Trying to Figure Out if “the Shoe Fits”

What a whirlwind of a week given it is only halfway done!

We’ve been busy with a lot of different things, work, writing and laying the final details out for the big fundraising push we rolled out yesterday.  While we shared the same blog that had been on Tom’s corporate website related to the reasons why we decided to do this, but for our many loyal readers we wanted to add some personal words to it as we work towards finalizing the full story for that elusive series of posts in the next few weeks.

There isn’t a whole lot to say right now about the settlement, we were threatened, intimidated, coerced and ultimately told to lie down and take whatever they were willing to give.  We have serious issues and questions of ethical boundaries that were crossed by others and the antics that occurred to put us into the position of a “forced” settlement.  We’ll leave it at that for now and save the rest for the mini-series.

The flip side is that for right now we’re just basking in the somewhat surreal concept of being done with this litigation.  We’re going to disengage for a bit before coming back to the table and discussing with attorneys about our questions and concerns of breached ethics that played a role in all this.  At the very least, thoroughly investigating such avenues will allow us to sleep at night.

So, as the settlement seems surreal and hasn’t sunk in we rolled out a huge financial pledge to Nine13sports.  We did this because we saw an opportunity to shine further light on what is truly an awesome organization (obviously biased) and in the usual Hanley fashion of “go big or go home” we created something that is designed to bring community together in a broader fashion.  Quite honestly, we created something that is designed to foster discussion and ingenuity in a way that helps combat childhood obesity and puts a focus on what we feel are important issues in society.

check out the Indy Star article: http://blogs.indystar.com/fitforlife/2012/07/31/deadly-wedding-day-accident-spurs-pledge

In the midst of dealing with the legal stuff and processing being done, we just saw a not quite finished version of the advocacy film that we did last month that will come out sometime in the next week.  We love it, they did a great job capturing the story and telling it in a 7 minute window.  We’re pretty sure that’s about 3 minutes longer than they had been going for but with the many parts of our story they did it justice and did it right.

So what are we going to do with the fact “we’re done”?  Nothing to extravagant, update some parts of the house and install the deck, get a vehicle that we each feel genuinely safe in and to let Tom have something more than just the Jeep for the winter, and put the rest away to help absorb the hundreds of thousands of dollars of future medical costs we will incur because of the carelessness and negligence of others.

Beyond that, we continue to develop the concept for our book and begin to figure out the best ways to weed through that process, we’ll continue to refine our efforts with the Indiana legislature in regards to proper vehicular homicide statutes, and we’ll venture down the path of advocacy and spokespeople as it comes.  Nothing has changed because we’re “done”, the same goals we  wrote about yesterday, last month and a year ago are the goals we’ll strive for today, tomorrow, and next year.  This doesn’t fix what was broken or help heal the wounds caused by this.

So as we get used to saying “litigation against the Mavris Arts & Events Center” has been finalized, we’re also getting used to the roles we find ourselves in that include words such as advocates, writers/authors, spokespeople, philanthropists, and many more.  About the only phrase that doesn’t make us laugh, blush or pause is “members of the Indianapolis community”.

Be patient with us as we learn the new roles and stumble around with them for a bit.  And don’t be afraid to laugh at us—we’re laughing as well.

Cheers,

Tom & Lauren