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2006 Citizen Activist Award Honorees
RONALD GRZYWINSKI and MARY HOUGHTON, co-founders of ShoreBank
Shorebank Corporation of Chicago is the first and leading community development and environmental banking corporation in the country and its success has inspired the worldwide community development banking movement. Since 1973, ShoreBank has been providing residents in underserved urban and rural neighborhoods with access to the financial resources and information that are typically unavailable to them, helping to fuel new opportunities that build vibrant communities and reinvigorate people's lives. By accomplishing ShoreBank's triple bottom-line objectives - building stronger communities, creating a healthier environment and achieving financial success - they have demonstrated that a financial services institution can change the world. Under the leadership of Ron and Mary, ShoreBank has infused more than two billion dollars into Chicago's South Side neighborhoods and communities across the country and helped to finance the purchase and renovation of more than fifty thousand affordable rental housing units. In addition, they are recognized members of the international development finance community that is building regulated financial institutions in Asia, Africa, Latin America and central Europe, channeling credit and know-how to the small entrepreneurs ignored by mainstream banks.
JULIE STEWART, Families Against Mandatory Minimums (FAMM)
When Julie Stewart formed Families Against Mandatory Minimums in 1991, it was because the issue touched her personally. Her brother, a nonviolent, first-time drug offender was sentenced to five years in a federal prison for growing marijuana. Julie had never heard of mandatory minimum sentencing laws, but soon learned they were the reason the judge was forced to hand down a five-year sentence. Outraged that the judge no longer had the discretion to make the punishment fit the crime, Julie started FAMM to promote fairer sentencing laws. Feeling that the law was not only inflexible, but also excessive, FAMM has worked to challenge mandatory minimum sentencing and to promote policies that give judges discretion to distinguish between defendants and to ensure that the punishment fits the defendant's role in the crime. Throughout the years, with the help of their thirty-six thousand members, FAMM's work has directly contributed to fairer sentences for over 435,000 drug defendants nationwide and paved the way for the current shift away from mandatory sentencing policies. Among FAMM's successful legislative reforms were changes to federal LSD and marijuana sentencing policies, restoration of judicial discretion in certain federal drug cases, and the introduction of parole for nonviolent Michigan drug prisoners formerly serving life sentences.
2004 Citizen Activist Award Honorees
Focus: K-12 Public Education
Christopher Barbic, initiated YES Preparatory School in Texas in 1998, demanding much of its inner-city students and teachers, including the requirement that to graduate a student must have been accepted to a four year college or university
Yvonne Chan, a pioneer in the national charter school movement, in 1993 converted the struggling public school to which she was assigned into the Vaughn Next Century Learning Center, now a model for nationwide educational reform.
Michael Feinberg & David Levin, have dramatically expanded their KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program) from its start as a single classroom in Houston in 1994 to 32 public charter and contract schools in 26 cities focussing solely on grades 5-8.
Bertha Lewis, has led ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) to become one of the nation's most effective organizations in the struggle to improve and reform public schools and inspired ACORN leaders across the country.
Michelle Rhee, founded The New Teacher Project, a revenue-generating non-profit that has revolutionized the way that teachers are brought into their profession, in six years attracting more than 10,000 high-quality teachers in 18 states.
Mark Rosenbaum, lead attorney for the ACLU Foundation of Southern California, conceived and shepherded the comprehensive statewide litigation seeking to ensure equal access to the fundamental components of education to all students.
J. B. Schramm, originated College Summit in 1993 to put students with low expectations through a three day college-preparation marathon that now enables 79% of those that apply to get into college and 80% of those to graduate.
Agnes Stevens, a retired elementary school teacher, began School on Wheels in 1993, and now with 200 volunteers and 300 tutors brings educational opportunities to 2,500 homeless children in 60 shelters in Los Angeles County.
Margot Stern Strom, created Facing History and Ourselves to engage students of diverse backgrounds in an examination of racism, prejudice and anti-semitism in order to promote the development of a more humane and informed citizenry.
Kevin Sved & Johnathan Williams, former public school teachers, started The Accelerated School in Los Angeles' inner-city that now serves 600 students in grades K-9 and was named Time Magazine's 2001 Elementary School of the Year.
2002 Citizen Activist Award Honorees
MIKE FARRELL, Death Penalty Focus, Human Rights Watch
Best known as Captain B.J.Hunicutt on the long-running CBS series "M*A*S*H", and more recently as another doctor, James Hansen on NBC's "Providence", Mike Farrell is equally known as an outspoken advocate of human rights and other issues impacting people everywhere. Praised for his integrity, he has been described as "that rare person whose life and ethical values are in harmony", someone finding greatest satisfaction in helping others, particularly those with little voice of their own.
