Then the team and individual awards were presented.  Amber’s Awesome Angels won the top family team!  Our team raised over $21,000!!!  Thanks to all of you who donated or helped us raise money!  We were awarded with a plaque, as well as a Circle Of Excellence pin from LifeScan, who makes the OneTouch meters that we use.  The lady in the green shirt is Kristy Slining, who is our LifeScan rep, who presented us the award.  The lady on the right is Mary Hunter, our JDRF Executive Director.

The Pioneer team won a platinum award, with over $34,000 raised! 

Each of us also received a Golden Sneaker award, for having raised over $1,000!  I had Austin talked into going up on stage to announce his total himself.  Last year, Kim went with him, but he was too shy to actually speak into the mic.  Well, he got restless this year (go figure) and went to a back corner to play a little basketball, so he missed his turn.  Darn it!

But he got another opportunity to go up on stage, for the very last award of the evening.  The final presentation was for the Volunteer of the Year award.  It recognizes the person who goes above and beyond for JDRF, and who participates in all JDRF’s activities.  When they started reading a description of who was being honored with this award, it began sounding very familiar. 

They honored our whole family with the award! How cool is that?

Here’s all the awards be brought home from the evening!

 

 

 

 

 

 

So to wrap it up, there’s just one thing to say to all of you:

Anyway, because of severe weather, our usual emcee, Ed Wilson, was unavailable, so Andy Fales stepped in, and did a great job.  It’s too bad that we didn’t have more lead time, because it would have been fun to do a spoof of “What’s Bugging Andy” on the topic of diabetes.  I think he was a little nervous, but he did an outstanding job, and Kim thinks that JDRF should get him as emcee more often.  I’d be ok with that.

One of the first things they did was announce the total raised for the walk.  $1.6 million is awesome, but it was less than our goal of $1.8 million.  Oh well, we’re that much closer to finding a cure, and we just have to try harder next year.  Mary Hunter, our Executive Director, presented an award to Dr Stevenson, this year’s corporate chair, and noted that Paul Schickler of Pioneer would be the corporate chair for next year!  Looking forward to that, it’s going to make for some good challenges for us at Pioneer! 

At our table was Jeff Olson, from Thrivent Financial, who sponsored our team again this year, Mary Ann Clark from Pioneer, and her mother, Janis Foote from Pioneer (who is our “Walk mentor”, as she got us to our first walk in 2005), and Scott and Jasny Brentano.  Jasny is the same age as Amber, and they are good friends.  Jasny’s mom, Jennifer, was on staff at JDRF. 

See the next post for the awards we won that night!

 And as you can see, a whole lot of other people did, too!  We estimated that we had over 8,000 people at the walk this year!  We had more inflatables, more exhbitors, more food from the vendors, It was a great day!  There were hundreds of people still there when we had to shut things down for the day. 

Our team fundraising goal was $10,000.  With the help of a few new people on our team, we were able to exceed that.  We got Amber’s YMCA after school teachers on our team, and they raised over a thousand.  One of my friends that I met through JDRF joined our team this year, and she raised almost two thousand.  Plus we’ve had more of our friends raise even just a hundred dollars.  My fundraising was even more than last year, and Thrivent Financial is going to do another team matching gift of $3,000!  Thanks, Jeff Olson!

The Walk Awards banquet is May 6th, we’ll see how well we stack up with all the other walk teams.  Until then, thanks to all of Amber’s Angels!