So it’s time to retire and you’re now looking to make good use of the nest egg you’ve built up over the years. What to do with it? Well, obviously you want to invest it wisely to provide a consistent income to secure your future. But is that all?
Not for Doris A. Segar. Born in Iowa in the mid-1920s, Segar helped her second husband expand a small plastics company into a major manufacturer of containers and packaging. She became financially independent after selling the business in 1978.
She invested a large part of her equity in The Colorado Hearing Foundation, a non-profit organization founded in 1974 by the audiology department at the Colorado General Hospital in Denver. Inspired by the calling of her son-in-law Jerry L. Northern, who is also the foundation president and a leading audiologist, Segar tried to make an advanced hearing technology — cochlear implants — available to underprivileged children.
Given the steep costs — an average of $40,000 per child — the foundation has brought the life-changing advances of these implanted hearing devices into reach for countless children. The foundation also has sponsored innovative weekend mountain experiences for deaf and hard-of-hearing children and their families.
Segar recently was honored by the Children’s Hospital Colorado Foundation for her generosity of service and for the resources to launch the inaugural “Dori’s Discovery Days” during the fall of 2012.
“Dori’s Discovery Days,” named in Segar’s honor, will be an annual weekend program for children ages 7 to 11 years who are deaf or hard-of-hearing (campers) and for their parents and siblings. Campers and their siblings will practice social and communication skills in a typical childhood camp environment, while their parents will participate in a variety of educational workshops, discussions and social activities.
Although designed to provide fun outdoor experiences for attendees, the educational program will improve parents’ understanding of the daily difficulties faced by their hearing-handicapped children. Other educational sessions will focus on the advanced technologies of hearing aids and cochlear implants worn by the deaf and hard-of-hearing students.
The goal of “Dori’s Discovery Days” is to strengthen children’s overall communication skills and parent education and advocacy. Together, the family participants will learn, laugh and build new skills and friendships.
Segar has been supporting The Colorado Hearing Foundation since 2000. She served on its board of directors for several years and is now an honorary board member.
What a thrill it is, she says, to know that children born deaf or nearly deaf can receive this surgery in their infancy and never even need to learn sign language. While the cochlear implants don’t give 100 percent sound quality, some children who receive them learn to speak at the same age and at the same pace as children who have no hearing loss.
When they gather on retreat with one another, “these little ones run around making regular noises,” she said. “You’d never know they don’t have full hearing unless you look behind their ears.”
She especially revels to see the fruits of these efforts in children who are born not just deaf but blind, too.
Today, Segar lives in Regent’s Point, a senior living facility in Irvine, Calif., but in her heart she’s just a phone call away from the audiology services in Colorado.
So why did she choose to do this? She said her son-in-law was making such a huge impact on so many lives, and she wanted to make the power of hearing more widely available.
Financially, she needed less and less as she got older, “so I wanted to do more for the kids,” she said.
Simple enough.
