15,000 pounds to date. Learn more about Linda

Anuradha Koirala is fighting to prevent the trafficking and sexual exploitation of Nepal's women and girls. Since 1993, she and her group, Maiti Nepal, have helped rescue and rehabilitate more than 12,000 victims. Learn more about Anuradha

Narayanan Krishnan brings hot meals and dignity to India's homeless and destitute -- 365 days per year -- through his nonprofit Akshaya Trust. Since 2002, he has served more than 1.2 million meals. Learn more about Narayanan

Since 1992, Magnus MacFarlane-Barrow has dedicated his life to helping people in need. Today, his program, Mary's Meals -- run from a tin shed in the Scottish highlands -- provides free daily meals to more than 400,000 children around the world. Learn more about Magnus

Harmon Parker is using his masonry skills to save lives. Since 1997 he has helped build 45 footbridges over perilous rivers in Kenya, protecting people from flash floods and predatory animals. The bridges also connect isolated villagers to valuable resources. Learn more about Harmon

Aki Ra is helping to make his native Cambodia safer by clearing land mines -- many of which he planted years ago as a child soldier. Since 1993, he and his Cambodian Self Help Demining organization have cleared about 50,000 mines and unexploded weapons. Learn more about Aki Ra

Evans Wadongo, 23, invented a way for rural families in Kenya to replace smoky kerosene and firelight with solar power. Through his Use Solar, Save Lives program, he's distributed an estimated 10,000 free solar lanterns. Learn more about Evans

Since 2005, Texas home builder Dan Wallrath has given injured Iraq and Afghanistan veterans homes of their own -- mortgage-free. He and his Operation Finally Home team have five new custom homes under construction. Learn more about Dan

 "CNN Heroes: An All-Star Tribute" will be airing this weekend on the global networks of CNN . .

Saturday, November 27
• 8 p.m ET/5 p.m. PT
• 11 p.m. ET/8 p.m. PT
• 2 a.m. ET (Sun)/11 p.m. PT

Sunday, November 28
• 8 p.m. ET/5 p.m. PT
• 11 p.m. ET/8 p.m. PT
• 2 a.m. ET (Mon)/11 p.m. PT

CNN International:
Thursday, November 25
• ET: 8 p.m.
• Buenos Aires: 10 p.m.

Friday, November 26
• ET: 5 a.m., 4 p.m.
• GMT/London: 1 a.m., 10 a.m., 9 p.m.
• Europe/Africa: 2 a.m., 11 a.m., 10 p.m.
• Abu Dhabi: 5 a.m., 2 p.m.
• New Delhi: 6:30 a.m., 3:30 p.m.
• Buenos Aires: 7 a.m., 6 p.m.
• Hong Kong: 9 a.m., 6 p.m.

Saturday, November 27
• Abu Dhabi: 1 a.m.
• New Delhi: 2:30 a.m.
• Hong Kong: 5 a.m.

 

CNN/HEROS

Related articles

• Anuradha Koirala is CNN Hero of the Year (thehimalayantimes.com)
• CNN Hero of the Year Award – 'Take Each Child as Your Daughter'- Anuradha Koirala Wins Fighting Human Traficking (pinkbananaworld.com)
• CNN Hero of the Year Award - 'Take Each Child as Your Daughter'- Anuradha Koirala Wins Fighting Human Traficking (lezgetreal.com)
• Anuradha Koirala feted with top CNN award (thehimalayantimes.com)

And the top 10 CNN Heroes of 2010 are ...

The CNN Hero of the Year will be revealed Thanksgiving night, November 25, during "CNN Heroes: An All-Star Tribute."

 



- A Scotsman providing free daily meals to 400,000 children, a former child soldier clearing land mines in Cambodia and a Texas builder giving injured vets mortgage-free homes are among the top 10 CNN Heroes of 2010.

The top 10 -- remarkable individuals nominated by viewers for their sacrifices and accomplishments -- were revealed by CNN's Anderson Cooper at 1 p.m. Thursday on CNN.com.

This year marks CNN's fourth annual global search for everyday individuals changing the world. Since January, the network has aired weekly profiles of CNN Heroes, chosen from more than 10,000 nominations submitted by viewers in 100 countries.

In their own words: The top 10 CNN Heroes of 2010

A panel comprised of luminaries recognized for their own dedication to public service selected this year's top 10 CNN Heroes. The blue ribbon panel includes humanitarians, activists and philanthropists such as Muhammad Ali, Sir Richard Branson and Yo-Yo Ma.

In addition to the $25,000, each of this year's top 10 CNN Heroes will be honored at "CNN Heroes: An All-Star Tribute," airing from the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles, California, at 8 p.m. ET/PT on Thanksgiving night, November 25.

The global broadcast, with Cooper as the host, will culminate with the announcement of the CNN Hero of the Year, selected by the public in an online poll that began at 1 p.m. ET Thursday.

Viewers can go to CNNHeroes.com to participate in the poll, which continues through November 18 at 6 a.m. ET. The individual receiving the most votes will receive an additional $100,000.

Here are the top 10 Heroes of 2010, in alphabetical order:

Guadalupe Arizpe De La Vega founded a hospital in

 

Meet the blue ribbon panelists

 

Guadalupe Arizpe De La Vega

 

Juarez, Mexico, that cares for about 900 people daily -- regardless of their ability to pay. Despite the escalating violence in the city, the 74-year-old travels there several times a week to make sure residents get the care they need. Learn more about Guadalupe

 

Susan Burton

 

 

Susan Burton was once caught in a cycle of addiction and incarceration. Today, her nonprofit A New Way of Life Reentry Project provides sober housing and other support services to formerly incarcerated women in California. Learn more about Susan

 

 

Linda Fondren

 

With her weight-loss challenge, Shape Up Vicksburg, Linda Fondren is helping her Mississippi hometown battle the bulge. Through free fitness activities and nutrition classes, residents have lost nearly 15,000 pounds to date. Learn more about Linda

 

Anuradha Koirala

  

Anuradha Koirala is fighting to prevent the trafficking and sexual exploitation of Nepal's women and girls. Since 1993, she and her group, Maiti Nepal, have helped rescue and rehabilitate more than 12,000 victims. Learn more about Anuradha

 

Narayanan Krishnan
 

Narayanan Krishnan brings hot meals and dignity to India's homeless and destitute -- 365 days per year -- through his nonprofit Akshaya Trust. Since 2002, he has served more than 1.2 million meals. Learn more about Narayanan

 

 

Since 1992, Magnus MacFarlane-Barrow has dedicated his life to helping people in need. Today, his program, Mary's Meals -- run from a tin shed in the Scottish highlands -- provides free daily meals to more than 400,000 children around the world. Learn more about Magnus

 

Harmon Parker

Harmon Parker is using his masonry skills to save lives. Since 1997 he has helped build 45 footbridges over perilous rivers in Kenya, protecting people from flash floods and predatory animals. The bridges also connect isolated villagers to valuable resources. Learn more about Harmon

 

Aki RA

Aki Ra is helping to make his native Cambodia safer by clearing land mines -- many of which he planted years ago as a child soldier. Since 1993, he and his Cambodian Self Help Demining organization have cleared about 50,000 mines and unexploded weapons. Learn more about Aki Ra

 

Evans Wadongo

 

Evans Wadongo, 23, invented a way for rural families in Kenya to replace smoky kerosene and firelight with solar power. Through his Use Solar, Save Lives program, he's distributed an estimated 10,000 solar lanterns for free. Learn more about Evans

 

Dan Wallrath

 

Since 2005, Texas home builder Dan Wallrath has given injured Iraq and Afghanistan veterans homes of their own -- mortgage-free. He and his Operation Finally Home team have five new cuustom homes under construction. Learn more about Dan

CNN HEROS

CNN HEROS FACEBOOK

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(Video with subtitles) Paul Fejtek, over comes disability by climbing Everest!

 

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TODAY’s Jenna Wolfe takes a look at Paul Fejtek, a man challenged by a hand injury, who overcame his disability by scaling the world’s highest peak – Everest.

75 year old Grandfather runs through Death Valley to raise money for his grandson who has Cerebral Palsy

What an amazing grandfather!!

Denness: 'One time, I was totally knackered from heat exhaustion and I could hear this fellow behind me. I looked round and it was the Devil'

Few places are more deserving of their name than Death Valley at the height of summer. The Californian desert is blasted by the sun and temperatures that regularly climb to 50C in the shade.

Incredibly, it is into this furnace of sand and peril that a 75-year-old grandfather from Rochester will run next week as he lines up for one of the toughest tests of endurance on the planet.

Jack Denness will take just three days to run 135, stamina-sapping miles in the Badwater Ultramarathon, billed by its American organisers as the "world's toughest foot race". And Denness knows what he's letting himself in for, having completed the punishing route almost a dozen times.

"You have to be mad to do it," says the school caretaker from his home, where he lives with his wife, Mags. "It's one of the conditions of the race. You just can't explain to people what the heat is like. Imagine opening your oven door and facing that all day long. The road temperature gets up to 140 degrees [fahrenheit] sometimes."

Jack Denness, a grandfather from Rochester, Kent, is set to become the oldest person to compete in Navad's Badwater Ultramarathon

Denness, who is running to raise money for Cerebal Palsy Care, already holds the record as the oldest man to complete the course, securing it as a sprightly 70-year-old back in 2005.

Having completed "ultras" in Mauritania, India, Niger and Morocco, he's qualified to call the Badwater event the "hardest one on the planet".

Each of the 90 competitors from all over the world mad enough to make the journey to Death Valley must arrive with a support team, which trails runners with energy drinks and cold water sprays.

Runners must complete the course within 60 hours to be in with a chance of bagging a medal, but the clock doesn't stop for nightfall. Denness will usually sleep  for no more than five hours during the entire race, keeping his energy levels up with dried fruit, nuts, energy bars and sports drinks.

Before long, the mind starts to play tricks and hallucinations are common. Denness says he looks forward to them, as they "break the race up a bit".

He adds: "One time, I was totally knackered from heat exhaustion and I could hear this fellow behind me. I looked round and it was the Devil.

