To be alive is a gift and to give life is the greatest gift of all. Network for Hope’s 23rd Annual Community Breakfast on November 14 was a beautiful reminder of what to be thankful for: life. 

Staff members were the featured participants in the 22nd Annual Celebrate Life Calendar at the Breakfast. Each staff member has a connection to donation, whether as a donor family, recipient, living donor, tissue recipient, family of someone waiting, or a recipient family. 

“As mission partners, we’ve all seen the miracle that is organ donation and transplantation,” Denisha Henry, Community Engagement Associate at Network for Hope and Donor Mom to T’Neil, said at the Breakfast. “Through everything, hope has been our bridge. Hope is what’s connected us to the pain of our loss to the life we live today.”

Purpose is what Henry found through healing, and purpose is the bridge that connected everyone in the ballroom that morning. The purpose of a life-saving mission that also honors heroic donors like T’Neil. Finding purpose in life is something else to be thankful for. 

Network for Hope also recognized Dr. Shimul Shah, a member of its Medical Advisory Board and a transplant surgeon at the University of Cincinnati Medical Center (UCMC), who is leaving UCMC. 

“His advocacy for transplant patients in our community has been unwavering, and under his leadership, UCMC’s transplant division has become one of the top-performing centers in the country,” Barry Massa, CEO of Network for Hope, said.

Network for Hope couldn’t achieve its mission, or tell impactful stories like these, without support from transplant partners like Dr. Shah. We are thankful to him. We are also thankful to our two hero sponsors of the Breakfast, the Christ Hospital Health Network and Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center.