It apparently took some time to verify the votes, but Kayleen Hannaway, who attends the Salem, Oregon UCG congregation, has been declared the winner of the Zinch "Sweet Diggity Dawg" scholarship competition, netting her a $20,000 scholarship for her studies at Vanderbilt University.

Kayleen and her family explained the verification process after she was declared the winner: "There was some vote verification that took more time than Zinch administrators expected. The time to verify might have resulted from all the unusual and varied locations where votes were entered." Well, we had a small part in that. We announced the final round to everyone on our UCG-Germany and UCG-Holland mailing list and asked them to support Kayleen in the final days of the competition. I don’t know what the vote total from here was, but I am guessing perhaps a couple hundred votes at least. When the deadline passed (yesterday) we had people asking what the outcome was. It was clear that Kayleen had the most votes, but the final result had not yet been verified. Now we know why. Kayleen’s family added: "Kayleen has had 5 radio/newspaper/TV interviews in the last two days. Kayleen has tried to emphasize in the interviews that her church family has been a major pipeline of support and diligence. It doesn’t always get printed or aired but she feels truly blessed and grateful and honored to find so many that would take the time and effort, and in some cases, the learning curve to help. She has learned many lessons — about networking, about computer IP addresses, about strategy, about perseverance, about patience, about acknowledging how individuals can make a difference, and many more lessons as well." Congratulations Kayleen and do well at Vanderbilt!