"He was all red, he had the horns and the tail and the trident. I looked at him, he looked at me, and we laughed at one another. Then he'd jump behind a rock or a tree. It kept going for about half an hour. It was great!"

The Devil rarely dogs Denness in the course of his everyday life, spent working at St William of Perth primary school. He retired ten years ago but quickly became bored.

Despite the rigours of the race, Denness says he takes care not to over-train. "I'm a firm believer that you should leave the mileage until the actual week," he says. "Save your energy for the race." So, every Sunday for the past nine weeks, Denness has run "only" a full marathon, fitting in two-mile jogs here and there during the week "when he's in the mood".

Some participants acclimatise by wearing five layers of clothing or jogging on the spot in a sauna in an attempt to simulate the heat of the desert. Denness doesn't bother. "Some people do those things but I think that weakens you. When I first started I used to do heat training, but I found I was exactly the same once I got out there. You've just got to go and do it."

Nor does he have a special diet, professing to "love a good fry-up" and primarily living on dinners of curries or fish and chips. "People say I must be eating pasta all the time but I don't like the stuff," he says. Instead, Denness puts his fitness down to his slim frame and taking cod liver oil since he was a boy. As for relaxing once the Badwater 135 is over, Denness says he'll crack open a few beers.

He won't be resting for too long, though: he has already booked for the 150-mile Sahara Race in Egypt in October. 

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The Independent

DEATH VALLEY JACK Facebook

CPC KENT

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Sally Field Works With Vital Voices, Helps Women Leaders Around The World

Each night this week, NBC Nightly News is highlighting the work of a celebrity and how they are making a difference. The series puts the spotlight on musicians, actors and comedians -- In this segment :

Sally Field's

work with Vital Voices, an organization promoting women's rights by supporting female leaders around the world.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

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Eva Longoria, Inspired By Disabled Sister (NBC News video)

Each night this week, NBC Nightly News is highlighting the work of a celebrity and how they are making a difference. The series puts the spotlight on musicians, actors and comedians --

including Sally Field, Ben Affleck, Eva Longoria, Usher and Will Ferrell -- and the charities close to their hearts.

In the second segment, Eva Longoria shares her experiences growing up with a disabled older sister. Inspired by her sister's struggles, Longoria started Eva's Heroes, an after-school program for special needs kids in San Antonio.

WATCH:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

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(video)Born Without Arms Or Legs, Shares Inspirational Story

He's traveled to 19 countries, performed his motivational speech to two million people, and appeared on 20/20. He was also born in Australia without arms or legs.

Nick Vujicic has used his disability to inspire millions of others with his message of hope despite misfortune.

Through his Christian-focused organization Life Without Limbs, Vujicic raises money for his tours.

Despite missing all four limbs, Vujicic can perform everyday tasks with ease. He can write with his feet and even type using a "heel-to-toe" method.

In honor of Mother's Day

Margarita with her daughter, Nancy.

Margarita Orozco's autistic daughter Nancy had a very bad fever as a child -- she frequently had seizures and during a particularly bad episode, Margarita took her to the hospital. The seizure was hard to stop, and by the time doctors were able to alleviate it, there had been significant damage to Nancy's brain.

She's now in a wheelchair, still wearing diapers and barely speaking.

The thing that upsets her most is when people avert their eyes, are embarrassed by her daughter's presence.

"I wish that things could change -- don't feel sorry for them," Margarita said. "Just say 'Hi, how are you?' They are just like us."

She knows how hard life can often be for someone with a disability, so when she received a phone call from Edgar Hernandez, who was rendered a quadriplegic after a 2007 car accident, she immediately knew she needed to be part of his life.

She knows how hard life can often be for someone with a disability, so when she received a phone call from Edgar Hernandez, who was rendered a quadriplegic after a 2007 car accident. she immediately knew she needed to be part of his life.

Margarita volunteers with the Andre Sobel River of Life Foundation, which assists single parents who have children with catastrophic illnesses. In Edgar's case, he needed constant attention and was unable to travel back to his mother's home. The first thing Edgar told Margarita was that he wanted to die -- and asked for her help.

"It shocked me when he told me that," she said. "I told him 'I'm not going to help you with that.' At that time he didn't know about any help in the area where he lived. He had no support groups. Nothing."

Since she already had to care for her daughter full-time, Margarita never thought she'd be able to invite someone else into her house. But, with Edgar's injuries and feelings of hopelessness, she knew she had to help. She asked him to stay, and he agreed.

"It's not easy," she told me. "It takes a lot of time and we've been through it and it's been more than two years. He's doing great, he can talk."

Margarita is thrilled with Edgar's progress. His color is back and he's gained much of the weight he lost after the accident. Now 22, Edgar may move back home with his mother and re-establish contact with his father, who moved back to Mexico.

The experience, however, has strengthened both Margarita and Edgar. He's gained his confidence back and, despite great difficulty, has persevered and wants to live. Margarita has now become a strong advocate for those with disabilities and special needs. She works in a government office on mental health issues -- and she owes it to Edgar and her daughter, she says.

"My daughter means so much to me. I touch lives because of my daughter. I wish she could talk to me. I can understand my daughter better because I hear about how hard it is for Edgar."

Her goal now is to encourage others to look at those with special needs with different eyes. "Once you know," she says, "you can change your view."

I asked what people can do. She said, "Just give them a smile."

To volunteer at Andre Sobal River of Life Foundation

Click here 

Huffington Post

Andre River Life

Photos offer perspective on living with disability (2 VIDEO'S NBC NIGHTLY NEWS)

NBC Nightly News,Making a Difference: After deciding to turn her cameras over to people with disabilities, a former fashion photographer gains an entirely new perspective. 

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

^{Everyone deserves a shot}

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

In 1996, I came across a group of people in wheelchairs at an event I was photographing.  It turned out they were part of a program run by United Cerebral Palsy of MetroBoston. That night, they invited me to come visit some time and take pictures at their facility in Watertown, MA.  I took them up on their offer.

The following week I ventured over to United Cerebral Palsy. Once I met everyone at the program, I was inspired to try to figure out a way to let this amazing group of individuals with disabilities take their own pictures and tell their own stories.

With a little ingenuity (and a little help from duct tape and velcro) we were able to adapt cameras so that individuals like EJ, who is only able to move his head and neck, could take pictures. My husband, filmmaker George Kachadorian, encouraged me to bring a video camera along with me to document the progress of this project. Ten years, 250 hours of footage and thousands of photos later, we're finally able to share this story in our documentary film, “Shooting Beauty.”

Last week, NBC's Peter Alexander and a crew of his video sharpshooters tagged along as we presented the movie at one of our school screenings at the Fayerweather Street School in Cambridge, MA.  The NBC crew even enlisted the help of one of our photographers—Tony Knight—to help shoot the piece!  It was a day to remember for all!

              Photographers Tony Knight and Courtney Bent

We had a great time working with whole NBC crew—Peter, Amber, Megan & Beverly.  Thanks to everyone at the NBC Nightly News for helping to tell our story!

     NBC's Amber Payne and Megan Marcus film photographer Tony Knight

Everyone Deserves a Shot 

MSNBC

Flood Relief Telethon To Air Flood Relief Telethon Thursday

Often when we think of Nashville  Tennessee we think of  the beauty,Vanderbilt College,the Country Artiest, Opryland,Grand Old Opry and Music Row. Memphis not to far with Graceland. Nashville is a place I spent a lot of my childhood visiting. When Most people visit Nashville we  do not realize that most of the population that makes Nashville fall below poverty level.  In fact,32,000 people fell below the poverty line. They have said in some local papers that the poverty level in Nashville is growing faster then in most cities. Now with the catastraphy of the flood the numbers will rise. The water supplies is critically low. People are not allowed to use faucet water and are having to buy gallons of water for cooking,bathing,ect. That costs money and for some people help getting to stores to buy water.

Sadly we have not heard many  stories of this flood on our nightly news,local or papers that makes it so devastating. .

Tomorrow May 6th  the local NBC station WSMV-TV from  7-10pm  will be having a telethon. Those of us not in Nashville will still be able to see the telethon and make donations by calling in by watching it on the local NBC CH 4 website. Details are below. I strongly believe we all need to help whenever anyone is in need. This will  take months to  years to clean up and rebuild.

NASHVILLE, Tenn. -

WSMV-TV Channel 4 will broadcast Working 4 You: Flood Relief with Vince Gill & Friends on Thursday, May 6, in prime time from 7 to 10 p.m.

Other stars scheduled to appear include Keith Urban, Alison Krauss, Naomi Judd, Darius Rucker, Phil Vassar, Steve Wariner, Buddy Jewell, Lonestar, Bo Bice and Lee Roy Parnell.

Nashville and the surrounding middle Tennessee communities have been devastated by floodwaters after the area received 15 inches of rain within a 48-hour time period. Thousands of middle Tennesseans have been evacuated from their homes with many losing everything to the flood. Many of the victims do not have flood insurance, and the demands on relief agencies are stretched to the limit.

