Families First Award

Nominations for Families First Award

In every field, there are those who forge ahead with a tireless spirit to "make things happen" for our deaf and hard of hearing kids. Help us recognize the professionals and parents in the field of deaf/hh education who pioneer on behalf of all our children.

Send in your nomination letter to recognize those parents and professionals who go the extra mile, who challenge the status quo, and who immeasurably enrich the lives of our children. Nominations will be accepted annually until October 1 of each year.

The 2008 Families First Award
And the Envelope Please…Allison Sedy!

It was with great pleasure that Hands & Voices presented the 2008 Families First award to Allison Sedey.  The Hands & Voices award is presented annually at the Colorado Symposium on Deafness, Language, and Learning.   The award recipients exemplify the spirit of this award, which reflects their diligent pursuit of support to families who have children who are deaf and hard of hearing.

Allison Sedey has worked tirelessly on the FAMILY Assessment for about 15 years in the state of Colorado. She is a published author, and the “data guru” of the group.  She is a stickler for accuracy and there is not a data point in the Colorado database that is not checked and re-checked.  Allison trains and advises many of the 22 students who work on the Assessment project each year and coordinates their schedules. The team analyzes over 300 assessments, including the twenty minutes of transcribed videotape of parent and child together. (She even planned her pregnancies and deliveries so that she could teach a full semester before birth, not needing the careful backup plan should nature have sidetracked her personal plans.)   

She participates on the Early Childhood Strategic Plan through CSDB and always provides up to date, practical information about what is needed based on current data for our children birth through seven. You may not be aware that the state of Colorado faces the loss of the grant funding for the project next summer, and with it ends almost twenty years of data used to improve the education of our young deaf/hh children and their families, and to tweak the programs for our deaf and hard of hearing children statewide. We can recommend her for any committee or task force, because she’ll be on time, prepared with thoughtful ideas, and will, in her no nonsense way, keep the group going further than anyone might have imagined. Colleagues vote Allison “most likely to respond to a question.” With her dual certification in speech pathology and audiology, she gets many. Allison is truly deserving of the Hands & Voices Families First award for her many years of dedicated service that have positively impacted individuals with hearing loss throughout the state.

Previous recipients of the Hands & Voices Families First award include Rep. Mark Larson, Barbara Jean Wood, Stephanie Olson, Dinah Beams, Allison Biever, Donna Ewing, BJ Brubaker-Blocker , Ruth Mathers, Cathy Noble Hornsby, Brian W. Smith, Cheryl DeConde Johnson, Christine Yoshinaga Itano, and Denise Davis Pedrie