Farrell's determination to look beyond the insular world of acting began in the 60's, working directly with drug addicts and ex-convicts through the rehabilitation programs of the Salvation Army. Drawn to issues of penal reform and prisoner's rights, he eventually became president of Death Penalty Focus of California, an organization dedicated to the abolition of the death penalty, visiting death row inmates and lobbying political bodies worldwide. His stance against capital punishment is broadened by his work as co-chairman of the California Committee of Human Rights Watch, through which Farrell has participated in missions around the world, from El Salvador to Bosnia to Rawanda. Also active in Amnesty International, ACLU, United Farm Workers, Greenpeace, the Special Olympics and other groups, he is not facetious when he calls acting his "day job".
Recently elected first vice president of the Screen Actors Guild, Mike Farrell has, through nearly four decades as an actor, as well as producer, director and writer, been a model of humanity for those both inside and outside his chosen profession.
DR. MIMI SILBERT, Delancey Street Foundation
The driving force behind an organization dubbed "the best and most successful rehabilitation program in the world", Mimi Silbert is co-founder, president and CEO of the Delancey Street Foundation, which has graduated fifteen thousand former substance abusers, prostitutes and other ex-convicts into useful lives since opening three decades ago.
After receiving a B.A. in English from the University of Massachusetts and M.A. in Counseling Psychology and a Ph.D. in Criminology from UC-Berkeley, she co-founded Delancey Street in 1971. Quickly developing her reputation as "the Mother Teresa of America's down and out", Dr. Silbert built the facility into a national model for self-help residential centers. Focused on giving participants academic credits and marketable skills, Delancey Street has seen its residents graduate to become realtors, salespeople, electricians, deputy sheriff and president of the San Francisco Housing Commission. Moreover, it has provided residents with the discipline, values and attitudes needed to live in society legitimately and successfully - at absolutely no cost to the taxpayer.
"It doesn't take an enormous amount of money to make change possible", explains Dr. Silbert, whose Delancey Street now has fifteen hundred residents in facilities in four states. "It takes a sense of values and a vision - and people believing in one another."
2000 Citizen Activist Award Honorees
DR. JACK KEVORKIAN, Retired pathologist.
Right to die advocate Dr. Jack Kevorkian was nominated by the widow of Thomas Youk, the fifty three year old afflicted with ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease) whose assisted suicide in 1999 led to the seventy-one year old retired pathologist's conviction and ten to twenty-five year imprisonment in Michigan. For over a decade, at times almost single handily, he has ignited a national debate regarding the right of the terminally ill to end their pain and suffering, and whether similar protection exists for doctors seeking to ensure "death with dignity" for their patients. After graduating University of Michigan's Medical School in 1952, Dr. Kevorkian specialized in pathology for his entire medical career. He took part in his first assisted suicide in 1990, leading to the suspension of his medical license in 1991. He has publicly acknowledged that he has helped at least one hundred and thirty people to die by assisted suicide. Dr. Kevorkian was prosecuted and acquitted on three occasions prior to his conviction, which is currently being appealed. In 1996 he appeared in court dressed as Thomas Jefferson to make a vivid point: "Jefferson advocated assisted suicide and euthanasia," explained Dr. Kevorkian."Gandhi advocated euthanasia. In ancient Greece [assisted suicide] was practiced by physicians openly. We're struggling to get back to where the Greeks were."
BRYAN STEVENSON, Equal Justice Initiative
Praised for a brilliant legal mind and unsurpassed oratorical skills, Bryan Stevenson has spent his entire professional career fighting the death penalty and the bias against the poor and people of color in the criminal justice system. A 1985 graduate of Harvard Law School, Stevenson began his legal career with the Southern Center for Human Rights in Atlanta. Four years later he moved to Montgomery to launch the Alabama Capital Representation Resource Center which, after its defunding by the federal government, he later revived as the nonprofit Equal Justice Initiative. While many of his former Harvard classmates earn ten times his salary in the private sector, Stevenson works eighty hours a week for less than $30,000 a year. Among myriad awards and honors, Stevenson has received the prestigious MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (donating the entire $230,000 grant to the Equal Justice Initiative), the ACLU National Medal of Liberty, the Public Interest Lawyer of the Year and the Thurgood Marshall Medal of Justice. His efforts have led to the release of more than forty innocent death row inmates. "Half of my clients have had someone in their family murdered. They are always getting their electricity turned off, or their telephone... They live at the margins of society, with no sense of control over their lives," says Stevenson. "Why do I do what I do? How can anyone do anything else?"
