Cheryl Juaire celebrates receiving the You-Have-Our AdMIRAtion Award.
Reminder Publishing photo by Tyler Garnet
HOLYOKE — To recognize and celebrate the efforts of Cheryl Juaire for helping raise awareness for opioid overdose, MiraVista Behavioral Health Center presented her with the first You-Have-Our AdMIRAtion Award of 2025.
Juaire lost her two sons, Corey and Sean, to opioid overdose and began a nonprofit to continue her work to connect parents facing similar losses and highlight the impact of substance use disorder on both families and communities.
In 2011, at the beginning of the opioid epidemic, Corey died of an overdose at age 23.
Juaire didn’t know anyone with a child who had died, let alone from an overdose, and she and her family grieved alone for two and a half years.
One night, she received an invitation to meet other mothers who had lost a child from an overdose. This sparked the idea of how much grieving parents, parents whose child had died from substance use disorder, needed one another.
In 2015, Cheryl founded Team Sharing, a support group within her state where parents meet and support one another and has since started chapters in 25 other states that do the same, including the national chapter Team Sharing.
In 2017, Team Sharing, Inc became a nationwide nonprofit support network for families who have lost a loved one through addiction.
In 2021, Cheryl lost another son, Sean, to the disease of addiction.
The efforts of Juaire led to launching a new specialty license plate with the words “Overdose Awareness” and the logo of her nonprofit, Team Sharing Inc.
Juaire explained that this was a project three and a half years in the making that required her to start a nonprofit, get the logo patented and eventually get 750 people to pre-order the plate.
Even when people questioned her efforts that were taking longer than expected, she said she knew she had to keep going because she told her son about the project before he passed away in 2021.
“I thought it’s going to be a piece of cake and all that, so I told Sean, and he was thrilled and said, ‘Mom the only thing I want for my birthday is for you to get those 750 plates,’” Juaire explained.
This conversation took place in February 2021 and Sean’s birthday is in March.
Sean died in June 2021 before she reached her 750 plates pre-ordered goal and Juarie said, “I made it my passion to push and when people said, ‘well maybe you should think about giving up’ I said, ‘I can’t, I told him, I promised him that I would do this for him.’”
This past March, Juarie was able to finally reach her goal and joked, “He never said to me which birthday so I knew I had time, so this past March 15, in honor of my son, I wished him happy birthday and I said, ‘we did it.’”
Juaire also received a call from the Registry of Motor Vehicles that 752 plates are made and are working on the letters that will be sent with each plate.
Team Sharing also secured a grant last year to help cover the $40 pre-order fee and that brought in more than the 750 pre-orders the state Registry of Motor Vehicles requires to begin production of a specialty plate. A portion of the fee benefits the nonprofit.
Juaire said she expects that those who ordered these plates will have them on their cars by May.
It is also not too late to order a plate. Those looking to do so can visit the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles website at mass.gov.
Juaire talked more about the specialty plates and said, “We hope it will save lives.” She added she sees the specialty plates as a confirmation that the lives “mattered” of those lost to a drug overdose.
MiraVista’s Chief of Creative Strategy and Development Kimberley Lee presented the award to Juaire and said, “Through nothing less than a Herculean effort, Cheryl has turned her grief into action. Her advocacy work aligns with MiraVista’s commitment to provide both treatment for individuals with a substance use disorder as well as understanding of the disorder as a medical condition so communities will support and not judge individuals in need of treatment.”
