Tuesday, November 27, 2012

Love Your Local Heroes

Please. Everyone. Click on over to https://www.loveourlocalbusiness.com/base/showcase23?region_id=us&content_id=1718&tab_id=7 and just click VOTE HERE. You don't even have to sign in. 

Intuit is granting 15 small businesses $5000 from Dec 3 to Dec 17. Our "up to 500-word essay" got cut off at 100 words but I've posted it below. Intuit says the more votes, the better our chance to win. Please vote today.  https://www.loveourlocalbusiness.com/base/showcase23?region_id=us&content_id=1718&tab_id=7


"Epic Heroes" is a Washington State charity and nonprofit organization dedicated to empowering children and teens with special needs by creating new super heroes and role models for them.

With a team of volunteers, we wrote, filmed and produced an entire season (twelve thirty-minute episodes) of our action/adventure show, "Epic Heroes." Episodes are completely free to watch online. The actors are teens and preteens who live with the real conditions that their characters do -- Type 1 Diabetes, Autism, Osteogenesis Imperfecta, Down Syndrome, and other challenges. Even now that the first season is complete, the cast and parents of the actors continue to stay in touch because all of these strangers have become friends. And all of us continue to volunteer hours every week, even as our lives get hectic with the holiday season. The children, teens and adults involved with "Epic Heroes" are so passionate, so dedicated to this show... because we aren't just changing the lives of our viewers -- we're changing the lives of our own children, brothers and sisters.

Our wish is to continue. To create a second season of all new episodes. We're not a viral video of a cat in pjs but fourteen thousand people have watched our episodes and encouraged us to continue. To create Season 2 of the show, we need props, equipment, permit fees, a transportation budget, and food for the cast and crew during shooting days. We also need funds to release the episodes on DVD, to get our central preteen and teen cast into schools to speak, and to spread the word about the show. With careful budgeting and our team of volunteers, $5000 could produce six entire episodes of "Epic Heroes."

This is our holiday wish. To continue to help these kids. Kids like my kids -- Maxwell and Faith -- who live with autism and Type 1. I have been so blessed to be the writer for this show. It has been an honor to be able to reach my kids in a way no one has been able to before. This show proved to them, they are heroes. All of the children on the cast are heroes! Whether they are wheelchair-bound or deaf or face another condition, they deserve to see themselves in a show that lifts them up, that never patronizes them, that gives them hope and adventure and dreams.

Please help "Epic Heroes" continue.

Jennifer DiMarco

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