My dear friend Kerri Eaker was a longtime advocate for children and adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) and serious physical, developmental, and mental-health conditions. She was the mother of two sons, Matthew and Dakota, including one with IDD.
Professionally, Kerri worked for the NC Mental Health Association, the NC Exceptional Children’s Assistance Center (ECAC), and, for many years, the Family Support Network of Western North Carolina. I worked alongside Kerri and her colleagues as chair of the Advisory Council for FSN of WNC for about a dozen years.
Kerri then chaired the NC Council on Developmental Disabilities. She received the 2022 Jack B. Hefner Memorial Award for her work and leadership in disability advocacy. Kerri died of cancer in June 2024, and after her death, the Council established the annual Kerri Eaker Mountain Mover Award, which honors individuals whose unwavering commitment has driven transformative systems change.
I spoke with Kerri at her father’s kitchen table for about 50 minutes just eight weeks before she died. Some highlights are presented in this video. I was asked by Kerri and her family to give the eulogy at her public memorial service. My son, Nicholas, and I also attended the private service.
In this conversation, as in her entire professional life, Kerri championed the IDD population and the delivery of appropriate and needed supports—from organizations, from community, and from government—to help disabled and medically complex or fragile children and adults and their families have lives filled with possibility, ambition, connection, community, and joy.
(My video-editing and captioning skills are about on par with, say, my dancing skills, which means: nonexistent. So, you can rightly assume—while cutting 50 minutes of video down to 11 minutes—that all errors and omissions are mine, not Kerri’s. You can watch the video embedded on this page—or click through to the video’s YouTube page to watch it there. For reasons that elude me, my captioning is fully represented on the YouTube page but not in the embed on this page, even while you still can turn on YouTube’s own closed captioning.)
And here’s a little slideshow of a few pics of Kerri from my camera roll:
