Author: WOAmemphis17

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Carol Barnett

Women of Achievement
2011

DETERMINATION
for a woman who solved a glaring problem despite
widespread inertia, apathy or ignorance around her:

Carol Barnett

Through the perseverance and determination of Carol Barnett, hundreds of the brightest Memphis City Schools students have been given the opportunity to attend summer academic enrichment programs through the Rotary Prep Program. In 1985, Carol began working with the Memphis Rotary Club, bringing the Prep program with her. When she started her work, 15 students from 8 Memphis City High Schools attended 5 different summer programs. At the end of her tenure as program director in 2007, 116 students from 22 Memphis City High Schools attended 30 different summer academic enrichment programs. Additionally, summer scholarships for these students rose from $129,000 in 1998 to over $430,000 in 2007.

Now known as the Memphis PREP Program, the organization Carol led for 17 years has striven to take academically talented students out of their own environments and expose them to new places, people, and academic demands. Students often make statements such as one from a recent attendee, “I believe the most important lesson I learned was that America is definitely not alone in the world…There is a whole world outside of Memphis, Tennessee and Prep School opened my eyes to that world. I now have the confidence to know that I have what it takes to compete.”

Reaching these students has taken extraordinary determination. Working with and educating guidance counselors who often did not know about the program, Carol reached out so all talented students would have opportunities. She developed a core group of volunteers to assist her, and her enthusiasm spread to them, and inspired a similar level of dedication within that group. Additionally, Carol was determined that these talented students would go on to college, and she has counseled and worked with them toward that end, developing a relationship with the Junior League to provide college exam preparation classes and seminars, and most recently to obtain foundation support for a dedicated college counselor.

The results of Carol’s determination are astounding. Every year, multiple students are accepted to Ivy League schools and other top tier colleges and universities. Local alums include Judge Lee Coffee, neurosurgeon Dr. Darel Butler, Schering Plough chemist and Memphis PREP Board member Ed Vaughn, seven current Memphis City Schools principals, a multitude of teachers and assistant principals, and MCS labor attorney Kimkea Harris.

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Onie Johns

Women of Achievement
2010

DETERMINATION
for a woman who solved a glaring problem despite
widespread inertia, apathy or ignorance around her:

Onie Johns

Onie Johns is living proof that steely determination can reside in the personality of someone who nevertheless is the very model of serenity. This quiet and humble woman began a journey that has turned her into an example for anyone who wishes to break down barriers between rich and poor, black and white, fortunate and unfortunate.

The journey began when Onie enrolled in a Servant Leadership class in order to explore her faith and spirituality. Taking what she learned in this experience to heart, it soon wasn’t enough to travel from the suburbs to the inner city, and then back to the comforts and safety of home. She felt drawn — indeed, she felt a calling — to make an inner city neighborhood her home. And so, Onie sold her house in Germantown and purchased a modest home in Binghamton where she immediately began working to improve her new community. She called it Caritas House, opening her door for aid, shelter and reconciliation.

Soon she acquired an old Masonic Lodge building in the heart of the neighborhood and founded Caritas Village, a friendly café and cultural center seeking to “break down walls of hostility between and among people and cultures, and to build bridges of love and trust between the rich and those made poor.”

And Caritas Village has become exactly that. People of every stripe, background and situation can be found there on any given day, sipping coffee or tea, sharing lunch, holding a meeting, taking a class, hanging art, exhibiting photography, learning a skill, or just being neighborly. Programs aim to help in job networking, skill training, healthful living, and self-worth development.

Binghamton once was a thriving blue-collar neighborhood built around a one-time boxcar factory. The area went into steep decline as the interstate highway approached Overton Park. The highway never was finished, but Binghamton almost was finished as a community. Now all that is changing.

Caritas Village has become a catalyst for change, a ministry where being present in community is the most important and faithful ingredient to success. And success is defined by the number and kind of human relationships that are built and sustained.

