A Personal Message from DINET’s President   Happy New Year everyone! I hope 2006 turns out to be a happy year for all of you! 2005 was a good year for DINET. We saw a terrific increase in membership, with new people signing up daily. By the end of 2005, DINET had grown to 963 members.

A particularly popular reason for joining was the Meet Others Program, an email group designed to put people who have dysautonomia in touch with others in their vicinity. Jane Bennett runs the Meet Others Program, and she added 390 new members in 2005. Way to go, Jane!

We are proud of our expanded efforts to educate patients, the general population and health care providers about dysautonomia. In 2005, DINET created a brochure on POTS expressly for physicians. We gave members the opportunity to submit the names of up to five doctors to receive this brochure, and DINET volunteer Valerie Fenston mailed the brochures to the chosen doctors.

DINET was also able to make brochures available to our members, thanks in part to Gena Stokes. Gena was kind enough to arrange for the brochures to be printed at cost through Realistic Media. Thank you Gena and Realistic Media!

Ashli Jones took on the project of mailing our informational brochures to members for school credit. Her parents graciously paid all mailing expenses. Three cheers for the Jones family!

We expanded our website in 2005, and watched the visitors come. We inaugurated our website in April of 2002, and that year we had a total of 158,310 hits. In 2005 we saw tremendous increase in traffic – imagine, a total of 1,299,012 hits! Now that is growth!

There was a considerable increase in forum membership as well. A total of 362 new people joined our forum in the past year, and we had 27,111 new posts. In fact, our forum has grown so large that I have a hard time keeping up with it, as well as my other DINET responsibilities. As a result, Nina Wilde will be dedicating herself to our forum’s administration duties and Melissa Mambort will become head moderator in the year 2006.

Donations increased in the year 2005, with members donating over $2,000. Nina Wilde held another bracelet fundraiser to help keep DINET in operation. Altogether Nina raised over $2,000, which resulted in over $1,000 going toward DINET after expenses. Between members’ donations and Nina’s fundraising efforts, DINET was able to spread the word about dysautonomia for another year.

I’m so very excited about DINET’s current path and am looking forward to an even better year in 2006. We are very grateful to our wonderful members who have already supported us and look forward to continued support.

Thank you,

Michelle Sawicki

Does your place of business or family give to charity? If so, please let them know about the Dysautonomia Information Network, www.dinet.org. DINET is completely funded by member’s donations and can’t exist without them. Thank you!

Dysautonomia News is a quarterly publication of the Dysautonomia Information Network.
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