"SOUND" – OUR LEGACY TO FUTURE GENERATIONS NEEDING H.E.L.P.
by R.W. Bro. Ron Campbell, President, The Masonic Foundation of Ontario

Over the past two years, we, the Masons of Ontario, our friends and neighbours toiled tirelessly to raise funds for "HELP-2-HEAR". The campaign was a lot of work and, I am sure many will agree, a lot of fun – the numerous fund-raisers brought the brethren together in a social atmosphere and opened our charity to members of the community at large.

The final total is now in – together, we raised $2,117,887! Take pride in this marvelous achievement and the future benefits that it will bring to hearing impaired youngsters!

With fund-raising completed, the project can move on to the next important and very rewarding phase: that of supporting the research which will ultimately help hearing impaired children to cope with their adversity and function in society as equals with their hearing peers.

At this point in HELP-2-HEAR would seem to be the ideal time to address a certain misconception about the project held by a small minority. The Masonic Foundation will not be turning the proceeds of the campaign over to an outside organization to manage. As is the practice of the Foundation, and as it has followed in the other two major campaigns, Project H.E.L.P., which raised $600,000 for hearing research, and Help Nip Drugs in the Bud, which raised $1.1 million for drug and alcohol awareness programs in primary and secondary schools, the funds raised have been invested in the Foundation’s Capital Account. Each year, the interest earned will be determined and used to support hearing research identified by the Foundation as contributing to the overall goal of HELP-2-HEAR.

As an example of the benefits of this practice, consider Project H.E.L.P. The interest earned on the $600,000 raised 23 years ago has supported research in determining how the auditory system develops in young children. To date, over $1.2 million has been donated to support that research, twice the amount raised, and the original amount remains invested.

As many individuals financially supported HELP-2-HEAR, it is but proper that they should know how the interest generated from this project is being utilized. This

 year, $105,000 is being spent to support research being undertaken at three centres across Ontario. While each research project is independent, they are complementary, with each contributing to the overall goal of the project: assisting infants identified as having a hearing impairment.

The Foundation is supporting the work of three pre-eminent experts in their respective fields of research: ·Dr. Richard Seewald, National Centre for Audiology, University of Western Ontario, to establish objective measures of hearing sensitivity in infants that will provide valid estimates of real-speech output and enable the proper fitting of fully-digital hearing aids; ·Dr. Andrée Duriex-Smith, University of Ottawa, and the Children’s Hospital Eastern Ontario, to: evaluate the development of language and the acquisition of literacy in children with a permanent bilateral hearing impairment who participate in an auditory verbal therapy program in Ontario; identify individual, instructional, social, demographic and cultural variances which influence the development of language and literacy in children with hearing impairment; and examine the impact of cochlear implants on language and literacy development in children with severe to profound hearing impairment; and ·Dr. Robert Harrison, University of Toronto and Senior Scientist, Auditory Science Laboratory, Hospital for Sick Children, to undertake a neuro-imaging study to identify how the auditory processing pathways in the cortex are affected by hearing loss and by hearing prostheses, such as hearing aids and cochlear implants.

The knowledge to be derived from this research will lead to benefits for hearing impaired infants living in every part of Ontario and, very likely, throughout the world - children who may never know us, but only our benevolent act. But, how better to personify the ideal of a Freemason of whom we hear on an annual basis! As HELP-2-HEAR advances from involvement by the masses through financial support, to involvement by the specialists through targeted research, we can be proud that we have done the good act, not for ourselves, but for the cause of good.