Caritas is a Latin word for charity — charity in the classic and in the biblical sense, which is not just feeling love for others, but acting in love for others. This is the basis of Onie Johns’ determination — a resolve to live out her faith where ignorance and apathy often prevail, where disunity and self-destructive behaviors have hurt a community that with help still can regain its self-respect and dignity.

As Onie herself says, Caritas Village is a place “where small miracles happen every day.”

Onie Johns truly is a model servant leader whose bright determination is solving a glaring problem every day as the sun comes up.

 

Onie Johns retired from her position as Executive Director of Caritas Village on February 4, 2017.

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Nancy Williams

Women of Achievement
2009

DETERMINATION
for a woman who solved a glaring problem despite
widespread inertia, apathy or ignorance around her:

Nancy Williams

Child sexual abuse. We don’t like to say the words aloud, much less talk about the problem. We don’t want to believe it happens in our community, to children we know, perpetuated by people we know. Yes, we know that it does happen, but not around here.

That was the case when Nancy Williams took on the job of director of the fledgling Memphis Child Advocacy Center in 1994 and that is the case today. Yet Nancy’s “dogged, persistent” determination has led to comprehensive services that make a huge impact on the lives of young victims and their families in Memphis and Shelby County and, that serve as a model for similar services all over the nation.

In 1994, Nancy Williams was completing a graduate degree while working full time and, with the incalculable help of husband Robert, raising two teenagers. Graduate school was nourishing her soul and she knew that her future work needed to be something that engaged her whole being. Having met the first Child Advocacy Center (CAC) Director Nancy Chandler through the Human Services Co-op founded by WA Recipient Jeanne Dreifus, she called to wish her well in her next job and ask who would be the Center’s next Director and just like that, Nancy Williams’ resume, name not attached, was in the mix.

Two months later she was on the job and two months after that, she wrote a therapeutic email of the “why didn’t you tell me” sort. Nancy was stunned by the apathy and inertia. People just didn’t want to believe that child sexual abuse existed. Organizations and institutions are slow to change. According to Nancy, it was like trying to move through a swamp, excruciatingly slow and filled with hidden obstacles. But Nancy came to CAC after seven years with the Mental Health Association and a brief stint with the Children Museum. She was used to hard work.

So, determined to make a difference, she rolled up her sleeves and did just that. In 1994 the Center had 4 employees and a budget of $350,000. Today there are 23 employees plus 43 from related agencies sharing the same site. And the annual budget is over $1,600,000.

But this story isn’t just about numbers; it’s also about the changes in service that these numbers represent. Nancy was determined to improve the experience of those children brave enough to speak up and look for a way out of their horrific situations. Solving child sexual abuse can’t be done by any single agency. It requires a group of agencies working together to reach that common goal.

Recognizing that urban environments come with a whole set of communication problems, Nancy decided that bringing the necessary groups to one site would vastly improve the results for young clients and their families. She used her vast diplomatic skills to push her vision forward. After all, she says, “Modern technologies even email can’t replace a cup of coffee.”

Now in addition to CAC’s staff, on-site offices include those of the Memphis Police Department, Children’s Protective Services and the District Attorney’s Office. The multi-disciplinary approach includes intervention, investigation, prosecution and treatment of abuse. Each day representatives from all four groups meet as a team to discuss each case and do the best possible work for each child. Cases now total over 2,000 annually. And thanks to the introduction of a revolutionary tracking system, each case can be followed and results used to improve outcomes for those children who follow. Forensic interviewing and counseling are done on site. Families enter the lobby and are immediately greeted with smiles, friendly voices and a wall of teddy bears of all shapes and sizes. Families are shown to a child-friendly waiting area and kids are offered snacks. And each young client receives the teddy bear of his or her choice for each visit.

Under Nancy’s leadership, prevention education has moved to the forefront. In 1994 there were age-appropriate presentations for 725 school children. In 2008, over 10,000 individuals, including children, teachers and parents, saw presentations by both staff and volunteers. Believing that child abuse is preventable only with the help of the community and wanting to make the problem more visible, in 2002 the Children’s Memorial Flag was raised for the first time. This flag flies every April in honor of Child Abuse Prevention Month and flies for one week each week following the death by abuse of a child in Memphis and Shelby County.

