Category: Initiative

WOMEN OF ACHIEVEMENT
2017

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

Kamekio Lewis

Intimate partner violence is a phrase social services and law enforcement use to talk about the abuse perpetrated in marriage or “romantic relationships.” More often it’s covered by the phrase domestic violence.

Yet most victims of that violence do not think of themselves as victims or as having anything to do with domestic or intimate partner violence. They are just coping with a volatile or difficult or chaotic boyfriend, husband, girlfriend or partner.

Kamekio Lewis survived a two-year abusive relationship, moved to Memphis and then realized as she saw news reports that she in fact was a survivor of domestic violence.

She says, “I never knew the word domestic violence before. I left a violent relationship and didn’t want to talk about it again. Here, I saw it on TV and happening in Memphis and I saw I needed to tell my story.”

Kamekio has published a book – “Looking4Love…In All the Wrong Places”– and written and produced a play based on her experience. And she is taking the initiative to develop services for women who have been damaged by vicious relationships and require housing, shelter, clothes and employment to recover and renew their lives.

Kamekio grew up in Camden, Ark., in a low income household where she became the first generation college student. She joined the Army because she wanted to do more, see more and be more.

She served for about 8 years and was based in Kansas when she experienced violence with a boyfriend. She moved to Memphis 12 years ago to be closer to family, intending to just not think or talk about the abuse.

But she seemed to hear about domestic violence all around Memphis. She says, “I saw the opportunity for me to share my story. There is a great need in the community. Women are broken. Many are dealing with depression and PTSD and I want to help them set goals for themselves. Once you set personal and professional goals and empower us as women, we are ready to leave. I want to empower women and give them the tools they need to transition out.”
Trained as a certified rehabilitation counselor, Kamekio launched A New Day Rehabilitation and Counseling Services, a non-profit agency. She volunteered with clients of Agape Child & Family Services in Hickory Hill Community Center and Autumn Ridge Complex – helping with homework, job readiness and financial aid information.

Her nominator, Bettye Boone, with the National Coalition of 100 Black Women Memphis Chapter, says, “Ms. Lewis has gone beyond simply providing referrals to other places for women in transition and/or trying to leave domestic violence relationships. She literally takes the next steps with them and gets others involved with her and her organization to help the women out.”

For example, a few years ago a couple with four school age children were living in their car. Someone directed them to Kamekio who paid for a hotel room for the family and then called on the Coalition and some other groups to assist as well. She helped the parents get work and to continue to live at the hotel for several months until they were back on their feet.

Knowing how crucial housing is to women and families in transition, Kamekio is striving to renovate and open a shelter in a house that was donated to her organization. Share Life Community Network is her program that is seeking partnerships and sponsors to repair the house, operate a clothes closet, offer resume coaching and career planning.

Kamekio is raising three sons and working full time providing job readiness training and job placement services at Case Management Inc., one of the largest mental health facilities in West Tennessee.

Yet her passion to help others succeed is demonstrated through her countless volunteer hours and outreach ministries. Kamekio Lewis’s initiative is bringing solace and encouragement to women beaten down by physical and emotional abuse, offering hope and a brighter future to them and their children.

WOMEN OF ACHIEVEMENT
2016

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

Bennetta Nelson West

In 1982, Bennetta Nelson West used her education in business management, her long-standing interest and participation in the arts, and her passion and understanding of the local African American art community to found the Memphis Black Arts Alliance, the city’s first regional arts and cultural organization which celebrates and nurtures artistic excellence and black heritage.

Born in the John Gaston Colored Wing Hospital in the 1940s, the only child of parents she describes as teachers, philosophers and entrepreneurs, Bennetta Nelson West knows a thing or two about racism and sexism. As a Girl Scout, Bennie, as she is known, and the rest of her troop were only able to enter through the front door of Girl Scout Headquarters, then located on Union Avenue, because the troop leader Mrs. Arvon Thigpen could pass for white. After graduation from mighty Melrose, she attended Tuskegee Institute. She wanted to own a hotel and restaurant but was told by a professor, “nobody’s going to let a colored woman do that. You should become a dietitian, work in a hospital and marry a doctor.” So she wasn’t admitted to that program her first year.

Determined to get in and against her mother’s wishes but with her father’s support, she came home and started as a “salad girl” at the old Chisca Plaza Hotel Restaurant downtown and ended up as its first Black waitress. With a letter from the Chisca’s owner, she was finally admitted to the program of her choice and graduated with a degree in Institutional Management & Foods & Nutrition. In her first professional job as a dietitian at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Memphis, she was only allowed to work with black patients.

