Virginia students win with their National History Day project about open heart surgery!

Some while ago, two students in Forest, Virginia, reached out to me regarding a National History Day project they were producing about the birth of open-heart surgery, the focus of my book “King of Hearts: The True Story of theMaverick Who Pioneered Open Heart Surgery.”

I am always happy to help, however modestly, with enterprising young people, so along with their teacher, Regan Alber and Audrey Stinnett got on a Zoom call with me. I followed up by providing some photos of the Father of open Heart Surgery, the late Dr. C. Walton Lillehei.

So imagine how excited I was for Regan and Audrey and their teacher when I received this email recently:

“We presented our project today and it went very well. We received a perfect score, and won the ‘Best in Show’ award which means that we won first place out of all 5 categories! We are going to continue our NHD journey by attending CVCC National History Day. Again, thank you so much for everything!”

I wish them the best of luck as they continue with NHD and in their career aspirations.

Here is the video:

Four months later, Ocean State Stories is making news

 

Four months ago today, on Nov. 4, 2022, I left The Providence Journal, where I had been a staff writer for 41 years, to become director of Ocean State Stories, based at Salve Regina University’s Pell Center. Much planning during much of 2022 preceded my departure, and with funding from generous organizations and individuals and everything else finally in place, it was time to get going.

During the weeks that followed, a lot of additional planning preoccupied me and Jim Ludes, Pell Center director; Pell staffers Teresa Haas and Erin Barry; and Lindsey Turowski, Salve’s director of Integrated Marketing Strategy and Brand Deployment, Strategic Communications and Public Affairs, among others.

The first edition of OceanStateStories.org – which is always free and free of click-bait -- was published on Feb. 8. It included the first of a two-part series onfood insecurity, written by me, and the inaugural Q&A in what is a weekly feature with Paige Clausius-Parks, executive director of Rhode Island KIDS COUNT.

We formed an Advisory Board representing Rhode Island's diverse communities and retained a member of Rhode Island’s Hispanic community to translate our content into Spanish and established a partnership with John Howell’s Warwick Beacon, Cranston Herald and Johnston SunRise newspapers to further extend our reach. John’s papers have carried our content from the start and we thank him!

We also are building a stellar freelancer corps (first story from the first of our contributors coming on March 15) and we pay for their stories. And we were accepted into membership with LION Publishers: Local Independent Online News, a great organization supporting news outlets across America like ours.

While we are a startup that’s been around for only a month, our analytics show impressive numbers of visitors, time on page, and total impressions. The numbers continue to climb, week by week.

So thanks to everyone who has made Ocean State Stories possible – and to our readers, who share our vision, summarized in our mission statement:

 “Our focus is journalism about issues that often are neglected or under-reported — stories that explore healthcare, education, public policy, socioeconomic and racial disparities and injustices, domestic violence, food and housing insecurities, the environment, ageism, suicide prevention, mental health, veterans affairs, and developmental and intellectual disabilities, among others. They will be told with data, expert input, and, most importantly, the personal experiences of Rhode Islanders.”

Look for more stories that matter in the weeks and months ahead as we continue to grow.