By Steve Mallory

September has terrific for our organization! We held the tournament fundraiser and everything went according to plan. There were 99 players this year, which is almost as many as last year. The weather was fantastic. It was a cloudless and wonderful 82 degree day.

One of our staff members, chat host Denny Jefferies, drove to Maryland from his home in Pennsylvania and spent the afternoon with my wife and me. That made the day complete to have an actual other stroke survivor there besides myself!

Hopefully, next year others from our organization will be brave enough to come to the tournament. The fundraiser is all about the Stroke Network and when the players see stroke survivors, besides myself, I think they can see what they are playing for and not just an idea of who makes up the Stroke Network.

Pictures are on the web site and can be seen at http://www.strokenetwork.net/fundraiser/maryland/gallery.htm.

One week later, our organization was invited to participate in the Harford County Resource Fair. It was basically a convention for all of the resources in my county. There were at least 100 tables. Everybody had very professional table arrangements, including the Stroke Network.

Our display included a standup trifold presentation board. It was covered with information about stroke awareness and the Stroke Network organization. I gathered and printed everything and my lovely wife placed the prints on the trifold.

Also, I printed a copy of the stroke quiz, found on our very own stroke awareness web site, and Missy had  copies  printed. We put them on our table as a hand-out. In addition, we had hand-outs of the organization brochure and my business cards.

Lastly, we brought a small fish bowl that was stuffed with our rubber stroke awareness bracelets with a sign to take one. There were probably 100 people from our county who attended the fair and at least half of them stopped at our table to chat and pickup our hand-outs. I made several contacts and several were actually family or friends of stroke survivors. They were very pleased to see that stroke was represented!

This brings me to my next thought. If I have a resource fair in my county do others from the Stroke Network have something similar in their county? Would other members like to represent stroke in a similar fashion? I have the information all saved and you would only need to print it out! The organization would pickup all associated expenses.

If you are interested in promoting stroke awareness, education about stroke and the Stroke Network please let me know! It is simple to get started. I am quadriplegic and cannot speak yet I organized everything with my county via email. If I can do it then you can do it!

I sat at my table all afternoon and people would stop by, read the trifold and then pickup the hand-outs and take a bracelet. When people would stop to talk most of them would talk about their own experience with stroke. How easy is that? Email me at smallory@strokenetwork.org if you are interested with doing this yourself and I will explain how to get started.

Did you contact someone at Stroke Network this month and did not receive a reply? Our business email addresses have been down for the last few weeks. It is possible that either we did not receive your question or you did not receive our reply. We are in the process of evaluating a new email server and hope to have everything corrected soon.

Did you receive my mass email last week about the search engine that pays for people's usage? They actually donate 1 cent for every search that you make to the charity of your choice, which hopefully will be the Stroke Network. The search engine is called Good Search and is powered by Yahoo, which means that it yields excellent search results.

For those who aren't sure how to use http://goodsearch.com/ here are some detail instructions for using the search engine:

Good Search is used exactly like you would use the Google search engine to search the internet for whatever you want to look up---with one tiny exception. The first time you go there you will be asked to name a charity to receive the penny for each search you make there after, type in 'Stroke Network'. After the first time, our site's name will automatically appear in the designation line so you won't have to do this step again. Then go to the top and type in the search topic.

You can also click to find out how much money has been raised. You can donate to our organization and never spend a penny, yourself!

We hope that you will add this search engine to your 'favorites' list and use it instead of whatever search engine you are currently using. But remember not to try to 'stack the deck' with bogus searches because that could get this site kicked off the list. I do suggest that you perform searches frequently, though!

Steve is President, CEO and Founder of The Stroke Network