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ASSISTANCE FOR NASHVILLE TENNESSEE FLOOD

Food/Supplies for Flood Victims

American Red Cross

To make a $10 donation via text message, text the word "RED CROSS" to 90999

Updated list of emergency shelters Hands on Nashville

Interested volunteers should register with Hands on Nashville at HON.org.  The organization will begin staffing disaster information centers and distributing Second Harvest's Emergency food boxes in critical areas. The Community Foundation of Middle

Tennessee

The Davidson County Office of Emergency Management has partnered with The Community Foundation of Middle Tennessee to raise emergency funds.  Donations can be made online at

CFMT.ORG or mailed to: The Community Foundation of Middle Tennessee, PO Box 440225, Nashville, TN  37244

The following items are needed in large quantities:  Diapers, formula, cleaning supplies and rubber gloves, wet vacuums, brooms, mops and generators

Cheatham County Office of Emergency Management

Office to open Old Fred's location, 356 Frey Street, at 8 a.m. Wednesday for public to donate to flood victims

Needed Items: Baby formula, baby wipes/wet wipes, diapers, non-perishable food items, candles, flashlights and batteries.  No clothing donations.
More Info: 615-792-3443

Maury County Office of Emergency Management  

Emergency Food Box Locations:

• Martha O'Bryan Center, 711 South 7th Street
• Napier Community Center, 73 Fairfield Avenue
• Hamilton United Methodist Church, 3105 Hamilton Church Road
• Goodlettsville Help Center, 108 Depot Street
• Una Church of Christ, 1917 Murfreesboro Road
• St. Phillips Episcopal Church, 85 Fairway Drive
• Salvation Army Magness Potter Center, 611 Stockell Street
• St. Luke's Community House, 5601 New York Avenue

Harris Teeter is offering free bottled water at the following locations beginning at 9 a.m. Tuesday:

• Hillsboro Village Harris Teeter, 2201 21st Avenue South
• Peartree Village Harris Teeter, 210 Franklin Road
• Belle Meade Harris Teeter, 4416 Ridgefield Way
• Westhaven Town Center Harris Teeter, 411 Whitman Road
• Harpeth Plaza Harris Teeter, 6002 Highway 100

Moving/Debris Removal Services: Midnight Movers in Murfreesboro is offering free moving service to flood victims
More Info: MidnightMoversMurfreesboro.com, 615-337-4864 Other: Senator Lamar Alexander's Nashville office: 615-736-5129

Federal Assistance:

Residents and individuals who sustained losses in Cheatham, Davidson, Hickman and Williamson counties can apply for assistance online at DisasterAssistance.gov or call 1-800-FEMA(3362) from 7a.m. to 10p.m.

To help clean up from flood! 

THE COMUNITY FOUNDATION OF MIDDLE TENNESSEE

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Chicago's Sister of Mercy

Sister Rosemary Connelly has inspired many with her Misericordia, or "heart of mercy," a home for adults and children with disabilities. Katie Couric reports on Sister Connelly's "American Spirit.

Watch CBS News Videos Online

Sister Rosemary Connelly is a Catholic nun - with 560 children. As executive director of Misericordia, Heart of Mercy - a home for people with developmental disabilities - she's spent 41 years watching them grow.

CBS News anchor Katie Couric: reports when Sister Rosemary came to Misericordia in 1969, the home only accepted children under 6 years old.

"Just before I came everyone older than 6 were discharged to the state institution," Rosemary said. "And I went out there and saw the service that was given to them and just decided that we would ignore the license and keep them longer."

The idea to give these men and women a community to live in was inspired by Sister Rosemary's nephew Brian, who became brain damaged after birth.

"We did not begin adult services until 1983, so he was always older than the children were able to serve but in 1983 he came to Misericordia," Rosemary said.

"Rosemary wanted to help him," said Brian's mom. "And others like him and thank God she did."

Under her leadership, Misericordia began accepting older children and adults like Craig Miller, who has cerebral palsy.

"He's developed skills at Misericordia we would have never dreamed possible for him," said Craig's mom Jean.

Craig now has a social life, work, and friends. He likes to work in the garden and play his guitar.

On the sprawling 31 acres of Misericordia, there's the Hearts and Flour bakery, a restaurant, and art classes. There's therapy and hospice for those for who need it. And there's a lot of love for Sister Rosemary.

One resident, Lauren Axelrod, has epilepsy. Her dad, White House Senior Advisor David Axelrod, says Rosemary made Lauren happy, independent and productive.

"She has made enriching the lives of people with developmental disabilities," Axelrod said, "the mission of her life. She has made a huge difference so, to me, that makes her a saint."

Sister Rosemary doesn't feel like a saint. She does consider herself very blessed.

"I think what the children and adults really have taught me in such a strong way is that some happenings in life, there are no answers," Rosemary said. "But there are answering people, and those answering people are a reflection of God's love."

That love comes from a heart of mercy.

Misericordia Hart of Mercy

CBS -EVENING NEWS

Teen turns escape from pain into charity (CNN HERO!!!)

I think any child being in horrible, intense pain like this, they need something. And something that I knew that helped me was books.

--Mackenzie Bearup

Alpharetta, Georgia (CNN) -- A disease that Mackenzie Bearup compares to a bomb going off in her knee prompted the 16-year-old to seek escape in the comfort of reading. Now she's helping thousands of troubled children soothe their own pain -- within the pages of donated books. "When I read, it's a real escape," Bearup says. "I try to take myself into the book instead of in the real world where I'm in so much pain." Her personal discovery that books could be used to ease discomfort was an idea that Bearup ultimately chose to share with homeless and abused children throughout the country. Bearup's journey began six years ago when she was jumping on a bed and dancing to TV's "American Idol." Suddenly her knee started "hurting unexplainably, extremely bad," she recalls. The next day, the fifth grader's knee swelled to the size of a grapefruit. After a week on crutches, it was even worse. Her knee collapsed when she tried to walk. After a series of misdiagnoses, doctors later diagnosed Bearup with Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy, also called Complex Regional Pain Syndrome.

The disease causes the nerves and blood vessels in the affected area to tell the brain "that the injury is still there," says Dr. James Yost, Bearup's pain-management physician. There is no cure, Yost said.

From 200,000 to 1.2 million people have RSD, ranging from mild to severe, according to the Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy Syndrome Association Web site. "The kind of pain I feel is very hard to describe," Bearup says. "It will explode at random times [and] when something touches it, it's like I'm getting stabbed multiple times." Medications and treatments failed to alleviate the constant pain in Bearup's knee. At some points, the extreme discomfort forced her to remain in bed for months, unable to walk. The only thing that took her mind off the pain, she says, was reading.

So when her pediatrician told her about kids living in nearby Murphy-Harpst Children's Center in Cedartown -- a residential treatment center for Georgia's most severely abused children -- Bearup had an idea.

"I think any child being in horrible, intense pain like this, they need something. And something that I knew that helped me was books." She learned that the center had just built a library, but had no books to fill it with. "I asked everyone I knew to donate books, and then I asked them to tell their friends," said Bearup, who spread the word further by stuffing flyers inside mailboxes, placing ads in newspapers, and launching a Web site. Bearup's goal was to donate 300 books, but she soon had 3,000

Once the library at Murphy-Harpst reached capacity, Bearup turned her attention to other places -- providing reading material to youngsters in homeless and domestic violence shelters, children's homes and treatment centers. "Reading isn't just an escape, you can learn a lot, too, and that's very important for homeless and abused children," said Bearup. "Staying in high school is one of the things that will help you most in life, to be able to get a job and be able to support yourself." Since 2007, Bearup has collected and donated more than 38,000 books for homeless and abused children in six states. With her mother's help, the teenager launched her official nonprofit -- Sheltering Books -- in 2009. Although donations are readily accepted, Bearup and her mom scour garage sales in the suburban Atlanta area to collect books. With the help of her brothers -- Alex, 14, and Benjamin, 11 -- Bearup sorts the books into categories, such as age, gender and interest, and delivers them to shelters. She's so far donated books for libraries and reading rooms in 27 different shelters. "Sometimes a child will tell me how much they liked a book from a library I've helped to create and it really makes me happy," says Bearup. "I try to suggest books that kids will like. And sometimes, when I meet a 10-year-old girl, I'll suggest she check out the books I liked when I was her age."

To help further encourage reading, Bearup developed a pamphlet that suggests reading programs for groups, such as crafts based on books and family bonding through reading. While Bearup still lives with constant pain, she says she feels better helping others. "If one homeless or abused child finds a love of reading through books that I've given them, then that will help them in school and just turn their .

Children without homes

Approximately 330,000 children under age 18 are in emergency shelters or transitional housing programs over the course of the year.

Source: U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development

CNN HERO'S

Shelteringbooks.org

Nominate a hero!

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From TED-Jill Bolte Taylor: Neuroanatomist

(My little input on  the post below)
Something I never spoke of on my blog (from what i can remember)  is my dad. My dad was on the road six years  ago when he had a stroke while performing on stage. My dad had been a very talented well known musician . He had been a drummer since he was 17  working with many well known artist at that point he had done that for 34 years. From listening to Jill Bolte (besides the fact that she is brilliant and amazing)  and from what people told me about how he was before his initial stroke that  happened on stage and before he went on stage. Luckily she is doing well, so well, would you ever know she had a stroke? How amazing it is she is able to remember so much of what was happening before,during and after. But then would  you want to choose to remember an event so dramatic?

The trick -the cruel trick of a stroke is its a toss up- you can either over come and be a "jill" or not.  When my dad had his stroke, that changed what i wanted to do as far as advocacy and "teaching people."I wanted to now help make our world aware of strokes and the amazing instrument of the brain. I also became more interested in other mental illnesses and disabilities.. My heart is still very broken by the huge loss my dad has to deal with day to day. Yes he is alive  but life,seems at times so unfair. Ive been disabled my whole life, but to imagine  what its like to have that change and 90% of the time not understand why is cruel. Life is truly frustrating for him at times when he doesn't understand why he can not do the things he think he  can do and use to do. Why he cant just go on tour or drive a car?  I remind him all the time how lucky he is to be able to do what he can. Life and being happy is way more  important then the job he did. His wonderful friends still cheer him on to keep him going. I then selfishly become incredibly thankful my disability  is not as "involved" We also need to bring better awareness to  the public about strokes. Enough of my babbling here is Jill Bolte's Story.

Jill Bolte Taylor: Neuroanatomist

One morning, a blood vessel in Jill Bolte Taylor's brain exploded. As a brain scientist, she realized she had a ringside seat to her own stroke. She watched as her brain functions shut down one by one: motion, speech, memory, self-awareness ... Amazed to find herself alive, Taylor spent eight years recovering her ability to think, walk and talk. She has become a spokesperson for stroke recovery and for the possibility of coming back from brain injury stronger than before. In her case, although the stroke damaged the left side of her brain, her recovery unleashed a torrent of creative energy from her right. From her home base in Indiana, she now travels the country on behalf of the Harvard Brain Bank as the "Singin' Scientist." "How many brain scientists have been able to study the brain from the inside out? I've gotten as much out of this experience of losing my left mind as I have in my entire academic career."

