Republished with Permission of Amy Tenderich of DiabetesMine.

I guess you could say we're lucky to have diabetes in an era when people get rewarded for reaching above and beyond the norm while living with this disease. Years ago, who ever singled people out for being inspirational with a chronic illness? Nowadays, we've got the Joslin Center honoring folks for longevity with diabetes, Animas Corp. and dLife showcasing diabetes heroes, Bayer with their Dream Fund contest, and as of last year, perhaps the most moving of them all, the new Inspired by Diabetes competition organized by Eli Lilly and the International Diabetes Federation (IDF).

The reason I find this one moving is that it's a creative expression competition that encourages anyone touched by diabetes (not just patients) to share their stories through visual and written works - essays, poems, art or photography. I bet the organization had no idea what to expect when the entries started pouring in last winter. By the end of March, they had 800 submissions from all over the world, including photos, essays, poems, paintings, and two music compositions. "Some of them just made your heart jump," a contest spokeswoman told me last week.

Equally inspirational is the fact that in conjunction with this contest, Eli Lilly & Co. has made a $50,000 donation to ADA for scholarships for low-income children to attend ADA diabetes camps. For each entry into the global contest, Lilly is donating money to IDF's Life for a Child Program, which provides life-saving diabetes supplies to more than 1,000 children in 17 developing countries.

Of course I realize that the contest embodies a big PR campaign for Eli Lilly, with former American-Idol contestant Elliott Yamin (who has type 1 diabetes) acting as the program's Global Ambassador. I got to interview him in person at the ADA Conference last week along with two of the four grand prize winners. From where I sit, despite the obvious self-promotion, it's still a wonderful thing the company has done here, pulling together a worldwide program to call attention to life with diabetes (the good and the bad), and those who need help with it the most.

Four judges from the American Diabetes Association - including one mother and daughter pair - culled through all the entries in the last months and rated them on four criteria: relevance, originality, creativity, and narrative. The four "grand prize" winners were officially unvieled at the Eli Lilly booth at the ADA Conference last Sunday.

The day before, on Saturday, I was privileged to meet two of the winners, along with goodwill ambassador Elliott (e-Train) Yamin himself in a personal briefing at the Prescott Boutique hotel near San Francisco's swanky Union Square.

We were ushered in to a small and quite modest suite with an entourage of PR chaperones. We waited in awkward silence until a silly three-tap knock came at the door. When it swung open, the baseball cap Yamin wore that day and lopsided grin immediately broke the ice. He's smaller and more compact in person than I would've imagined, but also more athletic-looking, and well... just very much a regular guy. If you didn't know, you'd never imagine he could sing like that!