DEMA Announces Diving Community Champion Awards Recipients

** Diving Community Champion Awards will be presented during the DEMA Membership Meeting held at DEMA Show 2019**

DEMA is proud to announce the Diving Community Champions Honorees for 2019!

Congratulations to 2019 Diving Community Champion Award Recipients:

2019 Platinum Winner: ScubaRadio (Overboard Entertainment, Inc.)

ScubaRadio is a radio talk show with a diving theme and provides the forum to connect divers and listeners over stories about the perfect dive, destination, or encounter with some amazing sea creature. ScubaRadio covers all aspects of diving, including the best dive sites, dive gear, live-aboards, shark diving, and much more. Every week thousands of listeners are tuning into ScubaRadio via radio stations scattered throughout the US.

2019 Gold Winner: Save Our Leatherbacks Operation

Save Our Leatherbacks Operation (S.O.L.O.) started in 2002 and first focused on the critically endangered Leatherback Sea Turtle. Working on a remote nesting beach in Papua, Indonesia, in partnership with a local subsistence village, S.O.L.O. met its goal to significantly increase this sea turtle’s hatching rate.  More recently, additional marine environmental projects within S.O.L.O.’s foundation structure have focused on clean up campaigns which have spawned more local community activity to help reduce marine litter.

2019 Silver Winner: Deep Sea Valkyries

Founded in 2014, Deep Sea Valkyries utilizes recreational scuba diving as an alternative form of therapy to injured veterans as a method to combat veteran suicide and enhance lives post-service. The veterans who participate in the program show a marked improvement in their quality of life and mental health. Since completing the program, past participants have gone back to school, given back to their community and other veterans through volunteer work, checked themselves into inpatient programs to get clean of the myriad of medications prescribed by the VA, and most importantly, continued to dive.

A complete list of finalists and their nomination submissions can be found online here.

DEMA’s objectives in creating this program include recognizing DEMA Member companies who are giving back to their communities and society through recreational diving and making these community efforts known to the general public.  DEMA Members could view the nominees and cast their votes through DEMA.org.

The Diving Community Champion Awards will be presented during the DEMA Membership Meeting held at DEMA Show 2019 on November 14, 2019.