Brain researcher Jill Bolte Taylor studied her own stroke as it happened -- and has become a powerful voice for brain recovery.

TED

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The most positive of positive people

Carlos Avila Gonzalez / The Chronicle Kate and Chris Statton met in 2007 while organizing an arts festival for Marin's homeless artists. Now they're married and directors of the nonprofit Roxie Theater in San Francisco. They are seen here in their San Francisco, Calif., home on Wednesday, March 24, 2010.

"I didn't know if Chris was homeless or if he worked at the homeless shelter," Kate Statton says of her husband of less than a year, Chris. The two met in 2007 while organizing an arts festival for Marin's homeless artists.

Chris was not homeless; he was working with a nonprofit and living with a gang of guys in a Lafayette bachelor pad. "But I hadn't really bought new clothes since junior high school," the 32-year-old admits with a huge smile.

There was an immediate connection. Despite her doubts, when Kate left the crowded room, she entrusted Chris with watching her laptop. "She told me it had all her poetry on it," says Chris, who was intrigued. From that day forward, despite Kate's boyfriend, the two became best friends. The bond was their shared passion for community work and the arts.

For the first time in his life, Chris imagined himself partnered. A hemophiliac who had contracted HIV through a blood transfusion, he'd been HIV-positive since preschool. He'd also battled other related health challenges: hepatitis C and non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.

Throughout the era when ignorance about HIV/AIDS was rampant, he'd kept his status a secret. His teenage years in Orinda were sometimes difficult, but, as a naturally positive and buoyant person, he had never felt as though he was missing out on anything.

But then came Kate.

Kate, 27, had heard that something was up with Chris' health, and one day she ventured a guess. Chris confirmed her hunch. It was big news, Kate says. "It made things complicated."

But just a day after she broke up with her boyfriend, the two moved slowly into a 24/7 togetherness that spanned months. There were many romantic moments along with a growing knowledge that they'd be together forever - whatever that meant. In medical lingo, these two are "serodiscordant," but as far as it is possible to see, there is nothing much else discordant about them. (Serodiscordant couples can safely conceive children, which the two are now considering.)

Kate's parents, although very liberal, had concerns. The couple brought her parents to Chris' doctor, who answered all questions. After only a few months they were house hunting, soon landing in their colorful Haight apartment. A few months later, Chris proposed via a citywide treasure hunt entailing shovels, hand-drawn maps, a metal detector, buried notes and a lot of planning.

"Chris loves putting on events," explains Kate.

A good thing, too. The couple, now married, recently took over as directors of the nonprofit Roxie Theater; they're neck deep in planning a revival for the city's oldest movie house.

"I am extremely lucky to live in a time where people who are HIV-positive can plan for the future," Chris says, shaking his head and smiling. "It's incredible."

"I like you, honey," Kate says.

"I like you, too," Chris says.

On the impact of Chris' HIV status:

Kate: "It makes you realize what's important."

Chris: "At the end of the day, who knows how much time anyone has together?"

SF Chronicle

Helping Patients Face Death, She Fought to Live

Todd Heisler/The New York Times

  Robert Pardi Jr. in the apartment he shared with his wife, who died in his arms. “I would have loved to say goodbye,” he said.

By the time she was 38, Dr. Desiree Pardi had become a leading practitioner in palliative care, one of the fastest-growing fields in medicine, counseling terminally ill patients on their choices.

Dr. Desiree Pardi on duty, top, and with her husband about a month before she died.

In 2008, while on vacation in Boston, she went to an emergency room with a fever. The next day, as the doctors began to understand the extent of her underlying cancer, “they asked me if I wanted palliative care to come and see me.”

She angrily refused. She had been telling other people to let go. But faced with that thought herself, at the age of 40, she wanted to fight on.

While she and her colleagues had been trained to talk about accepting death, and making it as comfortable as possible, she wanted to try treatments even if they were painful and offered only a 2 percent chance of survival. When the usual cycles of chemotherapy failed to slow the cancer, she found a doctor who would bombard her with more. She force-fed herself through a catheter and drank heavy milkshakes to keep up her weight.

Over the last decade, palliative care has become standard practice in hospitals across the country. Born out of a backlash against the highly medicalized death that had become prevalent in American hospitals, it stresses the relief of pain; thinking realistically about goals; and recognizing that, after a certain point, aggressive treatment may prevent patients from enjoying what life they had left.

Dr. Pardi had gone into the field because she thought her experience as a patient would make her a better doctor. Now she came face to face with all the ambiguities of death, and of her profession.

She remembered patients who complained to her that she did not know them well enough to recognize that they were stronger than she had thought. Now she discovered that she felt the same way about her own doctors. “I think they underestimated me,” she said in an interview last summer.

She came to question the advice she had been giving. She thought about quitting. “I just decided I have to believe in what I’m saying,” she said.

Desiree Dougherty was the overachiever of a modest family, the daughter of a sheet-metal worker and foreman and a nurse in Rockland County, about 30 miles north of New York City. She was 5-foot-1, with a wide, warm smile, a cascade of blond hair, blue eyes and a figure that turned heads. She loved the color green; Pink Floyd; and sentimental books and movies, like Richard Bach’s novel “One,” about life’s choices, and “Pretty Woman.”

She met her future husband, Robert Pardi Jr., on her first day of college at Stony Brook University. She wanted to be a doctor; he wanted to make money. “She was a hippie chick with blue eyeliner,” her husband recalled of those carefree days, “a far cry from the Ann Taylor woman she would later become.”

She began an M.D.-Ph.D. program at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in Manhattan at age 24. In 1998, she was halfway through when she decided to take a few months off to join her husband in the United Arab Emirates, where he was working as a portfolio manager.

‘It Was Bad News’

She needed a routine health screening to obtain a visa to remain in the country, and opted for a more thorough exam. At the hospital in Dubai, she later explained, the custom was for doctors to talk to the husband, even when the wife was the patient.

So her husband came home early one afternoon, and instead of taking her out for Turkish coffee and sweets, sat her down and said, “I’m afraid it was bad news.” Further tests showed she had breast cancer. She had just turned 31.

She discovered that she liked having her husband act as a buffer between her and her doctors. From then on, even when she was in the United States, her doctors were told that they should communicate only with him.

She light-heartedly called herself “the Queen of Denial,” because she did not want to know anything about her disease. Her husband gave her just enough information to enable her to make decisions, and she always chose the most aggressive treatment. When a doctor in Dubai suggested she wait a bit before getting a mastectomy, she would not hear it. “Off, I want it off!” she insisted.

After the mastectomy and months of chemotherapy, she was told the cancer was gone. Determined to try anything that might prevent a recurrence, she underwent a stem-cell transplant in 1999, before they were found to be ineffective for breast cancer. She had her other breast removed protectively, though her double-D figure had been a source of pride.

She graduated from medical school in 2002, and was invited to appear on a segment of “The Oprah Winfrey Show” about people who had overcome obstacles and graduated. She was tongue-tied, but expressed her joy by throwing her arms around a startled Ms. Winfrey.

She did her residency at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center, where her mentor, Dr. Mark Pecker, said she had among the highest medical board scores he had ever seen.

Then what she had been dreading happened. During her residency, her cancer returned, invading her liver, and she was treated with drugs and surgery. Even after that, she was never fully in remission.

When it came time to choose a specialty, she was drawn to oncology and psychiatry, but thought palliative care was a good compromise. During one hospitalization at NewYork-Presbyterian, she had asked for intravenous Dilaudid, a strong opioid, for “10 out of 10” pain. She was labeled a “drug seeker” by the medical staff, she said — perhaps because she was asking for the drug by name — as if she were an addict craving crack. It was a revelation that would lead her toward palliative care: that treating the pain was as important as treating the sickness.

In 2006, Weill Cornell needed a medical director for its new palliative care service, and recruited her. Her inexperience and illness gave the hiring committee pause, said Dr. Ronald D. Adelman, co-chief of geriatrics, who became her supervisor. But she won them over with her enthusiasm.

RESPECTFUL Dr. Betty Lim treated Dr. Pardi. 'She was very much in control of the situation,' Dr. Lim said.

She was sparing about sharing her own survival story with her patients; she needed to maintain some boundaries to do her job. Before she walked into a patient’s room, she said, she took a deep breath and reminded herself that “it has nothing to do with me.”

Some of her patients were celebrities. Many patients were older than she was, but some were disturbingly close to her in age.

About a year ago, she was asked to speak to a young woman who refused to accept that her life was limited. Dory Hottensen, a social worker who was there, later recounted how Dr. Pardi sat down and held the woman’s hand.

“I could see that Desiree had an unusual connection with her,” Ms. Hottensen said. Dr. Pardi spoke kindly, and “told her that she was not going to get better. In fact, she was going to die very soon. What did she want for her last days? How did she want to die?”

She persuaded the woman, who had cancer, to sign a do-not-resuscitate order. But when the woman died a few days later, Dr. Pardi cried. “I again couldn’t help but wonder what was going through her mind,” the social worker said.

Chemotherapy had become a regular part of Dr. Pardi’s life, scheduled every Friday. In between, she tried to cram in her work; trips to Bash Bish Falls in Massachusetts, where a friend had a country house; playing with her Yorkie; and being “Auntie Mame,” as she put it, to her niece Jessica.

In the summer of 2008, she and her husband took Jessica to Boston for a weekend. After a day of whale-watching and visiting the ducklings in the Public Garden, Dr. Pardi woke up with a high fever. Her husband called an ambulance.

She was admitted to Massachusetts General Hospital, and it soon became clear how far her cancer had spread.

A doctor asked if she would like a palliative care consultation. She was shocked; she interpreted the question to mean that she had been identified as someone who was dying, and she did not think of herself that way.

She had crossed to the other side of the mirror, from doctor to patient, and she no longer saw an orderly path to death.

Big Macs and Nutella

Months of constant chemotherapy followed. It kept her alive, but destroyed her appetite. Once an athletic 125 pounds, she had dropped to a sparrowlike 85. She lost her hair and wore a pixie-cut wig.

