ALS-Focused Grateful Featured at Heartland Film Festival

Experienced in education and business development strategies, Indiana entrepreneur Thomas Stoughton works with a diversity of consulting clients. Community focused, Thomas Stoughton was among those who helped launch the Heartland Film Festival, which has been running annually in Indianapolis for nearly three decades.

One unique short featured at the Heartland Film Festival in October 2018 was Grateful, which had its debut at the Indy Shorts International Film Festival. Also earning Best Documentary Film at the Circle City Festival and being shown internationally, Grateful focuses on one woman’s experience of living with ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease.

The film’s producer, Amy Pauszek, worked with a friend who is living with the progressive neurodegenerative disease on the documentary, which lent it a particularly heartfelt quality. As Ms. Pauszek describes it, people who view Grateful tend to laugh and cry while finding a source of inspiration. To date, this is the seventh film the producer has filmed in Indiana, with all having aimed at making a difference in people’s lives.

Progress House Aims to Reduce Jail Recidivism with Support Services

A distinguished education, management, and technology consultant, Thomas Stoughton is the former president of the Indiana-based firm Business Consulting Incorporated. In addition to a long career advising business and municipal leaders, Thomas Stoughton has dedicated resources to support the addiction-recovery program at Progress House in Indianapolis, Indiana.

Since 2017, Progress House has been an approved provider of Recovery Works.
The program aims to make mental-health treatment and addiction-recovery services available to people uncovered by insurance who otherwise may end up behind bars. It also enhances community-supervision initiatives to reduce the chances of reincarceration for those recovering from an addiction.

According to statistics, many Americans are part of the criminal justice system because they lack healthcare coverage and adequate resources to seek treatment. For instance, approximately 16 percent of currently-incarcerated individuals have a diagnosed mental illness and 53 percent of the State Prison population have a substance-abuse disorder. Additionally, 75 percent of people who return to prison also have a substance-abuse disorder. Progress House and Recovery Works administrators believe that increased mental-health and addiction-service support will help people break destructive cycles and stay out of prison.

How GPS Technology Can Improve Your Golf Game

Fort Golf Resort
Image: golfadvisor.com

The former president of Business Consulting Incorporated in Indiana, Thomas Stoughton has extensive experience as a technology, education, and business-management consultant. When he finds time for recreation, Thomas Stoughton enjoys golfing at top Indiana golf courses.

Other than fitting in more time at the driving range, one of the best ways to improve your golf game is by using GPS technologies to your advantage on the course. A GPS app can help you analyze the layout and set up your shots. For instance, knowing the topography of the course can help you make more accurate club selections and choose optimal targets for your ball as you advance toward the hole.

Google Earth Pro has a particular feature that allows you to measure distances between holes using satellite images. You can search for a golf course through the app and zoom in on key holes using the ruler functions to measure the distance between various points on the golf course.

Heartland Film Festival Featured Women Directors, Unreleased Film

The president of the Indiana-based firm Business Consulting Incorporated for 10 years, Thomas Stoughton built a reputation as a distinguished public policy and educational technology consultant. Aside from his successful consulting business, Thomas Stoughton founded the Heartland Film Festival, held each year in Indianapolis, Indiana.

Held in October 2018, the 27th annual Heartland Film Festival screened more than 100 feature-length films on a wide variety of subjects. One of those screenings was of the motion picture What They Had before it was released nationwide. Featuring two-time Academy Award winner Hilary Swank, What They Had tells the story of a family that struggles when confronting the matriarch’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis. Released everywhere on October 19, 2018, the film also stars Blythe Danner, Michael Shannon, and Robert Forster.

Aside from the buzz about the unreleased film, this year’s Heartland festival was marked by progress toward the goal of promoting gender equity. In 2018, the directors of half of the finalist films in the narrative and documentary categories were women. The festival also included a documentary about gender equity called Seeing is Believing: Women Direct. For information on the 2019 Heartland Film Festival, visit HeartlandFilm.org.