In conjunction with the flag-raisings, the Center sends email alerts that are heart-stopping. Sadly, most deaths are of children under one year. Realizing that where there is child abuse there is often domestic violence, Nancy was at the table when discussion of a Family Safety Center began. She secured approval of the board for the CAC to become the incubator for the new program, which will open its doors later this year. Asked how she’s accomplished so much, Nancy responds, “Not by myself.” She mentioned the importance of finding people who are in places who can make a difference and calling upon those people. Just take a look at the incredible staff and board of the Child Advocacy Center and you’ll see that Nancy has a great gift in finding those people. She describes many instances of the right people putting themselves in the right place at the right time. She says that while some people believe in coincidence, she believes in god-incidence and quotes Margaret Meade, saying, “A small group of people can do amazing things.”

Whatever the reasons, we know that it is Nancy Williams’ determination that drives Memphis Child Advocacy Center in its vision is a community where children are safe, families are strong, and victims become children again. And we salute her.

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Rebecca Jane Edwards

Women of Achievement
2008

DETERMINATION
for a woman who solved a glaring problem despite
widespread inertia, apathy or ignorance around her:

Rebecca Jane Edwards

After a decade of being told “black audiences won’t support the arts” and “Memphis arts supporters aren’t interested in attending diverse performances,” Rebecca Edwards got tired of hearing these things and established the Cultural Development Foundation of Memphis. For more than seven years, the CDFM has been bringing a culturally diverse range of performances to culturally diverse audiences that mirror the rainbow that is Memphis.

Rebecca Edwards was born loving music. In the mid-seventies, she joined the band at Sherwood and began playing the clarinet. Now — usually clarinets play harmony but Rebecca has always been determined to go her own way and consistently, over the objections of her band director, she played the melody. Finally the poor man gave up and added the phrase, “Ms. Edwards, your solo, please,” to his standard conductor’s spiel.

Rebecca continued on her own path in the Wooddale High School band. It being the late 70s with integration still fairly new, the band director decided that rather than rank the four African-American clarinetists, he’d name them all to fourth chair. Still dissatisfied with playing harmony, Rebecca insisted upon being given the opportunity to move to a higher chair — second, home of the clarinet melody!

It was in high school that Rebecca was introduced to theatre. Wooddale’s truant officer came to Greek Club looking not for truants but for volunteers to usher at the Orpheum. Rebecca went and for the first time experienced professional theatre. She was so caught up in the music of My Fair Lady that she missed the plot. She volunteered for the next few shows so that she could absorb everything about the play! During her junior year at Christian Brothers College, her English lit professor required the class to see The Emperor Jones at Circuit Playhouse. For the first time, Rebecca saw a theatre production with a black protagonist. She was amazed. In the late 80s, after entering the corporate world, her regional manager insisted that she see the first Memphis production of Cats. She loved it.

Having spent lots of money for an up-close seat and parking, not having a date, and remembering that ushers see the show for free, she embarked on her life as a volunteer usher.

She’d see shows over and over, always thrilled. But she grew increasingly aware of the lack of diversity in audience and productions. She mentioned this regularly to many theatre types and was consistently told that African-Americans wouldn’t pay to see the arts and that typical Memphis audiences (European-American sorts) weren’t interested in seeing diversity on stage. After years of unsuccessfully trying to convince local companies to do something, she took on the mission herself and formed the Cultural Development Foundation of Memphis.

The first show was Sing, Sister, Sing. It was a big hit. But immediately she started receiving calls from educators saying, “What about the kids? They need art, too.” And so, knowing from personal experience that this is true and that art is a cultural bridge, she decided to make sure that every Cultural Development production would include student performances.

Since 2000, CDFM has presented over 65 performances seen by over 67,000 people. Half have been young people under the age of 18. Rebecca’s dream is for CDFM to have 1,000 subscribers and to get a big NEA grant. CDFM is currently planning “Breaking Bread; Breaking Barriers,” which seeks to pair families of different cultural heritage to share a meal together and then attend a performance. With Rebecca’s determination, we’re sure that this next arts bridge will be built.