She and her husband tried to counter her weight loss. She snacked frequently. If she had an urge for a Big Mac, she would call her husband, who would rush to McDonald’s and deliver it to her office. He spent hours looking up high-calorie foods online, then made 1,100-calorie milkshakes laced with Brazil nuts, almond butter and Nutella spread. For several weeks, she received nutrition through a port in her chest while she slept.

Based on her symptoms, the standard medical advice, she said, would have been that she could no longer tolerate chemotherapy, that it “was going to become more of a burden than a help,” and that she should start to think about how she wanted to live out her remaining time.

But she did not want to stop even when she had exhausted standard chemotherapy regimens. So she turned elsewhere.

“What I realized was that if I was still being seen by an oncologist who would be affiliated with the hospital, they would have just said ‘go to hospice,’ ” she said in the interview last July. She was fortunate that she could afford treatments not fully covered by insurance, hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth over the years.

During the interview, which took place a year after her trip to the Boston emergency room, she said she wanted to write to the doctors there to say, “Look here! I’m still here!”

She said she thought of all the times that her own patients had argued that she was underestimating their capacity to get better. “Then am I writing them off too soon?” she mused. “When they do say, ‘Well, you don’t know me. I can, blah-blah-blah,’ that’s what I said, too, in my mind. ‘You don’t know me.’ You don’t know my husband, for sure.”

She had gained back 27 pounds. “So I know it’s possible,” she said.

But she knew her own colleagues would tell her that she was not really getting better. “I’ve said it myself many times to patients,” she said.

She feared that she could no longer, in good conscience, tell patients they were going to die when she refused to accept that her own death might be near. “And so I felt like, I feel like, if I now go and tell a patient what I used to tell patients, or what they would have told me, then I’m being hypocritical.

”At one point, she tripped getting into a taxi. Instead of taking that as a sign that she should slow down, she signed up to be a New York City walking-tour guide.

In August, she and her husband walked on the beach at Coney Island. She could not swim because of the feeding line attached to the port in her chest. “She told me she wasn’t ready to die,” Mr. Pardi recalled.

But a week later, she was in the hospital, not because she was ready to die, but for pain from constipation. She chose Mount Sinai, avoiding NewYork-Presbyterian because she did not want the humiliation of being treated by her colleagues and students.

She refused to be treated by the renowned palliative care specialists at Mount Sinai whom she knew professionally, but her husband and her best friend, also a doctor, persuaded her to allow a palliative care doctor to oversee her care, with a team of gastroenterologists. She settled on a young doctor she had never met, Betty Lim.

After very painful enemas and a colonoscopy, the team of doctors suspected that inoperable tumors were adding to the blockage. Yet Dr. Pardi demanded more enemas.

Dr. Lim believed it was her role to listen to her patient’s wishes. “Definitely, we did things that we knew would have very small chances of working,” she said, until finally she and her colleagues decided that further treatment could perforate Dr. Pardi’s bowel. “I don’t think, at least during the time when she was conscious, she ever got to the point where she was like, O.K., this is it.”

“She said, you know, ‘I can suck it up,’ ” Dr. Lim recalled. “Anything that gave her another chance to get back to what she was doing before.”

She needed an extraordinary amount of pain medication. “It wasn’t working, because her disease burden was so great,” Dr. Lim said.

She was also being given sedatives to help her rest, but one day, she flung herself out of bed, ripping out tubes, because of a jolt of pain in her bowel.

Doctors gave Dr. Pardi stronger sedatives. As her body shut down, she began to grow confused and lose consciousness. Mr. Pardi, who stayed at her bedside with her mother, said he and his wife had talked in detail about her wishes. He had no qualms about sedating her, about taking away artificial nutrition and hydration, or about letting her kidneys shut down. Even though she desperately wanted to live, she had said that when it was her time, she did not want to be in pain.

“We had talked about how in some situations, family members want to bring you to consciousness to say goodbye, but that is not for your benefit,” he said. “God, I would have loved to say goodbye. But that was her wish. She never wanted to open her eyes and see people sad around the bed.”

She was 41 when she died in her husband’s arms on Sept. 6, after two weeks in the hospital, seven years as a doctor and nearly 11 years with breast cancer. Her eyes opened in the moment before she died, her husband said, but she seemed unable to see anything.

‘She Wasn’t Ready’

She died before many of her colleagues could say goodbye, and they grappled with her death.

Dr. Pecker, her mentor, said he would have reassured her that she was not betraying her principles by refusing to go to hospice. “I think that how you want to live, and what you choose to do is different than what you might recommend to someone else,” he said.

Her supervisor, Dr. Adelman, sympathized with her internal struggle. “Here she was, this really young, passionate woman who really had a calling,” he said. “She wasn’t ready.”

Some doctors were less understanding. “After her story came out, they would get very frustrated and say, ‘Oh, she was in denial,’ ” Dr. Lim said.

She died without ever learning the extent of her disease. Her husband said that she had tumors in both lungs, her liver, the lining of her small intestines, her colon and her bones.

Dr. Lim said doctors at Massachusetts General might have been right in offering palliative care a year earlier. “She passed away in unfortunately quite a painful scenario,” she said. “Many people would not have chosen that route.”

Yet she respected Dr. Pardi’s choice and was not ready to write off her stubbornness as denial. “She was very much in control of the situation,” Dr. Lim said.

Dr. Lim attempted, in her own mind, to reconcile Desiree Pardi the palliative care doctor who believed in a peaceful death, with Desiree Pardi the patient who wanted to keep fighting.

Dr. Lim said she believed that “somewhere deep inside, she knew this was not fixable.” But Dr. Pardi “knew exactly how much she was willing to endure,” Dr. Lim added. “And she was able to endure a lot.

Months to Live-NY Times

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Four Seasons Restaurant " A success Story"

Jackman, Maine

For the past 11 years, Alan DuPlessis has owned the Four Seasons Restaurant at 417 Main Street in Jackman. The restaurant is open for three meals a day, hosts private functions, and provides off-site catering services. In addition to its dining services, the restaurant has been attracting attention for its diverse staff of 20 that includes youths with disabilities.

Alan began diversifying his staff as part of an effort to make Jackman a better place to live and work by developing connections between the school system and local businesses. The school superintendent felt that certain students with disabilities would benefit from a modified school day that included workplace learning in the afternoon. The Four Seasons Restaurant became an enthusiastic participant in the program.

“He starting off doing dishes, but after a while we realized he could take on other duties,” said Alan, recalling the first student he hired as part of the program. “He learned to work potatoes and press hamburgers. He was very good kitchen help.” After successfully working at the Four Seasons, the student went on to find employment at another restaurant.

As part of the program, Alan and the school staff keep in contact. “We coordinated so that lessons learned on the job could be taken back to school and built on,” said Alan. “For example, when [a student] learned to accurately weigh and make the 4 ounce and 6 ounce hamburgers that we serve, back in the classroom, the math teacher worked on ounces and pounds conversions.”

This past school year, Alan hired another student with a disability. Alan reports, “The only thing we have had to do differently during the training was to say some things more than once and show him how to do specific tasks. He does whatever we need him to do.”

Alan elaborated on his experience with the program saying, “This has worked very well for me. We helped the school and they helped us. We gained a very dependable worker who knows what he is doing and takes the job more seriously than some of our other employees.”

Alan DuPlessis has some advice for businesses: “Hire them. Don’t be afraid. Go one step at a time. After they master one task go on to the next. You can always find work that needs to be done at your business that will match their abilities.”

Visit the Four Season's Restaurant the next time you are in Jackman!

Th!nk Beyond The Label

New wheelchair gets its first real-world test

Saw this on CNN this morning! Amazingly wonderful !!

The U.N. Development Program estimates that less than 1 percent of the need for wheelchairs in developing countries is met by local production, partly because small workshops can’t exploit economies of scale to be profitable. Moreover, the wheelchairs that are available aren’t designed for people who must push themselves over rough roads and muddy walking paths often encountered in the Third World. As a result, millions of people must rely on others to carry them or be stranded inside their homes.

What is needed is an affordable device that can carry users comfortably and efficiently off-road, but is also small and maneuverable enough to use indoors. Amos Winter, a PhD candidate in mechanical engineering, along with a team of undergraduates and international design collaborators, has designed such a device, which he describes as performing like a combination of a desk chair and a mountain bike — "something you can comfortably sit in all day and maneuver around the office, but also use to efficiently commute to and from work.” Constructed from widely available, cheap bicycle parts, the Leveraged Freedom Chair (LFC) features two large levers attached to a bicycle drivetrain that helps the chair power through mud and over rocky paths.

Winter recently returned from East Africa, where he spent three weeks in January surveying six disabled people who had tested prototypes of the LFC. Using feedback from the four-month trial, as well as a $50,000 grant he recently received from the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB), Winter is currently tweaking the LFC design in anticipation of advancing it to large-scale production, which would provide local manufacturers with the tools to produce 500 to 1,000 units per month.

According to the U.S. Agency for International Development, 20 million people in developing countries require wheelchairs; Winter estimates that 70 percent of those people live in rural areas where regular wheelchairs simply don’t work. He has been studying the problem of wheelchair production in Third World countries since the summer of 2005, when he traveled to Tanzania on a public-service fellowship and saw firsthand how wheelchairs that rely on hand-rim propulsion are too difficult to use on rough terrain and for long-distance travel. He also learned that hand-powered tricycles are too big to use indoors and usually have only one gear. His solution “for people who grew up in a village where they were literally dragging themselves to school” is the LFC.

By pushing two levers located on each side of the LFC, a user can change mechanical advantage by simply moving hand position in order to go fast on flat ground or to produce enough torque to travel over sand or through mud. The removable levers hook into a bicycle drivetrain that has been converted to work on a wheelchair and is made entirely of bicycle parts that can be found throughout the developing world. This means that the LFC can be made and repaired anywhere one has access to a hacksaw, welder, drill and vice.

