HEATHER JACKSON AWARD Following the tragic loss of our Chairman, Heather Jackson, last year it was decided to set up an award in her memory to be awarded annually to the person who has done most to improve the welfare and opportunity of deafened people. Her husband, David, and her daughters, Lara and Tiffany, have given their support to the award, and the five organisations with which Heather was most closely connected agreed to be involved in the nomination process - NADP, LINK, Hearing Concern, CACDP and HI Kent. Stewart Simpson (who is one of NADP's Patrons, Vice-President of LINK and ex-Chief Executive of CACDP) agreed to coordinate the process for the first year. Each organisation was asked to nominate up to five people for the award, and Stewart received a total of fifteen nominations from the five organisations. The quality of the nominations was very high, and every one of them would have been a worthy winner. Stewart then circulated the supporting information he had received for each person put forward and the five organisations were asked to vote again by putting them in order of preference - each organisation was left to choose how many people they voted for at this stage., but was asked to consider all the candidates and not just the people NADP had themselves put forward. Because of the very tight timescale this time it has not been possible to involve the whole membership in the process and the nominations for this year were made by members of the Executive Committee. We very much hope that all members will be involved in the process in future years. We are delighted to announce that the first recipient of the Heather Jackson Award will be Geoff Brown, who is well known to us all in NADP. Not only is Geoff a long serving member of the Executive Committee, he is also NADP’s webmaster, runs the electronic newsletter and oversees the membership database and recruitment. He also represents NADP on TAG and is TAG’s webmaster. He was a founder member of STAGETEXT and is still very active in its development, and is a past Chairman of the Deafness Support Network in Cheshire. He regularly travels to the USA to attend meetings of the Association of Late Deafened Adults (ALDA), which is the American equivalent of NADP. He has been a lay preacher in the Methodist Church for over thirty years. He does all this and more at 80 years young, and his energy puts to shame people of half his age. So he is a truly worthy winner of the first award. The award itself is a piece of engraved glassware which has been commissioned from Warwick Crystal Designs, which bears the name of the award, the recipient and the year on it. It will be presented at NADP's AGM in Birmingham on May 31 by David Jackson, Heather's husband. Close Window