Labor Day weekend was extra memorable for our President, Crystal Zukauskas! She was invited to the Hartford Yard Goats to receive the Liberty Bank Community Kindness Award.

Crystal was joined by EGH co-founder Kyle Zukauskas and some of EGH’s earliest supporters to watch as she went onto the field to be honored in front of the crowd before the game started.

Included in the group was our friend Ronan Murphy, who you may remember from past posts as the Boy Scout who recently hosted an impressively successful lemonade stand to raise money for EGH!

Ronan was joined by family including his dad Brian Murphy, who works for the Town of Hamden. As Crystal and Kyle worked to select the site for the future home of EGH Brian played a critical role in helping to arrange for key players in the town to visit the property to align on the machine gun test firing range being a good fit for the future healing garden. The first time Brian heard of the garden potentially being built at DeNicola Park he called it “poetic” and was moved by the plans to transform a space designed to test weapons created to harm people into a place of healing for people impacted by violence.

Also in attendance was Crystal’s close friend Adrienne DeVos and her husband Michael. Adrienne played a very special role in the formation of EGH. Donors during the recent Great Give received a special thank you card where Crystal told the story of her texting with a friend about finding ways to do good in the community following the death of her nephew Elijah Gomez. Weeks later Crystal and Kyle would go on to form Eli’s Garden of Healing. That friend was Adrienne, shown in yellow in the group pics!

The game was a blast for everyone and ended with a win for the home team!