Freedom to move around

Winter has been developing the design ever since the concept won the MIT IDEAS Competition in 2008, partly in conjunction with a wheelchair design class he teaches at MIT’s Mobility Lab. Winter founded this lab in 2007 so MIT students could collaborate with local manufacturers and experts from the developed world to produce mobility aid technologies.

One of those experts is Matt McCambridge, a designer for Whirlwind Wheelchair International, a San Francisco-based nonprofit that produces durable, low-cost wheelchairs in developing countries.

McCambridge likes the simplicity of the LFC design, but says he has been most impressed with the intentionally slow, methodical implementation of the LFC. He praised Winter for conducting user testing early, “rather than inventing something in the lab, then using donor money to make thousands of them and forcing them on disabled people who really have no option but to smile and say, ‘thank you.’ ” McCambridge believes that Winter’s process should produce solid results that grow slowly.

The implementation began last summer, when Winter launched his first trial in East Africa with collaboration from the Association for the Physically Disabled of Kenya. He and Mario Bollini ‘09, Danielle DeLatte ‘11, Benjamin Judge ‘11 and Harrison O’Hanley ‘11, spent a month in Kenya building eight prototypes of the LFC. Each chair cost slightly less than $200 to make, which Winter said is roughly the price of a regular wheelchair in Kenya. Weighing about 65 pounds, or five to 10 pounds more than a regular wheelchair, the LFC was customized for the trial participants, who range in age and live near varied terrain in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda. Winter returned to Africa with MIT senior Tish Scolnik four months later to interview the participants and test the efficiency of the LFC for each user.

What they learned from the “phenomenal feedback” is that although the LFC is more efficient than a regular wheelchair for plowing through mud and over big stones, it is still too wide and heavy. Winter will make the chair lighter by lowering the seat four inches and shifting the wheels back two inches, which will eliminate the need for the bulky mounting brackets that are currently used to attach the rear wheels to the chair.

‘My little angel machine’

In addition to reducing the width and weight, Winter will focus on improving the LFC for indoor use so that it functions just as well as a normal wheelchair when the levers are removed. He uses the desk chair/mountain bike analogy to describe how the LFC is intended to be used all day. Although someone might spend many hours each day sitting in a desk chair, it would be horrible to use that chair to commute to work, especially if the commute involved dirt roads. Similarly, while the mountain bike would be great for the commute, it would be awkward and uncomfortable to sit on all day at the office. “What we have now is an LFC that is great off-road and is comfortable to sit on, but is still too big to comfortably use indoors,” Winter said.

With the trial results, guidance from manufacturing collaborators and help from a group from his design class, Winter will use the IADB grant to design a new prototype and produce about 30 chairs for another trial that will begin in August in Guatemala. One crucial goal of the trip is to develop the manufacturing equipment that will be used to build the chairs for large-scale production, which Winter hopes will begin in 2011.

Until then, he continues to review the feedback from the East African users, including Abdullah Munish, a Tanzanian spinal injury survivor who lives in a hilly town with rough roads and who has tested various wheelchairs over the past decade. Munish said that in terms of capability and functionality, the LFC is “number one” compared to other wheelchairs.

“It is strong and stable in African terrain, and you can travel long distances and uphill without using too much energy,” he told Winter. “I would say that we have [a] life saver … I just call it my little angel machine.”

The Leveraged Freedom Chair

MIT News

Anti-Poverty Activists Shut Down Office Of Minister Of Community And Social Services

OCAP (ONTARIO COALITION AGAINST POVERTY)

On Thursday, March 18th members of the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty, OCAP Ottawa, and Ottawa's Under Pressure Collective teamed up to descend upon the office of Madeleine Meilleur, Liberal Minister of Community and Social Services.

As the Liberals are putting the finishing touches on the budget at Queen's Park, we made clear that we will not sit by quietly while the provincial government continues to attack the basic needs of poor communities. Filling the office and surrounding street front with angry chants we demanded an immediate 40% raise to social assistance rates and an end to the attack on the Special Diet supplement. While Meilleur's assistants responded to our demands by calling in the cops, people passing by greeted the banner dropped from the minister's rooftop, flyers, speeches and chants with words of encouragement and honking car horns.

While all this went down at her office Minister Meilleur was busy orchestrating the biggest cut to social assistance since Harris slashed the rates by 21.6% in 1995. Blatantly trying to circumvent orders from the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal, the Liberals have sent clear signals that they intend to entirely eliminate the Special Diet Supplement. In a pathetic attempt to disguise their anti-poor agenda, rumors have circulated in the media that suggest the Liberals might offer a measly 3-4% raise. Essentially, they are robbing thousands of individuals and families receiving the Special Diet of hundreds of dollars a month, needed for basic housing and food costs, and offering them $18 to $31 in exchange. For poor people there is no difference between the McGuinty and Harris governments: same program, different facade.

Governments responded to the economic crisis by giving billions of dollars in bailouts and tax cuts to failed corporations and banks. Now they are looking to get that money back in the way of serious social cutbacks. The Special Diet is an example of this, but housing, social assistance, childcare, and all public services are under threat. We know that any cuts will result in an even bigger explosion of poverty and suffering in this Province.

If we let the government write our future, it will be bleak. We are calling on poor and working people in Ontario to organize and fight back.

We won’t pay for their crisis or their deficit. We demand the right to a decent income and a future free of poverty. Raise the Rates by 40% Now!

Join us on April 15 and fight for the right to decent income!

WHAT YOU CAN DO:

1) Call-in / Email in Day: Tuesday, March 23rd
Contact the Minister of Community and Social Services at (416) 325-5225 or madeleine.meilleur@ontario.ca and Janet Davis, Chair of the Council Committee responsible for Social Services in Toronto at (416) 392-4035 councillor_davis@toronto.ca.
**To the Province: Tell them you support the following demands: Restore Social Assistance rates to the 1993 level, Don't eliminate or reduce the Special Diet, Throw out the Provincial memos limiting access to the Special Diet.

** To the City: Toronto City Council must register its opposition to this new policy by the Province AND inform its own social services offices to respect people's right to the Special Diet

2) Come Out: Public Meeting - Testimony of Poor People Against this Government
Friday, April 9th: 6pm @ PARC (1499 Queen St W)

3) Come Out: Mass Demonstration
Raise the Rates - Rally and March Against the McGuinty Government

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• Special Diet Program Contravenes Human Rights: Province Considers Scrapping Program in Response (newswire.ca)

Sean Penn: Haiti Relief a Family Affair/Video

I love love love Sean Penn. Besides the fact that he is blunt on how he feels about people/media and the

fact that he is a great actor, he gets out and helps those who need it  the most. Penn remembers

the "little people".. Actors like Penn are my favorite!

Watch CBS News Videos Online

Actor Sean Penn talks with CBS' Lara Logan about bringing his son and daughter to Haiti and what valuable lessons they can learn as part of the relief effort.

Watch CBS News Videos Online

The Oscar winning actor talks with CBS' Lara Logan about how he delivered $1 million in aid to Haiti following January's earthquake.

Watch CBS News Videos Online

Actor Sean Penn tells CBS News' Lara Logan he doesn't spend a lot of time thinking about his critics but does admit he wouldn't mind if they "died screaming of rectal cancer."

Watch CBS News Videos Online

Sean Penn speaks with Lara Logan about the disastrous earthquake that hit Haiti and the recovery efforts in Port-Au-Prince.

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Indian eye care group wins top world aid prize

BOSTON (Reuters) - An Indian group that performs 300,000 free or subsidized eye surgeries a year for the poor will receive the world's largest humanitarian prize, jurors said on Friday.

Aravind Eye Care System, the world's largest eye care provider, was chosen for the $1.5 million Conrad N. Hilton Humanitarian Prize, awarded annually to an organization that does extraordinary work to alleviate human suffering.

The award will be presented April 20 in Redwood City, California. Aravind was one of almost 200 nominees for the prize, awarded each year since 1996 by the Hilton Foundation established by the late hotelier to help the world's poor.

Past winners include the medical group Doctors without Borders; Heifer International, an agency that works to end world hunger; and the International Rehabilitation Council for Torture Victims.

Aravind, founded in 1976 by the late Dr. Govindappa Venkataswamy, operates five hospitals in India backed by a network of clinics, manages four others, and has research laboratories, a training center and a manufacturing centers.

"Aravind's is a remarkable enterprise," Steven Hilton, CEO of the Hilton Foundation, told Reuters. "The impact of what they do is so broad -- all with 70 percent of patients receiving the surgeries free or at very low cost."

Most of the world's estimated 45 million blind are in the developing world and some 12 million are in India.

"Over 80 percent of the developing world's blindness and impaired vision is needless, causing enormous personal and family suffering and severely limiting a country's ability to develop," said Dr. P. Namperumalsamy, Aravind's chairman, known as Dr. Nam.

Extreme sun and a genetic predisposition mean cataracts often strike Indians in their 40s and 50s versus the 60s and 70s more common in the United States.

McDONALD'S AS MODEL

When he retired from India's government health service in 1976, Venkataswamy, known as Dr. V, mortgaged his home to start an eye clinic with 11 beds in a rented house in Madurai, Tamil Nadu, in the southern tip of India.

Aravind has handled more than 29 million outpatients and performed more than 3.6 million surgeries.

Dr. V, who died in 2006 at age 87, was inspired by the U.S. fast-food chain McDonald's and its ability to replicate the same quality and efficiency anywhere in the world, and adapted the concept to eye care. Everything at Aravind, from systems and equipment to training, is standardized.

While a typical ophthalmologist might perform 250 to 400 surgeries annually, an Aravind doctor will average 2,000.

Because only 30 percent of its patients pay for services, Aravind's model hinges on volume and efficiency to keep costs down.

Aravind is expanding globally, establishing seven eye hospitals in Bangladesh and also has participated in developing national eye care plans for India, Rwanda and Eritrea.

Aravind's next challenge -- one more complex than the relatively simple task of cataract surgery -- will be to deal with India's spate of diabetes-related blindness, Dr. Nam told Reuters in an interview.

