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Deidre Downs, Miss Alabama (center); Elizabeth Barchas, Miss Idaho (right); and Elizabeth Muto, Miss Nevada (left); were honored for their community service as recipients of the 2004 Quality of Life Awards from the Miss America Organization.

Downs received top honors and a $6000 scholarship for her work creating the Making Miracles Program, designed to raise awareness and funds in the fight against cancer in children. Barchas, the First Runner-up, earned a $4,000 scholarship for writing A Dad Just Like Mine, a children's book inspired by her father, who is physically disabled. Muto won Second Runner-up honors and a $3000 scholarship for creating H.E.L.P.ing Children Overcome Adversities, teaching children to use negative circumstances to initiate positive change.

Downs, a graduate of Samford University, is an aspiring pediatrician beginning medical studies at University of Alabama's School of Medicine next year. Her passion to help kids with cancer was ignited when she visited Camp Smile-a-Mile, a Birmingham summer camp for children with cancer. That experience inspired her to volunteer at the Children's Hospital of Alabama Cancer Unit. Seeing the positive effect working with the children and families had on herself, she created Making Miracles as a means for high school students to volunteer to work directly with childhood cancer patients.

The more she learned about pediatric cancer, the more she realized that research funding would be the key to making strides in treatment, detection and prevention. This understanding led her to shift the focus on Making Miracles from volunteerism to establishing a permanent funding source for research. Her creativity and innovation paid off in the form of Alabama's Curing Childhood Cancer license plate. Downs both designed the plate and worked diligently with the health care community, state legislature and the media to bring the program to fruition. Today, every $50 Curing Childhood Cancer license plate sold in Alabama adds $41.25 to fund research in the fight against childhood cancer.

A writer and scholar with career goals in foreign service, Barchas earned a bachelor's in Russian Studies and English from Emory University and a master's in Creative Writing from St. Andrews University, Scotland. A lifetime of loving support and inspiration from her disabled father inspired her to concentrate her volunteer work on increasing access and acceptance of the physically disabled. Her understanding of the power of the written word led to the creation of A Dad Just Like Mine a children's book designed to encourage dialog about people with disabilities and how they are sometimes mistreated in society.

Educators, librarians and advocate organizations have embraced her book and the teaching materials that she designed to complement it. Muto, a graduate of University of Nevada, Las Vegas, is planning a career in international business. Her life story provided the backdrop for her work. She was abandoned at the Reno Airport as an infant. Later adopted by a loving family, she has overcome a prolonged period of shame and frustration associated with the knowledge that her natural parents did not want her. She created her program with others like her in mind - and for every child who feels unloved in family and social adversity. H.E.L.P.ing Children Overcome Adversities was designed to ensure that the human spirit survives, enhancing parental and medical care that ensures survival of the body. Her story has enabled her to leverage regional and national attention to the plight of the more than 40,000 children abandoned in the United States each year.

The Quality of Life Awards program was introduced in 1988 as the first community service-related scholarships presented to Miss America contestants. They have since been amended with numerous other community service awards sponsored by the Miss America Organization, to contestants at all levels of competition and to high school students.

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