Ian
Walk4Hearing Featured Walker
By Gloria Fan
(Captain of Fans of Castle Team)
Participating in the Walk4Hearing has been an amazing experience of support from our friends and family! It was a great blessing to be a part of this and do some good!
My son, Ian, was diagnosed with progressive sensorineural hearing loss in 2006 at 15 months of age.
Ian was enrolled in the CASTLE program in 2009 and graduated in 2011. Since then, he has been thriving and doing all the things he loves to do! He has just entered 4th grade as a straight A student. His interests are basketball, soccer, and clarinet. His favorite subject is math. He has a knack for memorizing sports stats/teams/names. He is an outgoing, talkative young boy with a love for life!
I tell you all of this because Ian is a living testimony of the essential building blocks CASTLE provides to preschool children with hearing loss. We were blessed to live close enough to drive him to the school everyday and to be able to afford the tuition. However, there are many other families who cannot.
Our goal was to raise funds to support CASTLE's current UNC REACH program for all families regardless of where they live and regardless of their financial situation!
UNC REACH provides parent support and auditory therapy for the hearing impaired (PreK age) child via the wonderful technology of teleconferencing. There are several families who cannot afford therapy for their hearing impaired children and live in areas of the state with underserved school systems.
It was a great privilege to give back to CASTLE (Ian’s old preschool) and start a team with my son, Isaac Fan (14 yrs), to raise funds for this worthy cause through HLAA Walk4Hearing.
Many of our friends and family gave generously to our team while Isaac’s classmates showed up in full force on the day of the Walk, wearing our cool t-shirts! With t-shirt sales, we raised a little over $11,000 (exceeding our goal of $10,000)!
Thank you, HLAA, for providing a venue to help us raise funds for our personal cause while supporting your national organization! It was great fun to exercise and catch up with friends while raising funds for a worthy cause! As a first year team, we were ecstatic about exceeding our fundraising goal! We hope to continue this momentum next year!
Support your local Walk4Hearing!
Read About Other Featured Walkers:
|