 

Rebecca Edwards is now the Executive Director of Cultural Arts For Everyone (CAFE), a presenting arts organization with a reputation of presenting high-quality, diverse programming that educate, entertain, and engage students, new audiences, and underserved communities.

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Regina D. Walker

Women of Achievement
2006

DETERMINATION
for a woman who solved a glaring problem despite
widespread inertia, apathy or ignorance around her:

Regina D. Walker

Regina D. Walker has served for the past 20 years as Senior Vice President of Community Initiative with the United Way of Memphis. Her dedication and determination have provided the resources to build stronger and healthier not-for-profit agencies and communities. Securing funds and services involves some of the least glamorous aspects of community service, yet Regina has dedicated her life to making sure that communities get both the fiscal and strategic support they need to thrive.

Though non-profit community organizations are more in need than ever, they start out with every disadvantage. The federal and state support for vital community organizations has been cut dramatically over the course of Regina’s career. Regina, however, has been determined not to let disadvantaged citizens remain on the chopping block. Her work has sustained countless community programs in the Mid-South. In 1999 alone, her Community Initiative Department generated over $6 million in grants and in-kind services.

Regina graduated from Virginia State University in Petersburg, Virginia, with a B.S. in psychology, but she began her career in the not-for-profit sector as a VISTA volunteer with a home health agency in Portsmouth, Virginia. She worked for the United Way of South Hampton Roads in Norfolk for five years, and at the Portsmouth Area United Way for one year. She came to Memphis in 1984 to work for United Way and began volunteering for countless non-profit boards. By 1987, she was a graduate of Leadership Memphis.

Throughout her career, she’s emphasized the need to provide training tools and technical assistance that help non-profits achieve sustainable growth. Her passion is for community building. She set up a venture program that set aside funds for which community groups that weren’t members of the United Way could apply. And even more importantly, these groups could apply for training.

She is master of identifying resources that are already available thereby keeping new organizations from having to create themselves from scratch. Her work connected United Way agencies with a new tier of grassroots organizations and thereby revitalized the entire community. Working in the background, she keeps connected to ideas and resources that are bubbling up through the system and elsewhere.

Her work reaches far beyond the United Way. She has taken time to insure that more Memphians take advantage of the Earned Income Tax Credit. She worked with organizations, businesses and faith-based communities to provide equipment, training, site centers and volunteers to help the disadvantaged complete their tax returns.

In her own neighborhood organization, The Vollintine-Evergreen Community Association, she is respected as a mediator who helps get potentially divisive issues out, discussed and resolved.

Regina has also been a strong advocate for better education for children and better training for teachers. She is on the National Board of Parents for Public Schools. She’s served on planning teams for the Memphis City Schools. And in her typical hands on way, she’s served with her daughter as a volunteer reader with the “Reading Bridge” program at the MLK Head Start Center.

Regina Walker’s drive and determination keeps her seeking out new resources for our community. Her work will contribute to the ongoing health and vitality of the Mid-South for years to come.

 

Regina Walker continues to serve the Memphis area in other non-profit organizations. She is the interim executive director at First 8 Memphis. She is also the president/CEO of R D Walker & Associates, a health practitioner business.

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Lisa K. Jennings

Women of Achievement
2012

INITIATIVE
for a woman who seized the
opportunity to use her talents and created her own future:

Dr. Lisa Jennings

Lisa Jennings is that rare individual who is both an internationally known researcher and teacher and also a highly successful entrepreneur and founder of two businesses: Ariste Medical and CirQuest Labs.

She started on this path as a child, reading articles in the World Book Encyclopedia and finding herself drawn to the ones on science. In the sixth grade, she traveled with her family in Kingsport to take her older sister to Knoxville to attend the University of Tennessee. In the college bookstore, Lisa found herself in the biology section reading a purple book about cells. Her parents actually bought it for her. Lisa’s interest in science continued through high school, where her science projects won prizes and funded a large part of her undergraduate schooling at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, where she majored in botany and developed an interest in cell plant cell biology. She and her husband then moved to Memphis so that he could attend medical school. They’ve been here ever since.

