Lewis Bigler
Mental health and addiction counselor, Lewis “Lew” Bigler, has been practicing in the Buffalo, N.Y. communities of Amherst and Snyder for more than fifty years.
Lew has provided mental health care to service members and their families of the local Niagara Falls Air Reserve Station, home of the 914 Air Wing and the Niagara Coast Guard and Army Guard for decades. In addition to marital counseling he has helped the local military community address mental illnesses including anxiety, eating disorders, depression, bi-polar disease and schizophrenia. Lew says that many of his cases begin with marital discord as a result of a service member being deployed multiple times and then returning home with no mental health support.
Lew works with military service and family members as well as pro bono for Give an Hour. About 92 percent of his Give an Hour clients are able to make great progress over a period of ten or so sessions. Along with volunteering for Give an Hour, Lew volunteers for Mental Health Services for Erie County and a hotline for police officers.
Lew is devoted to his volunteer work and says, “We have these skills sets and must apply them to help those who have served us. They often return to tumultuous lives. They need our help.” This is why Lew is a Daily Point of Light.
Shoreh Elhami
Shoreh Elhami is a volunteer with the GISCorps, a volunteer program under the Urban and Regional Information Systems Association (URISA), an International professional organization for GIS professionals.
Volunteers within the GISCorps are geospatial professionals who provide technical services in the areas of geographic information systems, remote sensing and global positioning systems. Among many other projects, Shoreh and other GISCorps volunteers have been instrumental in providing vital service location for refugees in Cairo; GIS capacity building in Afghanistan, medical care referrals for the poor in Central America, development of a national web map portal of volcanoes in Armenia; and mapping genocide events in Darfur and Chad. The volunteers create a connection with their clients who need assistance or want to create a better way of life by providing their services either on-site or remotely.
Moreover, the volunteers strengthen local capacity by helping them adopt and use information technology. GISCorps volunteers' services help to improve the quality of life by supporting humanitarian relief, enhancing environmental analysis, fostering economic development, supporting community planning, and supporting health and education related activities.
Volunteers with the GISCorps provide much needed technical services across an enormous set of environmental, disaster relief, human rights, historic preservation, economic development, election monitoring and educational applications. That is what makes Shoreh a Daily Point of Light.
Cora White
Cora has fostered over 200 children in the last 30 years. Knowing personally what these children were missing, she founded Foster Care Children and Family Fund to bridge the gap between government agencies and businesses to provide services and gifts to foster children.