1998 Citizen Activist Award Honorees
Focus: The campaign against tobacco
ALAN BLUM, family doctor and founder of Doctors Ought to Care, has been the inspiration to many other activists due to the vigorous, multifaceted campaign he has led for almost thirty years.
STANTON GLANTZ, scientist and author, has fiercely fought the tobacco industry for decades and has emerged as one of the very top leaders in the world wide tobacco control movement.
AL GORE, despite the tobacco farms in his district, for the last fifteen years as Senator and then Vice President, has proven to be one of the most effective elected officials promoting tobacco control.
CHRISTINE GREGOIRE, Attorney General of the state of Washington, tenaciously led the team that negotiated the public health concerns in the agreement with the tobacco firms.
C. EVERETT KOOP, as former Surgeon General, brought visionary leadership to a formerly obscure post and became the individual most identified with efforts to eliminate tobacco as a public health problem.
JANET CAROL MANGINI, a family lawyer, began a legal campaign against RJR's Joe Camel in San Francisco that resulted in an unprecedented settlement and provided extraordinary RJR documents for other cases.
HENRY WAXMAN, for decades has influenced the legislative agenda in Congress on tobacco and chaired numerous hearings on the hazards of smoking and the insidious workings of the tobacco industry.
JEFFREY WIGAND, as VP for Research and Development at Brown and Williamson, uncovered the extent to which toxic chemicals were added and felt morally compelled to release this information.
MERRELL WILLIAMS, shocked by tobacco industry documents showing a massive illegal cover-up, in violation of a court order, provided copies proving that the industry knew nicotine was an addictive drug.
PATRICIA YOUNG, a flight attendant, worked for decades as an individual, without institutional support of any kind, finally becoming one of the lead plaintiffs in the precedent setting settlement.
1996 Citizen Activist Award Honorees
GERALDINE JENSEN, Founder, Association for Children for the Enforcement of Support (ACES)
When her husband left and stopped sending child support payments, Geraldine Jensen began an eight year odyssey of despair: selling her home, going on welfare, suffering a prolonged illness, gaining and losing a good job. In 1984, with only $12.00 left, she spent $8.43 on a local ad in Toledo: "Not receiving your child support? Call me." The result was a gathering of twenty-five women whose collective frustration and determination led Jensen to establish the Association For Children for the Enforcement of Support (ACES). Its mission was clear: to assist disadvantaged children affected by parents who fail to meet the legal, moral and financial obligations of child support. Today, the nonprofit organization is the largest child support advocacy agency in the nation, with three hundred and fifty chapters in forty-seven states and more than thirty-five thousand members. Since its inception, ACES has helped over five hundred thousand families collect approximately one billion dollars in delinquent court ordered child support payments. In addition to offering education to custodial parents, ACES has been influential in the passage of such laws as the 1988 Family Support Act and the 1992 Child Support Recovery Act.
TANYA TULL, Founder, Para Los Ninos, Beyond Shelter, A Community of Friends, and cofounder, L.A. Family Housing
In 1967, with an infant son, no income, and nowhere to turn for help, Tanya Tull was forced to apply for welfare. Although within months her life turned around, she never forgot the fear, hopelessness and despair she had experienced first hand. Since 1980, she has been a champion for homeless families, developing new methodologies to combat chronic poverty, welfare dependence and homelessness, while promoting systemic change. Her early efforts include creating Para Los Ninos on Los Angeles' Skid Row, which has served approximately twelve thousand impoverished families; cofounding the L.A.Family Housing Corporation; and founding A Community of Friends, which develops supportive, permanent housing for the chronically mentally ill. In 1988, Tull founded Beyond Shelter, a dramatic new response to the problem of family homelessness. This innovative methodology has moved over seven hundred-fifty primarily female headed families directly into rental housing, with economic and social services provided after the family is no longer traumatized by the experience of homelessness. Dr. Tull has received much recognition for her work over the years. Through national technical assistance, various national forums, and demonstration projects for HHS and HUD, Tull's creativity resonates throughout the country.