"India is going to be the diabetes capital of the world," he said. "Our aim is to prevent going blind due to diabetic retinopathy."

But getting to patients in time, including the many who are poor and illiterate and living in remote villages, will be a huge challenge. "There are 46 million diabetics in India, and only 11,000 ophthalmologists," Nam said. "Every diabetic should have an ophthalmologic exam -- but it's not possible."

Reuters.com

 **Please feel free to comment below** 

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Nujood Ali: 12-Year-Old Divorcee Takes A Stand Against Child Marriage

                                               

Huffington Post-Impact

Nujood Ali and her lawyer Shada Nasser leave the stage after being honored at the Glamour Women of the Year awards Monday, Nov. 10, 2008 in New York. Ali, a former child bride, was able to get a divorce from her abusive husband with the help of Nasser. (AP Photo/Jason DeCrow)

Nujood Ali is a 12-year-old girl from Yemen. She lived with her parents and went to school and lived, by most reasonable accounts, a normal life. There are a few things about Nujood Ali, though, that make her a bit different from most children her age. First of all, she's a published author. Secondly, she's divorced.

At the age of 10, Nujood's parents introduced her to a deliveryman in his 30s, and informed her that this was to be her husband. She had to leave school and cried all through her weekend.

As Nicholas Kristof wrote in yesterday's New York Times, Nujood has become a heroine for women's rights in Yemen, sneaking away from her home one day to a courthouse and requesting a divorce.

Divorced Before Puberty

NY Times

 

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Published: March 3, 2010

It’s hard to imagine that there have been many younger divorcées — or braver ones — than a pint-size third grader named Nujood Ali.

Nujood is a Yemeni girl, and it’s no coincidence that Yemen abounds both in child brides and in terrorists (and now, thanks to Nujood, children who have been divorced). Societies that repress women tend to be prone to violence.

For Nujood, the nightmare began at age 10 when her family told her that she would be marrying a deliveryman in his 30s. Although Nujood’s mother was unhappy, she did not protest. “In our country it’s the men who give the orders, and the women who follow them,” Nujood writes in a powerful new autobiography just published in the United States this week, “I Am Nujood, Age 10 and Divorced.”

Her new husband forced her to drop out of school (she was in the second grade) because a married woman shouldn’t be a student. At her wedding, Nujood sat in the corner, her face swollen from crying.

Nujood’s father asked the husband not to touch her until a year after she had had her first menstrual period. But as soon as they were married, she writes, her husband forced himself on her.

He soon began to beat her as well, the memoir says, and her new mother-in-law offered no sympathy. “Hit her even harder,” the mother-in-law would tell her son.

Nujood had heard that judges could grant divorces, so one day she sneaked away, jumped into a taxi and asked to go to the courthouse.

“I want to talk to the judge,” the book quotes Nujood as forlornly telling a woman in the courthouse.

“Which judge are you looking for?”

“I just want to speak to a judge, that’s all.”

“But there are lots of judges in this courthouse.”

“Take me to a judge — it doesn’t matter which one!”

When she finally encountered a judge, Nujood declared firmly: “I want a divorce!”

Yemeni journalists turned Nujood into a cause célèbre, and she eventually won her divorce. The publicity inspired others, including an 8-year-old Saudi girl married to a man in his 50s, to seek annulments and divorces.

As a pioneer, Nujood came to the United States and was honored in 2008 as one of Glamour magazine’s “Women of the Year.” Indeed, Nujood is probably the only third grader whom Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has described as “one of the greatest women I have ever seen.”

Nujood’s memoir spent five weeks as the No. 1 best-seller in France. It is being published in 18 other languages, including her own native language of Arabic.

I asked Nujood, now 12, what she thought of her life as a best-selling author. She said the foreign editions didn’t matter much to her, but she was looking forward to seeing it in Arabic. Since her divorce, she has returned to school and to her own family, which she is supporting with her book royalties.

At first, Nujood’s brothers criticized her for shaming the family. But now that Nujood is the main breadwinner, everybody sees things a bit differently. “They’re very nice to her now,” said Khadija al-Salami, a filmmaker who mentors Nujood and who translated for me. “They treat her like a queen.”

Yemen is one of my favorite countries, with glorious architecture and enormously hospitable people. Yet Yemen appears to be a time bomb. It is a hothouse for Al Qaeda and also faces an on-and-off war in the north and a secessionist movement in the south. It’s no coincidence that Yemen is also ranked dead last in the World Economic Forum’s global gender gap index.

There are a couple of reasons countries that marginalize women often end up unstable.

First, those countries usually have very high birth rates, and that means a youth bulge in the population. One of the factors that most correlates to social conflict is the proportion of young men ages 15 to 24.

Second, those countries also tend to practice polygamy and have higher death rates for girls. That means fewer marriageable women — and more frustrated bachelors to be recruited by extremists.

So educating Nujood and giving her a chance to become a lawyer — her dream — isn’t just a matter of fairness. It’s also a way to help tame the entire country.

Consider Bangladesh. After it split off from Pakistan, Bangladesh began to educate girls in a way that Pakistan has never done. The educated women staffed an emerging garment industry and civil society, and those educated women are one reason Bangladesh is today far more stable than Pakistan.

The United States last month announced $150 million in military assistance for Yemen to fight extremists. In contrast, it costs just $50 to send a girl to public school for a year — and little girls like Nujood may prove more effective than missiles at defeating terrorists.

AMAZON.COM

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Nonprofit Sends Heavy-Duty Wheelchairs to Haiti

Tonic

Have you seen the movie Murderball? The Internet Movie Database calls it, "a film about paraplegics who play full-contact rugby in Mad Max-style wheelchairs."

While rugby and extreme sports have little to do with Haiti at the moment, wheelchairs sure do, especially "Mad Max-style" ones. In a situation where towns are covered in rubble and many people have severe injuries from the recent earthquakes, there's a desperate need for low-cost, durable wheelchairs.

A perfectly-targeted national government organization is stepping up to fill that need. Whirlwind Wheelchair International designs and builds heavy-duty wheelchairs for use in developing countries around the world, and under the present circumstances, is turning its attention to Haiti, reports PBS Newshour.

"We're having, so far, 350 chairs made in Vietnam and Mexico, and all sent to Haiti to be distributed to people both with spinal cord injuries and with amputations, usually dual amputations, who absolutely have to get mobility soon, before it's too late," co-founder Ralf Hotchkiss told Newshour.

Hotchkiss, who is in a wheelchair himself, started the organization after learning the hard way that wheelchairs are rarely tough enough to withstand any kind of adventurous riding.

"My first wheelchair lasted me half-a-block, and the front wheel was then ripped off by hitting a crack in the sidewalk," he said. "It was beyond repair."

The chairs he will provide to disabled people, called the RoughRider, will be head and shoulders above that unfortunate chair of long ago. He was awarded a MacArthur Genius grant for innovating this equipment in ways that can help so many people so fundamentally and for raising awareness about the needs of disabled people in developing countries.

 

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Snowboarder Kevin Pearce makes improvements after serious head injury !

Snowboarder Kevin Pearce has been moved to a brain-rehabilitation hospital. 22-year-old athlete had to perform in Olympics but he could not manage to go after an accident in which he suffered serious injuries. Now, he is recovering and doctors say he can walk and handle many daily tasks with some help. Kevin Pearce came into light after he defeated Olympic Gold medalist Shaun White in halfpipe contest. Although, his medical reports are optimistic but he may take longtime to recover. He was one of the favorites for Vancouver Olympics.   According to reports, he was preparing for Vancouver Olympics and was trying a trick called “double cork” that suddenly he lost his balance and got his head injured after hitting with the rim of the halfpipe. Immediately, he was taken to the nearby hospital where he diagnosed with Tramatic Brain Injury (TBI). Later, doctors told that his helmet saved his life and without it, he might died. Now, he is shifted to Craig Hospital that is considered a leading rehabilitation center for spinal cord or TBI in Englewood, Colorado.

Scotty Lago who won the bronze medal in the Vancouver 2010 Olympics dedicated his medal to friends Kevin Pearce and Danny Davis. Danny Davis is another athlete who could not participate in Olympics due to injuries. NBC is likely to present a report on Kevin Pearce. The report will include the parents of Kevin, father Simon Pearce and mother Pia Pearce.'

NY TIMES

Also see

Tom Brokaw: Kevin Pearce tribute

NBC's Tom Brokaw visits the family of Kevin Pearce, a halfpipe snowboarder who suffered a severe head injury after crashing.

Tom Brokaw interview with family 

http://www.kevinpearce.com/

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Carts of Darkness

Murray Siple's feature-length documentary follows a group of homeless men who have combined bottle picking with the extreme sport of racing shopping carts down the steep hills of North Vancouver. This subculture depicts street life as much more than the stereotypes portrayed in mainstream media. The film takes a deep look into the lives of the men who race carts, the adversity they face and the appeal of cart racing despite the risk. Shot in high-definition and featuring tracks from Black Mountain, Ladyhawk, Vetiver, Bison, and Alan Boyd of Little Sparta.

http://www.nfb.ca/film/carts_of_darkness

Bill Cosby, People's Inaugural Ball philanthropist team up for volunteering

Northern Virginia philanthropist Earl W. Stafford and comedian Bill Cosby are planning to announce a new Internet-based effort on Wednesday to encourage more Americans to volunteer by telling them about other people's good deeds.

Doing Good: The People's Project will list volunteer opportunities and provide information about groups that are engaging in volunteer projects, Stafford said.

The effort is a continuation of Stafford's People's Inaugural Project, which brought hundreds of poor, sick and homeless people to Washington to participate in events surrounding President Obama's inauguration.

Stafford said he scheduled the announcement of his new effort on the first anniversary of Obama's inauguration. Cosby has filmed a public service announcement for the project.

Stafford, who last year sold his Centreville technology company to Lockheed Martin, said he was prompted to encourage volunteerism after witnessing the generosity of people who contacted him during the inauguration with offers to help with his project.

