Empowering Children
to find their voice
Join Us as we Support Families. Encourage Children. Serve Our Community. Share Hope.
Who We Are
Imagine not being able to speak. Or worse yet, imagine your child not being able to communicate with you. Developmental delays can burden a family, mentally and financially. We want to help. We want to share hope.
Many children with Autism Spectrum Disorder or other related disabilities have delayed language development and difficulty understanding other people’s feelings. These children can be plagued with social, communicative, behavioral, and academic challenges.
The Sharing Hope Children’s Therapy Fund sponsors families to help finance therapy payments for special needs children.
We prioritize young children with global language delays. Why? Research confirms that early behavioral interventions improve learning, communication and social skills.
As soon as there is a diagnosis (which can be as soon as 12-18 months of age), this is a time when therapy is most important and often difficult for parents to be able to finance. The Sharing Hope scholarship is a way to help give the child additional support, particularly when they are waiting for aid from the State of Florida or after they have exhausted such aid.
While Miami-Dade County public schools have special classes for children with neurological disorders, oftentimes, the child needs much more therapy than the school can provide. Furthermore, children need therapy before they are school-aged.
Michael Alessandri, PH.D
Executive Director,
Center for Autism and Related Disabilities (CARD)
Clinical Professor of Psychology and Pediatrics & Assistant Chair,
Department of Psychology
University of Miami
“The challenges of accessing care for a child with autism or a related disability are monumental. The initial struggle is getting an accurate diagnosis which helps to open the door to appropriate treatment.
Sadly, though, the diagnostic process is woefully delayed in most cases leaving vulnerable children without a clear path to the evidence-based interventions they desperately need for months and sometimes years.
Once diagnosed, the challenges sadly continue as parents confront the very real shortages of professionals qualified to provide the highly specialized interventions and, perhaps most importantly, the enormous cost of providing the types and levels of care recommended by experts.
One can only imagine the emotional toll this puts on parents who only want to provide their children the care they need to get better and live a fully functional life.
The importance of The Sharing Hope Children's Therapy Fund cannot be overstated. The lives of the children and families who are fortunate enough to benefit from the financial support of this Fund will be changed in ways that my words could never capture.”
Meet The Founders
Sherri & Paul DiMarco began sponsoring special needs families’ therapy payments in March 2020 when they learned of families furloughed from the pandemic and thus forced to cancel their children’s therapy services. In late 2022, they partnered with the Coral Gables Community Foundation to make an official fund to continue their mission to help families afford therapy payments.
The DiMarco Family witnessed the benefits of pediatric therapy first-hand. Their daughter, Ansley, was evaluated for speech delays in 2016. She was deemed “nonverbal.” Yet, they have watched Ansley flourish and thrive due to the intensive speech, behavioral and occupational therapy services she has received. They want to help other families achieve similar results regardless of financial circumstances.
