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Dear friends and family of DeafHope, DeafHope Board of Directors is proud to celebrate another great 2007 event! Our executive director, Julie Rems-Smario, was nominated as one of 18 “CNN Heroes” finalists.
There were six categories of heroes with three finalists per category. Julie was one of the three finalists for the Community Crusaders category. 7000 nominations were made from 93 countries, and only 18 were selected. This put DeafHope on the global map!
Letter from DeafHope Board Chair, Kate Kovacs— Dear friends and family of DeafHope, DeafHope Board of Directors is proud to celebrate another great 2007 event!Our executive director, Julie Rems-Smario, was nominated as one of 18 “CNN Heroes” finalists. There were six categories of heroes with three finalists per category. Julie was one of the three finalists for the Community Crusaders category. 7000 nominations were made from 93 countries, and only 18 were selected. This put DeafHope on the global map! It is so important to us to continue our mission to spread awareness about domestic and sexual violence in the Deaf community. This would not have happened without the thoughtfulness of a woman named Taya Levine from eWomen Network who submitted the nomination. Additionally, it is with a great honor to witness Julie in the company the other two finalists in her category. One, an American soldier, Army Sgt. Maj.James McDowell, is making a great difference in Afghanistan by helping the farmers grow saffron on their farms replacing poppy farms to eradicate the heroin trade. The other, Sister Rosemary, an Ugandan missionary who runs a boarding school for girls abducted by the Lord’s Resistance Army. Sister Rosemary won the Blue Ribbon award for this category. A week prior to the CNN Heroes show on December 6th, the DeafHope Board was notified that Julie was not the Blue Ribbon finalist. Yet she was invited to New York City to celebrate with other finalists on December 6th. She came back with delightful stories including meeting Anderson Cooper who approached her and gave her a warm greeting. The DeafHope Board of Directors sends congratulations to Sister Rosemary for her well deserved blue ribbon award for her amazing work. We are all greatly humbled by the incredible bravery and charity she demonstrated for many women and their children who survived the violence in her region. As one of the 18 finalists, CNN awarded Julie $10,000.00, which she asked to be donated to DeafHope instead of given to her as personal gift. She specifically asked for this gift to be allocated to DeafHope’s pending capital campaign called “Door To Hope”, a transitional home center for abused Deaf women and their children. We are extremely appreciative of Julie’s generous gift. Once again, big congratulations to Julie on this “global” recognition. We are all even more inspired by what we have seen with the other finalists’ accomplishments and how much further we can go with DeafHope. We are excited about new opportunities for the future.
Kate Kovacs, DeafHope Board Chair
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