After getting a Masters in Cell Biology at the University of Memphis, Lisa did research for her doctoral degree at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital’s Biochemistry Department and at the University of California’s Gladstone Foundation Laboratories in San Francisco. She received her PhD in Biochemistry from UTHSC in Memphis.

In 1985, she joined the faculty at the University of Tennessee Memphis and established a competitive research laboratory. In 1999, Lisa initiated the Vascular Biology Program at UTHSC and became its first director. In 2001 the center was awarded the highly competitive Center of Excellence status, granted to programs designed to spearhead new research efforts, pull faculty together across disciplines and establish collaborative working relationships. The success of the program resulted in increased funding from the National Institutes of Health, the American Heart Association and others.

Collaboration may be one of Lisa Jennings’ favorite words.

In 1999-2000, she founded and became director of TAM, the Tennessee, Arkansas and Mississippi Cardiovascular Research Consortium for cardiologists . The purpose of the group is to be an avenue to allow area cardiologists working in collaboration with the UT Vascular Biology Center to provide the most current therapies for their patients, through access to clinical trials.

In 2007 Lisa formed Ariste Medical, a biotech company whose mission is to develop drug delivery medical implant systems that will reduce infections and scar tissue formation resulting in better outcomes for patients. Patents are pending and operations should start this year.

In 2008 Lisa founded CirQuest Lab. The doors opened in 2009. A life science service company, CirQuest guides researchers and pharmaceutical and device companies through the rigorous preclinical and clinical phases of clinical trials on the road to successful commercialization. Highly collaborative, the group does such things as locate sites, put together screening questionnaires, conducts site visits and assist or oversee trials. Though located in Memphis, CirQuest Lab has clients throughout the United States and overseas.

Lisa was the first PhD to receive a tenured faculty appointment in UTHSC’s Department of Medicine and the first woman designated director of a multidisciplinary research program. She now holds joint appointments in the departments of Molecular Science, Biomedical Engineering and Surgery. Known internationally for her role in vascular biology research, she serves as a mentor to both medical students and graduate students.

When asked about how she evolved from researcher to entrepreneur, Lisa says that she’s always been interested in translating research results into application. There are people who research well and people who run trials well – but these are not necessarily the same people. She wanted to help bridge those gaps and has found ways to do so. She’d spent 25 years working with industry, sitting on advisory boards, and when she decided to go into business, she found a mentor to serve as her business coach. She jumped right in and learned to think like a CEO. She now has friends whose parents have benefited from her work and says that it is rewarding, when something you were involved in a saved life.

Lisa Jennings took the initiative to translate her love of science into businesses that save lives and for that we honor her.

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Jenny Odle Madden

Women of Achievement
2011

INITIATIVE
for a woman who seized the
opportunity to use her talents and created her own future:

Jenny Odle Madden

Jenny Odle Madden was in her first play with a speaking part in third grade – a Thanksgiving program at a Florida elementary school. She began then to find her voice in the theater and – lucky for Memphis – she never quit.

In junior high in Texas and then at White Station High School, Jenny sought out the competitive speech and drama clubs. With her BFA in performance from the University of Memphis, Jenny joined the Playhouse on the Square resident company and won awards for her acting. She also served in development jobs, did voice-over work and has worked a bit in film.

A narrative theater piece by University of Memphis professor Gloria Baxter and her students inspired Jenny to look at Southern women’s writing as a source for a stage piece that might win her and a friend a spot at the Fringe Festival in Scotland. The students had used Eudora Welty’s often-humorous stories.

Jenny says, “I’m a comedian by nature. I said, ‘hey why don’t we find a couple of short stories and go to Edinburgh?’” They worked from May 1995 using stories by Welty and Bobbie Ann Mason and raising money under Jackie Nichols and the Playhouse on the Square. When they needed to name their enterprise for a grant application, they came up with Voices of the South. In August 1996 they made the trip to Scotland for two weeks.