1994 Citizen Activist Award Honorees
WENDY KOPP, Founder, Teach For America
A visionary leader of grassroots education reform, Wendy Kopp is founder of Teach For America, a national corps of college graduates from all academic majors who commit a minimum of two years to teach in under resourced urban and rural public schools. Founded in 1989, Kopp's nonprofit organization has trained and placed thousands of corps members throughout the country. Kopp developed the concept of a national teacher corps during her senior year at Princeton University. Convinced that education holds the answer to our most pressing national problems, Kopp envisioned a Peace Corps for teachers comprised of outstanding graduates who were not education majors, yet were willing to spend at least two years teaching their field of expertise in traditionally under served regions. Just prior to graduation, Kopp sent a condensed version of her senior thesis to thirty major corporations, receiving initial sponsorship from Mobil Oil and Union Carbide. Today, with tens of millions of dollars in corporate support and regional offices throughout the country, the success of Teach For America can be measured not merely by feature stories in Time, Newsweek, The New York Times and numerous other publications, but by its indelible impact on hundreds of thousands of students nationwide.
RALPH NADER, Founder, Public Citizen, Center for Study of Responsive Law, Center for Auto Safety, Public Interest
A man whose name has become virtually synonymous with citizen activism, Ralph Nader has dedicated a lifetime to issues of public information, health and safety. His outrage is eclipsed only by his boundless energy, intelligence and passion for justice. Founder of this nation's top watchdog groups, he is also responsible for myriad others through the work of his followers known as Nader's Raiders. Learning citizenry through his immigrant Lebanese parents, Nader began his quest for auto safety at Harvard Law School in the late fifties. In his 1959 publication Unsafe At Any Speed, he challenged General Motors for its design of the GM Corvair,a campaign that awoke public concern and led to the creation of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Through extensive lobbying, legal action and public awareness campaigns, Nader and his Raiders are responsible for the creation of OSHA and the EPA, the Freedom of Information Act and countless laws pertaining to product labeling, meat packing and poultry, pesticides, nuclear power, occupational safety, campaign finance reform, judicial access, education and privacy. As a result of his efforts Americans drive safer cars, buy safer products, eat healthier food, breathe cleaner air and are governed more openly. Ralph Nader's crowning achievement may, in fact, be inspiring others to fight for themselves, to exercise their own inalienable rights and responsibilities as citizens.
1992 Citizen Activist Award Honorees
LOUIS CLARK, Executive Director, The Government Accountability Project
An attorney and former Methodist minister, Louis Clark has been the Executive Director of The Government Accountability Project since 1978, building the nonprofit organization from humble beginnings to its current standing as a nationally recognized, $1,000,000 per year operation. With a highly skilled team of attorneys and staff members under Mr. Clark's guidance, GAP today is the nation's most visible and effective organization aiding government and corporate employees willing to report abuse or negligence in the workplace but afraid of the possible repercussions of becoming "whistle blowers". Born in Indiana, Mr. Clark evidenced a strong desire to help others from the outset, electing first to serve as a community activist and welfare reform advocate in his capacity as a pastor, and later to apply his inherent activist energies as an attorney. Soon after joining The Government Accountability Project, he realized he had found the ideal opportunity to blend his combined interest in both the law and community outreach, and has never looked back. A public interest organization, GAP has aided many hundreds of public and private employees, as well as many grassroots activists nationwide, to expose and help combat threats to the environment and to public health and safety. By winning numerous cases on behalf of "whistle blowers", GAP has not only helped the individuals in question, but all of society by defending the rights of citizens against governmental or corporate negligence and abuse.
WILLIAM WASSMUTH, Executive Director, The Northwest Coalition Against Malicious Harassment
One of the leading crusaders for human rights and those opposed to racial hatred in the northwest, Mr. Wassmuth, an ordained priest, helped found the Seattle based Northwest Coalition Against Malicious Harassment in 1987, serving as the nonprofit group's Executive Director since its inception. A longtime outspoken proponent of racial harmony, at the risk of his own personal safety, he helped form Idaho's Kootenai County Task Force on Human Relations, specifically established to oppose the violence of the white supremacist group Aryan Nations. Later Mr. Wassmuth helped establish The Northwest Coalition Against Malicious Harassment with a mandate to encourage peaceful means of defeating racial violence. This group, which is comprised of representatives from Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, Washington and Oregon, has devoted its time and resources to helping eradicate racially motivated acts of harassment and violence in the northwest via local community organizing and annual conferences which provide forums for the discussion of human rights issues that help people feel empowered and encouraged to take a stand in their own communities.
