Two victories in two days

It’s been a good couple of days for The Second Front and it’s you, the readers, who’ve made it that way. In two days The Second Front has won two victories.

First, the Hannah’s Hope Fund won a Pepsi Refresh Grant for $250,000 to help find a cure for Giant Axonal Neuropathy. If you read the blog post last weekend, you already know how the story started, but now it has a happy ending.

Your support helped The Second Front win Birmingham's Best Blog.

While the results won’t be official for a few weeks, Pepsi has announced Hannah’s Hope the second-place finisher. (First and second place receive the grants.) My brother, a researcher working to cure GAN, tells me that Hannah’s Hope inched across the finish line with just minutes left before the Aug. 31 midnight deadline. Pepsi has not shared the final tallies, but it is evident from the back-and-forth in the final hours that the margin of victory was slim. That means every vote mattered, not just the votes in those final minutes.

For all of you who voted, tweeted, texted and shared, thank you.

We went to bed Tuesday night believing Hannah’s Hope had finished in third place and we got a taste of what that kind of heartache feels like. For the International Rett Syndrome Foundation, to learn in the morning that they’d lost when they thought they’d won, that had to be crushing. With that in mind, my brother and I would like to ask anyone who supported Hannah’s Hope to cast a vote for the International Rett Syndrome Foundation in the next Pepsi Refresh Challenge, which is already underway.

Also, The Second Front won another victory this week because of your support. Birmingham Magazine’s “Best of Birmingham” readers’ poll named The Second Front Birmingham’s Best Blog, and I was a runner up for Birmingham’s Best Columnist (Damn you, Archibald!). It’s a great honor, especially for a blog so new, and it’s all due to your support, for which I’m incredibly grateful.