Honoree: Dr. Stephanie Cook

WANDA DILLARD: Who I would like to talk about is Dr. Stephanie Cook. I am Wanda Dillard, I work for the Ohio State University Medical Center and I'm director of community development. She is like a ray of sunshine; I first met her when we both went through the Art of Hosting, and we spent some time together down in Deer Creek. Spending that time with her, I learned a lot from her. I learned that she was a physician, but I also learned that she had a lot of compassion; she had a lot of compassion not only because she is a physician but she just had a lot of compassion.

One of the things that I learned from Stephanie is that you could be a professional woman but you could also be down to earth, and she is very, very down to earth. The one thing that I could say she taught me, too, is that you'd never see her in a moment when she's down. Whenever I encounter Stephanie there's a hug, there's an excitement, there's all kinds of things that go on and she is just like sunshine that comes into your life and provides you with inspiration, but also she provides you with the knowledge that even though she's a professional, she is still a sister.

We had the opportunity to spend time together working on a project at the Metro School: we did an "Open Space" with the students and it was so interesting that when we did the Open Space, we had the students decide what they wanted to do for their topics and the topic was to look at what hindered you from being successful in school. And this young woman said that being successful in school was ignoring the people at home. Both of us looked at each other and we realized that this young woman was maybe hollering out for help, that maybe there was trouble in her home.

So Stephanie and I went to the principal and we told the principal that she probably needed to check into her home environment because we felt there was something else going on, that there was something that needed doing. At that moment, I realized that Dr. Cook had intuition similar to what I have, being able to pick up on when somebody may be in trouble or when there might be some type of issue and I think that what she taught me was that you don't necessarily have to be down all the time, that you can always look for the sunshine because once it rains, there's always a rainbow, and the sun will come out.

Transcription by Transcribe OSU