1991 Citizen Activist Award Honorees
KAREN NUSSBAUM, Co-Founder of 9 to 5, The National Association of Working Women
Although the Jane Fonda hit film, "9to5", was a comedy, its still timely call for sexual equality in the workplace was certainly no laughing matter to the woman who in great part inspired that film, Karen Nussbaum. Born in Chicago, Ms. Nussbaum was employed as a clerk typist in the early 1970s when her own negative experiences prompted her to help form 9to5, the National Association of Working Women, a nonprofit group devoted to securing for female employees the same pay, benefits and respect earned by their male counterparts. Some two decades later, 9to5 has chapters and members in all fifty states, making it the most prominent membership organization for working women in the country. With Ms. Nussbaum as Executive Director, 9to5 helped female and male employees win some $25,000,000 in back pay; provided counseling to more than one million women on their job rights and careers; lobbied nationally on behalf of child care and family leave policies; and assisted in exposing significant health risks (such as excessive computer use) in the workplace. Ms. Nussbaum has also authored two books and now serves as the Director of the Working Women's Department of the AFL-CIO.
ANN WILSON, Chairperson of the Board of Commissioners, Housing Authority of the City of Milwaukee
With little but keen insight and deep commitment on her side, Ann Wilson has single-handedly turned disadvantage into triumph. A Nebraska native, Ms. Wilson became a single mother at the age of fourteen and, despite tireless efforts to become self sufficient, eventually wound up on welfare, living in Milwaukee's Hillside Terrace, a housing project whose picturesque name belied its deplorable, gang ridden conditions. Rather than stand idly by, however, Ms. Wilson over the subsequent years became a visible supporter of tenants' rights, actively waging a variety of campaigns to generate proper health service, job training, drug rehabilitation and voter registration programs on behalf of public housing residents citywide. In 1988, Ms. Wilson was appointed by Milwaukee Mayor John Norquist to serve on the Commission of the Milwaukee Housing Authority, and shortly thereafter she was elected Chairperson. In addition, she also served as the regional representative of the National Association of Housing and Redevelopment Authority Officials. Concurrently she became lead organizer of Milwaukee Jobs With Peace and was named cochair of the National Jobs With Peace, helping to promote the organization's efforts to redirect federal monies away from the military in favor of domestic social concerns. Currently Ms. Wilson serves as the Executive Director of the National Jobs With Peace Campaign, headquartered in Milwaukee.
1990 Citizen Activist Award Honorees
DEBORAH C. McKEITHAN, Founder of Handicapped Organized Women (HOW),Handicapped Independent Men (HIM), Opportunity Plus, and Learning How, Inc.
Summing up the very reason why she has become both a leader and inspiration in the realm of social activism, Deborah McKeithan notes, "I'm a disabled person working very hard not to let my attitude be my handicap". A native of Charlotte, North Carolina, Ms. McKeithan in 1979 was left paralyzed, epileptic and legally blind as the result of a massive stroke brought on by cerebral multiple sclerosis. Soon realizing she would find no organization able to assist her in developing relationships with other disabled women, she decided to take the initiative herself by forming HOW (Handicapped Organized Women), the nation's first such self help group. With an indefatigably positive outlook and a mandate to encourage the greatest possible self respect and independence among the disabled, Ms. McKeithan in the late 1980s also founded the pioneering organizations HIM (Handicapped Independent Men); Opportunity Plus, an employment agency for the disabled; and Learning How, Inc., an umbrella organization for the others and likewise dedicated to helping the disabled achieve their fullest potential in society.
SOPHIA BRACY HARRIS, Co-Founder of the Federation of Child Care Centers of Alabama (FOCAL)
As a young black girl growing up in Alabama during the 1960s, Sophia Bracy Harris came to learn from personal experience just how devastating racial prejudice could be, and never more so than when her own home was fire bombed after she and her sister became the first blacks to attend an all white high school in the area. While countless others would have considered the obstacles too great and the personal risks too frightening, Ms. Harris instead not only decided to fight back, but to make the quest for racial equality in general, and for improved living conditions and educational standards among low income black families in particular, her life's work. It was, in fact, this noble goal which in 1972 led her to co-found The Federation Child Care Centers of Alabama (FOCAL), devoted to combating state regulations threatening to even further reduce provisions for poorer black families. As Executive Director of FOCAL ever since, Ms. Harris has overseen and spear headed its evolution from a relatively small alliance of social crusaders to a sizeable and widely respected organization which to date has offered over ten thousand hours of instruction in early childhood care and education, lobbied successfully on the local and state levels and generated more than $20,000,000 for child care providers.
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