“The company is now 16 years old,” Jenny says, “and now it means all kinds of voices. At the time it was two girls who wanted to go to Scotland! My whole thing was – I want to perform.”

After enduring her parents’ divorce when she was very young, she saw her mother persevere and stand strong. Compared to that, she says, “a theater company is easy. Why can’t we do this? I just kept on. If I heard ‘no’ I turned it around to ‘why not?’”

In 1998, she applied for non-profit status and she became executive producer, a post she held until December last year while also performing regularly.

Voices of the South got a big break in 1999 when Gloria Baxter was asked to create a piece from the journals of Wyoming environmentalists Olauf and Mardy Murie. She collected some of her former students who all became part of the Voices of the South for the Wyoming project, which was performed in 2000 and 2002. During those years the company galvanized into a bigger group, adapting original texts with Southern flare.

The company has done 30 to 40 original scripts since then, including a commissioned piece that they toured across Alaska in December 2010.

One of the most popular shows is Sister Myotis’s Bible Camp, which in June 2010 became the first Memphis theater production to perform off-Broadway in a four-week run at the Abingdon Theater. Jenny performs as Sister Ima Lone in the Sister Myotis stories which are actually three full-length shows featuring a devout and over-the-top church lady who cautions Christians against the evils of thong underwear – among other gospel lessons!

Jenny’s world changed last April when she had surgery for lung cancer. She made the decision in December to step down as executive producer, remain a company member and have more time for her two children and to maintain her part-time job as theater director at St. Mary’s School.

“What a great testament to me and to them that Southern Voices can survive,” Jenny says. Anyone with a project can come incubate their work. “It’s for everybody.”

Accolades continue to come. Cicada, written by Voices of the South artistic director Jerre Dye, is the winner of the 2011 Bryan Family Foundation Award for Drama from the Fellowship of Southern Writers. Set in rural Mississippi, this coming-of-age ghost story is deeply rooted in the life of a small Southern family on the verge of transformation.

Voices of the South began as a creative way to launch a fun trip and it has persevered and thrived as an ever changing, growing enterprise that showcases excellent talent and entertainment.

Jenny Odle Madden is a gifted performer, whose talent could have taken her to New York or Hollywood, but she is committed to doing this art in Memphis.
Thanks to her – and her artistic and business skills – we have a robust and ever-surprising theater company especially attuned to Southern voices.

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Sonia Louden Walker

Women of Achievement
2010

INITIATIVE
for a woman who seized the
opportunity to use her talents and created her own future:

Sonia Louden Walker

If ever a life story defined initiative – it is the story of Sonia Louden Walker.
Teacher, social worker, TV personality, community activist, nonprofit executive and now ordained minister – Sonia Walker has built and rebuilt herself in distinct careers that make perfect blended sense within the basic deeply held values that define her.

Community healer, bridge builder, connector and encourager – these too describe this remarkable, vivacious and gifted woman. It doesn’t really matter to Sonia Walker what the job title is – she will make it into what it needs to be in order to be of good purpose.

Her good friend Nancy Bogatin wrote: “Her persona incorporates a sensitivity which transcends her ambition and yes, a spirituality which, without imposing it upon others, she shares, often soothing, always smoothing the way for so many who come within her aegis.”

When Sonia Walker arrived in Memphis in 1974, mother of three sons and wife of the new president of LeMoyne-Owen College, she had already had a career as an educator and social worker in school, hospital and agency settings. And she had enjoyed three years that she described on her resume as “home administrator. . .not gainfully employed” but engaged in “family launching.”

In Memphis, she took a job as director of community relations at WHBQ-TV, beginning a 16-year term as manager of public affairs programming and community service projects for the ABC affiliate. She served on public boards, hosted “A Closer Look” and delivered editorials, effectively addressing social issues and solutions. Sonia was not just another pretty face on TV — her fingerprints are on innovations from Adopt-A-School to Food for Families as she used that job to lead community solutions across the spectrum.

