Walk Awards Banquet 2008
On May 6th, 2008, the Walk Awards banquet was held at Hy-Vee Corportate Conference Center. One of my favorite things about that building is the bricks right outside the main doors. I’ve always liked that “hard” recognition of Hy-Vee’s national sponsorship of JDRF. Hy-Vee has been an awesome sponsor and partner for our chapter, they raise about a million dollars a year for JDRF, and that’s just awesome.
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!
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