WE HAVE THE MOST AWESOME NEWS!

June 15, 2007

KIDS LOVE DARIUS GOES WEST! That fact first became obvious to us during our world premiere at the Santa Barbara Inernational Film Festival. There, we were interviewed by a middle school journalism class. These students not only gave our movie glowing reviews, they also sent us e-mails, and begged for DGW t-shirts. Even after we left Santa Barbara, DGW fever continued. Earlier this month, students at Santa Barbara Middle School took a week and a half bike ride using DGW as their theme. You can read all about it at:

http://web.mac.com/sbmsjourneys/iWeb/SBMS%20Journeys/HOME%20Movie.html

A couple of months after Santa Barbara, DGW screened at FilmSlam, a special program of the Cleveland Inernational Film Festival that is geared to high school students. Again, DGW was a huge hit, with one Q&A session lasting nearly three hours! Fan e-mails poured in from our young Cleveland supporters. DGW was also a hit with general audiences attending the regular festival in Cleveland. In fact, we won two Audience Choice Awards there, including The Greg Gund Memorial Standing Up Film Competition.

Recognizing that students tend to be our most enthusiastic audiences, the DGW crew (five of whom are majoring in education...then there's Logan, who recently graduated with a degree in special education) began brainstorming ways to target this audience and motivate them to help us raise money to fight DMD. That's when we came up with the idea to create a DGW-in-the-Schools program. Our dream: to have as many middle and high school students as possible, nationwide, see our film, then encourage these students to organize fundraisers for Charley's Fund.

The problem was, we had no money to fund this program, which would require someone to direct it and someone to develop lots of materials to send to schools. NOW WE DO!!!!

After winning the Greg Gund Memorial Standing Up Film Competition, we sent a copy of Darius Goes West to Greg's mom, Theo Gund. She fell in love with the film (she's now seen it 10 times!), and when she heard that we were trying to get it seen at schools nationwide, she proposed a meeting between "Team Darius," herself, and the multitalented staff of the Cleveland International Film Festival (Marcie Goodman, Patrick Shepherd, Bill Guentzler, Debby Samples, and Beth Radisek). Since the crew was scattered all over the globe (London, Michigan, Wyoming, Los Angeles), Logan's mom, Barbara Smalley, flew to Cleveland for this meeting last week and walked away with seed money from Theo Gund to fund this program! (We have posted pictures of our meeting on this site...check them out).

The program, which Logan has tapped Barbara to run, will officially launch in September of 2007. We already have 57 schools across the country begging to show DGW--and these are totally unsolicited requests (imagine what will happen once the word gets out!). Our intent is to package the DVD with lesson plans (in a variety of subjects) for teachers, as well as provide fundraising ideas for students .

We are incredibly grateful to Theo Gund for her generous gift, which will help us get the word out about DMD to an audience that we know will work as hard as we have at raising awareness of--and finding a cure for--DMD.

Keep in mind, though, that this is just seed money. We need additional donations to keep this program going strong. If you can make a donation, please send it to Charley's Fund (www.charleysfund.org) and ask them to earmark it for the DGW-in-the-Schools program. If you know of grants we could apply for, please contact Barbara at bssmalley@aol.com. And if you know of schools who may want to show our movie, please have them get in touch. We need you to help us spread the word!

We are so pumped about this program and hope you will be, too!

Know about it!

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