Kate James from New England Mutual presented the 'Professional and Retail Services Category' award last year to Kelly Foran for Friendly Faces Helping Hands.
Speaking to the Moree Plains Shire Council, Kelly Foran is a strong woman, a woman with a purpose.
As the CEO of Friendly Faces, Helping Hands, Kelly and her husband David single-handedly run an organisation that reaches people Australia-wide.
She speaks with conviction and strength about helping people through some of the darkest hours of their lives.
She has come to the council meeting seeking funding for this special organisation, so that she can keep it running until it becomes self-funding.
However, a mere two years ago, Kelly's world fell apart with the discovery of a massive brain tumour while she was pregnant with her baby boy, Jake.
She was sent to RPA Hospital in Sydney on just an hour's notice, and after two weeks of steroid treatment underwent an emergency caesarean and an operation to remove the tumour.
Kelly's son Jake was born with a hole in his heart, hyper insulin anemia and jaundice and could not drink unaided.
He was kept in high dependency intensive care for three weeks.
After two months Kelly's family returned to Sydney for the tumour removal but instead she was told she had diabetes and the operation was not possible until her blood sugar levels were under control.
After the operation Kelly suffered a slight stroke, and when she returned home three weeks later she struggled to walk, talk or eat unaided.
She had to return again to Sydney with meningitis on the brain, and then suffered muscular dystrophy.
The final blow came 12 months later when Jake was diagnosed with cancer and had to have his eye removed.
"We now had to look forward to three-month hospital visits and day surgeries as well as the challenge of what if it's back," Kelly told the Moree council.
"We also had to deal mentally with our beautiful baby having only one eye and our guilt for allowing this to happen."
Kelly and David now take Jake for hospital checkups every 12 months.
"The journey is tough enough but the underlying stresses of finances, jobs you have to leave for periods of time," Kelly said.
Kelly's family found the lack of services and information for rural people dealing with medical issues to be very frustrating.
"We had options, people were willing to help but we just couldn't find them," she said.
It was out of this Kelly created Friendly Faces, Helping Hands, to address the knowledge gap and help rural people find information ahead of their medical treatment.
The website helps minimise the overwhelming feelings of isolation, Kelly explained, and give people the power of information in these difficult times.
The site links rural and remote people and communities and provides a central portal for accessing information on accommodation, parking, cheap eats, supermarkets and even hairdressers that are located around each metropolitan hospital. Links are also available for support networks, social workers and counsellors.
Kelly has not been paid for the two years she has run the organisation full-time.
The organisation gets no funding, and she is struggling to get a DGR because the organisation is "too broad" and helps people with too many different illnesses.
"I need financial and physical help.
"I'd like to get kits to all of the hospitals and employ someone to upload information to the website. We need to get our name out there, especially to rural people."
Kelly said $100,000 per year for two years would allow the site to become self-funding through advertisers.
Mayor Katrina Humphries said Kelly's story was "very humbling" to all who heard it.
She took the information about Kelly's organisation and her request for funding to the Country Mayor's meeting the following day.
"I had huge success, I handed out all the information to the mayors present and they were all very motivated to get involved.
Country Mayors chairman Adam Marshall will be inviting Kelly to be a guest speaker at one of the upcoming meetings.