Cosby said Tuesday that he got in touch with Stafford after hearing about the People's Inaugural Ball. He praised Stafford's foundation for its work in the United States and abroad in countries such as Haiti, where Stafford has traveled three times on mission trips for his church. Stafford has given $50,000 to the earthquake relief effort there and has pledged to match some funds from other donors.

"I am an admirer of Mr. Stafford," said Cosby, who wore a sweatshirt emblazoned with the words "Doing Good." "What he did really inspired Mrs. Cosby to make me do what she wanted me to do, and that was to call Earl and volunteer to give him an evening or a day of Bill Cosby to help him in whatever promotion he wanted."

Stafford has been involved in charitable work for years. Last month, he was recognized by the Salvation Army of Greater New York with its first Stand Together Award. He was named last year to Ebony magazine's Power 150 and in November was given the Outstanding Philanthropist Award by the Washington chapter of the Association of Fundraising Professionals.

Mary Virginia of Washington, who attended the People's Inaugural Ball, said Stafford helped restore her "dignity."

Stafford said he received 9,000 calls and e-mails offering to help with the ball.

"At the Stafford Foundation, our focus is to collaborate with others who seek to do good, other agencies," he said. "So after the People's Inaugural Project, we made a vow to stay in contact with our guests and those we brought in. . . . We want to work with them to spread the word that doing good feels good."

Cosby said that is why he signed on to help.

"It is a good idea for people to find out about groups that are doing good," he said.

A Fight for the Homeless and Against Authority

A Fight for the Homeless and Against Authority

SAN LUIS OBISPO, Calif. — Burly, bearded and gleefully obscene, Dan de Vaul does not look the part of the bleeding-heart homeless advocate, sporting as he does a feather-topped cowboy hat, a large collection of guns and a bushel of hoary wisecracks.

But for nearly a decade, Mr. de Vaul has been housing dozens of homeless men and women in a farmhouse and a collection of tents, trailers and sheds spread around his 72-acre ranch here on the outskirts of this city in central California.

Mr. de Vaul says he is simply doing the work his county cannot or will not do. But officials say that the housing at Mr. de Vaul’s ranch, known as Sunny Acres, is substandard, often illegal, and rife with dangerous code violations, including missing fire detectors and faulty wiring.

Now Mr. de Vaul faces possible jail time, and his activities are sharply dividing residents of San Luis Obispo and the surrounding county, even as the county’s surging homeless population — estimated to be 3,800 people — outstrips the capacity of its shelters, which have about 125 beds.

The feud reached a boiling point in recent weeks after Mr. de Vaul’s conviction in November on two misdemeanors related to code violations, a judgment that the authorities had hoped might cajole Sunny Acres into compliance. But Mr. de Vaul refused a deal for probation and has since been sentenced to 90 days in jail and fined $1,000 by a judge, who called Mr. de Vaul’s behavior “irresponsible and arrogant.”

Mr. de Vaul was bailed out of jail, pending an appeal, by a juror who said she regretted her vote to convict him.

San Luis Obispo has a a growing number of the homeless. More Photos »

“He’s chosen to take in this undesirable population that most of us turn our heads to,” said the juror, Mary Partin, an office manager. “I had to do the right thing.”

But critics question Mr. de Vaul’s motives and methods, like charging tenants $300 a month for often meager shelter and asking them to perform five hours of odd jobs a week, like splitting wood, cooking and housework. Others wonder whether Mr. de Vaul is fighting to do good works or merely obsessed with sticking his thumb in the eye of authority.

“I believe he truly does care for the people he takes in,” said Bruce Gibson, the outgoing chairman of the San Luis Obispo County Board of Supervisors. “And there’s only one thing he cares more about. And that’s fighting with the county.”

Mr. de Vaul admits to enjoying battling local officials, but he also says he has been shaken by his prosecution.

“What I’m saying is that I’m in over my head,” Mr. de Vaul said. “And because I don’t like authority, I’m not going to give up.”

Mr. de Vaul is one of a handful of people who have taken the problem of homelessness into their own hands in California, often running afoul of officials. Last summer, the police disbanded an encampment in Sacramento pitched with the permission of a private property owner, while in Loomis, Calif., a couple was cited in November for allowing a homeless family to park in a lot the couple owned.

A ramshackle compound that abuts a row of suburban homes, Mr. de Vaul’s ranch is not much to look at. A converted dairy barn serves as a kitchen. Cars and trucks sit in a dirt parking lot, while rusting equipment — bulldozers, a fire truck — dots the surrounding fields, where the ranch’s cows also make their homes.

Mr. de Vaul, 66, still limps from an old dune buggy accident and lives in the attic of a barn stuffed with cars and tools; the 101-year-old farmhouse where he grew up houses homeless people.

Neighbors say they are sympathetic to the homeless but have complained repeatedly about Mr. de Vaul’s activities at the ranch, including stockpiling vehicles.

“People say it’s all about the view,” said Christine Mulholland, a neighbor and former city councilwoman. “But the fact is I have windows in my house, and, yes, when I look out my window, I see his property.”

r. de Vaul’s family had rented the Sunny Acres ranch since the 1930s. One day in the 1980s, Mr. de Vaul was digging a well at another family property when a ragged-looking man asked if he could park a camper there. Mr. de Vaul agreed. About a week later, Mr. de Vaul noticed another man on the property, who turned out to be a high school friend. He was also a Vietnam veteran and a schizophrenic.

Mr. de Vaul’s family had rented the Sunny Acres ranch since the 1930s. One day in the 1980s, Mr. de Vaul was digging a well at another family property when a ragged-looking man asked if he could park a camper there. Mr. de Vaul agreed. About a week later, Mr. de Vaul noticed another man on the property, who turned out to be a high school friend. He was also a Vietnam veteran and a schizophrenic

“No one else is going to help him,” Mr. de Vaul recalled thinking.

Mr. de Vaul bought the Sunny Acres ranch in 2002, and started allowing dozens of homeless people to live there. Now there are about 30, including Daniel Brainerd, 45, who came to the ranch after leaving a shelter in Santa Barbara County.

“It’s not an option,” Mr. Brainerd said of returning to that shelter, while cooking a meal of cheddar cheese melted on a hot dog. “I don’t like people that much.”

Jennifer Ferraez, a clinical social worker who recommended Sunny Acres to Mr. Brainerd, said Mr. de Vaul’s way of dealing with the homeless — putting them to work and largely letting them deal with their demons on their own time — paid dividends.

“Dan will take them as they are,” Ms. Ferraez said.

Mr. de Vaul, who says he kicked a serious drug and alcohol habit two decades ago, says Sunny Acres is a clean and sober facility, and says residents are required to attend meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous.

But officials are skeptical, and records from the sheriff’s department show three calls for people “drunk in public” there since 2007, as well as reports of theft, battery, disturbing the peace, attempted suicide and compliance checks for parolees and sex offenders. Mr. de Vaul counters by saying that he has called in many of those problems himself.

Officials also have safety concerns, including nearly a dozen hand-made wooden sheds — each with four beds — which Mr. de Vaul coated with crankcase oil, a flammable lubricant. (Mr. de Vaul says it gives the wood “life.”) The sheds have been condemned.

County and city officials say they have tried to help Mr. de Vaul bring his operation into code compliance, offering to waive fees, haul off junk and even bring architects to the site.

“We really felt the county was bending over backward to have Dan be able to house homeless people,” said Dee Torres, the homeless-services director for the county’s low-income service agency. “And Dan would not give a centimeter.”

Mr. de Vaul’s appeal is expected to be heard sometime this year. In the meantime, he says he will continue to take in the down-and-out.

“It’s just like when you start to drill a well,” he said. “The deeper you get into it, the more you want to see it through.”

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Cerebral Palsy Patient A Star Volunteer At Disabilities Organization

What's not widely known about people with disabilities is that many get involved in their communities as dedicated volunteers. People living in Project Freedom housing are no different in giving back to the community.

When Matt Payton moved into Project Freedom in Robbinsville, he was already a volunteer at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital at Hamilton. Eleven years later, he is a fixture at the hospital as an award-winning volunteer.

   

Project FreedomMatt Payton is a dedicated volunteer at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital at Hamilton.But unlike other volunteers at the hospital, Payton faces a few obstacles each of the five days a week that he volunteers. Payton has cerebral palsy, is visually impaired and uses a power wheelchair.

Payton's day begins at 7 a.m. when his aide arrives to get him up, showered and dressed in time to catch a ride on NJ Transit's Access Link to the hospital. Access Link has a 40-minute window in which Payton's van can arrive to pick him up. This means that if his aide is delayed in getting him up and Access Link arrives early, he can miss his ride. It also means that Payton can wait for 40 minutes or more if Access Link is late.

"It is part of living with a disability and trying to be active in the community," said Payton. "I can't drive myself. I can't use the regular NJ Transit bus, so I need to use Access Link to go to work."

Payton describes his volunteer job as "getting stuff or people from point A to point B."

He also said that describing in detail everything he does at the hospital would take too long. He started volunteering at RWJH after graduating from Mercer County Junior/Senior High School. A few years ago the hospital gave Payton its Volunteer of the Year award.

Tim Doherty, executive director of Project Freedom, was visiting the hospital one day, got lost and came upon Matt making his rounds. "Matt took me where I had to go, without a moment's pause," said Doherty. "I was really glad to see his smiling face."

Payton moved into Project Freedom because he wanted "more room to spread my wings." He was not unhappy living with his parents, but "like any young adult, I wanted to move out," he said.

"I was a little nervous living on my own for first time," continued Payton, "but I had support from my family and my neighbors at Project Freedom."

"I like helping people," he said. That includes helping Project Freedom with its annual 50-50 raffle. Payton is one the top sellers each year.

Payton credits Project Freedom with giving him the opportunity to do more. He goes to movies and restaurants with neighbors using Access Link.

"Living at Project Freedom gets me out in the community," said Payton. "I like the people. I like the opportunity to go places. I like the freedom."

Funds from this year's Holiday Appeal will be used to help Project Freedom expand its mission to develop housing and recreational, educational and social services for those who need them in our communities.

Huffington Post

www.projectfreedom.org

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