Hospice Hero Awards Program
Winning skippers get to take home flags and trophies from regattas. In addition, the National Hospice Regatta Alliance encourages every hospice regatta to present a different kind of trophy — a Hospice Hero award — during the ceremony where sailors receive theirs.
To support the awards program, the Alliance sends a Hospice Hero trophy to every local regatta each year as a tangible benefit of membership.
How does someone qualify for a “Hospice Hero” award? Ask yourself: Who reflects the concept of volunteerism in its truest sense – serving as an inspiration to others?
In general, we encourage each regatta to honor someone who strengthened its event and/or the hospice it supports in some significant way.
Any Hospice Hero should probably have helped raise funds or awareness for the local hospice. That could be the top individual fund-raiser, or the sailor who recruited every skipper in a local one-design fleet to race, or the person who got all the beverages donated for the post-race party.
Exceptional volunteers demonstrate considerable commitment in terms of time, amount of responsibility assumed, and longevity, as the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization says about its “Volunteers are the Foundation of Hospice” awards.
Ideally, every Hospice Hero will have undergone substantial personal growth, too.
Once you’ve identified a local award winner, you can nominate him or her for a National Hospice Hero award.
How? There’s a form for that — click here to open a fillable form.
We’ll collect nominations, then have them reviewed by an independent friend of hospice to make a recommendation to the Alliance board.
Click here to see the criteria used to review nominations.
By year’s end, we’ll name the National Hospice Hero. In addition to giving him or her a special trophy, the Alliance will donate $250 to the honoree’s local hospice in his/her name. We’ll also celebrate the winner in our e-newsletter, on our website, and in social media.
With the introduction of the Hospice Hero awards program, the Alliance is discontinuing the practice of inviting Hospice Impact skippers to compete in the Hospice Regattas Championship.