In 1990 and 1991, she coordinated the Black Family Reunion Celebration in a nine-state area. Seeing another need among the 7,000 members of her church, she created a spiritually based, culturally sensitive counseling program at Mississippi Boulevard Christian Church that within a year had a building of its own. Out of a lifelong commitment to education and children, she staffed and equipped the first office of Partners in Public Education and continued to lead the non-profit school reform and funding program for five years.

Along the way Sonia served on numerous community boards and advisory committees – from the Chamber of Commerce to the Literacy Foundation to the Memphis Jobs Conference and the National Conference of Christians and Jews and beyond. She is a founding board member of Leadership Memphis and was the first woman and the first person of color to chair it. She is an honorary trustee of the Community Foundation of Greater Memphis.

She did all this while supporting the independence of her husband, Walter, who was diagnosed with MS just three years after the family moved to Memphis from Chicago.

Having flirted with the idea of religion studies for years, in 2002 she entered Memphis Theological Seminary part-time, vowing to complete her studies slowly, with no student loans — but before she turned 80!

Two years ago, she graduated from Memphis Theological Seminary and was ordained by the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). This daughter of a minister in Columbus, Ohio, finally fully assumed the ministry she had felt and lived since childhood.

Her Memphis journey had flowed from first Memphis Kwanzaa Queen, in 1976, to graduation cum laude and with the Hoyt Hickman award for Excellence in Liturgical Scholarship from Memphis Theological Seminary in 2008.

Sonia has excelled in a half-dozen fields and in all she found ways to use her unique talents and skills for the benefit of others. For her unending, passionate, discerning, gracious service to our community, we salute Sonia Walker, 2010 Woman of Achievement for Initiative.

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Ruth Lomo

Women of Achievement
2008

INITIATIVE
for a woman who seized the
opportunity to use her talents and created her own future:

Ruth Lomo

From her birthplace in Sudan, to her adopted home in Memphis, Ruth Lomo has taken the initiative to use her gifts and skills to improve the lives of the women and children around her.

Ruth was born in Sudan in 1970. Coming from a family that understood the value of education, she attended high school and then had the unusual opportunity to participate in vocational training. She considered the three options, looked around, recognized a need and enrolled in the carpentry program, where she was the only woman.

In 1993, during Ruth’s 23rd year, violence erupted between the Sudanese government and rebel forces. Fearing for their lives, Ruth took her own five children, her sister’s six children and one other child and walked for five days to the border with Zaire. From there they crossed into Uganda where they reached the relative safety of a refugee camp. In 1995, her homeland still unsafe, Ruth searched for other options for herself and the children. Discovering better opportunities and services, they journeyed to another camp in Kenya.

The intent of refugee camps is to provide housing on a short-term basis, but due to the on-going violence in Sudan, Ruth’s family stayed six years, until 2001 when their situation was evaluated by the United Nations. Clearly it was not safe to return to their home, so Ruth and the children came to the United States under the auspices of the Associated Catholic Charities Refugee Resettlement program.

Arriving in Memphis, she and the children were provided with a social worker and a place to live. She found work as a carpenter and quickly learned to use the power tools now available to her.

Shorty after getting settled, she managed to enroll all the children in her care into parochial schools. Having had little opportunity for education in the camps and speaking little English, they were nonetheless placed in grades more equivalent with their age than their level of learning. Recognizing this, Ruth found them tutors through a program at Second Presbyterian Church. Seeing the difference this made in the lives of her own children, she started arranging tutoring for other refugee children.

Fluent in several languages, Ruth also helped other women from Sudan, Afghanistan and Somalia learn the skills they needed in their new home – how to drive, enroll in English language classes, navigate a new culture, help their children succeed in school.

Ruth’s experiences had given her a clear vision of what women needed – an organization to support and teach refugees how to advocate for themselves and their children. She created the International Community of Refugee Women and Children out of her own dogged determination that it needed to exist, and with support from organizations such as Catholic Charities, the United Methodist Neighborhood Centers and her own church community.

