Press

Connecticut Magazine. March 2014

“We are mothers who came together to make a difference,” they say on the website. “We met over a chance meeting and subsequent conversations about raising children of difference. We shared our stories as parents, laughed and cried together over the challenges and victories, the limitations and ultimately the possibilities these children face particularly as they head towards adult independence. It seemed clear to us that there ought to be a way to create a community in which the young people themselves could share their stories, narratives, experiences with one another.”

“It’s just getting started,” Hedley says on the phone, referencing stories posted about acancer survivor and someone dealing with hemophilia. In telling these stories and others, the interactive website is designed “to inspire conversation, de-stigmatize and promote genuine understanding. This is an initiative: a step towards stripping away judgment and critique and a step towards developing true empathy.”

“There’s a real need,” Hedley says, mentioning an effort in the works to craft a “differences” curricula for schools.

The Difference Diaries is a philanthropic endeavor at the vanguard of human, civil and personal rights as they apply to the growing spectrum of 21st-century manifestations of identities—statuses that once seemed to make a person “different” but are increasingly perceived as what they always have been, which is simply other shades of normal.