Eventually Ruth left the carpentry business to create her own home-cleaning business. She still devotes much of her time to the ICRWC, continuing to oversee the organization’s after-school tutoring program for children.

Each morning Ruth takes her children to school, does home cleaning in the day and industrial cleaning at night. Four afternoons a week, she goes to the tutoring center to babysit so that mothers can attend English classes. She gets home at midnight or later and then gets up the next day and does it all again.

She continues to network with other refugee coalitions in other areas, learning and sharing with other women what she has learned. The refugee women in Ruth’s program wanted to tell us about Ruth. Using their growing English skills, they spoke with shining eyes and they had a lot to say. They described her as a mother, a sister.

“You meet her and you feel like you’ve always known her. She talks with us about everything and she takes care of us. We can always find her and she can always find us.”

“She’s lovely. I’m standing with her forever.”

Ruth Lomo is building new lives for her family and for many others. She is in every way a Woman of Achievement for Initiative.

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Nancy Hale Lawhead

Women of Achievement
2007

INITIATIVE
for a woman who seized the
opportunity to use her talents and created her own future:

Nancy Hale Lawhead

Nancy Lawhead left her native Kentucky in the late 1960s determined to see some places and help some people.

In 1970, after a few years spent working in New York, Nancy found her way to Memphis. And lucky for us she did. She has used her University of Kentucky social work degree and eventually two master’s degrees to help our most vulnerable citizens.

Her decision to put service over self has, for the past 35 years, helped create a better future for thousands of men, women and children – from troubled, delinquent teenage girls in Brooklyn to homeless mentally ill people in Midtown Memphis, to neglected, abused and at-risk children, to the tiniest of newborns in the neonatal intensive care unit of the Med.

She says, “I wanted to be in a helping profession. I saw the plight of the mentally ill as a young social worker in the mid 70s, because of the stigma of mental illness. People, if they get cancer, can get treatment, but not if they are mentally ill, homeless, walking the streets hearing voices.”

She joined the United Way of Grater Memphis as a planning and research assistant for child welfare, juvenile delinquency and teenage pregnancy programs. Five years later, Nancy moved to the University of Tennessee Mental Health Center, in charge of program development and grant writing. In 1978 she was named executive director of the UT Mental Health Center. This was the era when mental patients were being “deinstitutionalized” and put out of facilities such as Western State Mental Hospital to fend for themselves.

Nancy passionately believed patients needed a community mental health center that would connect them to medications, housing, transportation, and whatever else they needed to have a normal life.

Dissatisfied with services being provided to poor Memphians, Nancy in 1980 located a school building on 2 ½ acres at the corner of Danny Thomas and Pontotoc, raised the needed money and founded Midtown Mental Health Center. Renovation of the old school alone cost $400,000.

She followed that feat with development of an on-site, 24/7 Crisis Stabilization Unit for people in serious psychiatric crisis.

For 7 years, working virtually around the clock, Nancy led the Center as executive director.

After a two-year break in the private sector, she returned to public service in 1990 as executive director of the Memphis and Shelby County Community Health Agency. For five years, she worked to improve access to primary care for poor people.

In 1995, Shelby County Mayor Bill Morris tapped Nancy to become special advisor to the mayor for health policy at national, state and local levels. She worked on release plans for Shelby County Jail inmates who were mentally ill or had substance abuse problems while grappling with what she saw as the criminalization of the mentally ill by managed care health systems.

In 1998, Nancy brokered the joint venture between the Memphis Shelby County Health Department and The Med. The agreement linked their clinics into a primary care network called the Health Loop, a $15 million operation and the largest primary care provider in Shelby County.

Now serving her third mayor, Mayor A C Wharton, Nancy earlier this year moved into the Urban Child Institute where she will head the county’s efforts to address early childhood and infant mortality issues. She will advocate for more funding and new policies and coordinate local efforts to stop the high rate of infant deaths.

Nancy Lawhead’s passion for helping the helpless led her to a career of service that has made thousands of lives healthier and happier and has made Memphis a better place to live.