She married and moved to California. Her husband didn’t want her to work. According to Bennie, he only wanted a “trophy wife,” but that didn’t stop her. She got a job anyway, in the Food Services Department of Disneyland. After orientation she was assigned a Mammy outfit to wear in a New Orleans style restaurant. Anyone who knows Bennie won’t be surprised at what happened next. She quit.

Unhappy in marriage and not satisfied with her career, she got a National Institutes of Health Fellowship and moved to New York City to attend Columbia University to pursue a Master’s Degree. She stayed a decade.
There, between 1968 and 1978, Bennie became active in the black arts movement. She studied and participated in the theatre, dance, and visual arts industry, settling on a part-time career as a potter. Seeking to merge her arts and business interests, she received additional training in Arts Management from the New School of Social Research in New York City and the Arts Management in Community Institute through the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund and the National Guild of Community Schools of the Arts.

Upon return to Memphis in 1978, Bennie joined the Continuing Education Department of what was then Shelby State Community College. While there she organized the First National African American Crafts Conference & Jubilee. This conference became a precursor to the National Black Arts Festival.

In 1982, while continuing as a college administrator and with the support of fellow faculty members Yvonne Robinson Jones, Patty Lechman, and 2005 Woman of Achievement for Initiative Mahaffey White, Bennie organized artists and arts groups to found the Memphis Black Arts Alliance, Inc.

Her biggest challenges included resistance from major arts funders and other emerging arts groups, disputes between artistic egos and struggles across disciplines. As is the case with many women, balancing family and work was also an issue.

Since its beginning, the Memphis Black Arts Alliance has created a venue for the development and showcasing of local and nationally recognized black artists. MBAA has employed more than 300 local artists and provided over 3,000 youth, families and adults the opportunity to learn, master and showcase the rudiments of the arts with well-trained, dedicated and culturally inspired artists.

This year Memphis Black Arts Alliance, Inc. is entering its 34th year. And Bennetta Nelson West has just recently retired and passed the baton. Under new leadership, MBBA continues to grow and thrive, a very significant achievement in the life of an organization founded on one individual’s dream and drive.

For this, we applaud and honor Bennetta Nelson West for her initiative.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Women of Achievement
2006

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

Susan Stephenson

When Susan Stephenson was a second-grader in Chattanooga, she told her teacher she wanted to be a doctor.

Her teacher suggested that Susan was mistaken. What she meant was that she wanted to be a nurse. When Susan told the story at the dinner table that night, her father decided it was a time for a lesson about choosing her future.

The next day, he accompanied Susan to her classroom where he diplomatically explained to her teacher in the hallway that Susan could be a doctor, a nurse or whatever profession she chose. He made sure that Susan heard what he said.

That lesson about confidence and possibilities would guide Susan for the rest of her life.

She graduated summa cum laude from the University of Tennessee with a major in history and English. Her goal? To attend law school and become the first woman justice of the Supreme Court of the United States.

Sandra Day O’Connor would beat her to the bench, but Susan found another way to be the first woman in an influential spot.

The year before O’Connor joined the court, Susan moved to Memphis as the young wife of a student. She had spent half a school year teaching in Chattanooga, but couldn’t find a mid-year teaching job in Memphis. A friend suggested she try banking and sent her resume to First Tennessee Bank. The bank saw executive potential in the young college graduate and invited her to join the bank’s management training program.

That was in 1980. She more than realized her potential. Fifteen years later after being hired as a management trainee, Susan was named chairman, president, and chief executive officer of what was then Boatman’s Bank of Tennessee. She was the first woman to serve as CEO of a Memphis bank. That was in 1995. Just three years later, in a climate of mergers and acquisitions, Susan and Chip Dudley took a chance at organizing a new, independent bank – appropriately called Independent Bank. The bank is thriving today and offers special programs for women.

That reflection of personal values in the workplace is typical of Susan, said Ruby Bright, president of the Women’s Foundation for a Greater Memphis where Susan is chair-elect of the board.

“Susan stands on her beliefs and she walks her talk,” Ruby said. “She led her corporate board of directors to the decision over a year ago to be committed to paying a living wage to all of its employees.”

“She has broken many glass ceilings in a male-dominated field,” Ruby added. “She has certainly earned this recognition.”

Susan has worked with other community groups – from arts organizations to the American Cancer Society to Junior Achievement and the Leadership Academy – and she also takes time to share her experiences with other women. She emphasizes the power of confidence:

“Confidence is the steady assurance that something you want or need to happen will happen,” she once told a group of women.

“. . . You can change your life and the lives of people around you if you act with confidence.”

Women of Achievement
2004

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

Deanie Parker

Deanie Parker’s life has been filled with music. As a child she listened to Memphis radio station WDIA. Her days brimmed over with gospel, R&B and contemporary jazz, hosted by now-legendary DJs such as Nat D. Williams and Rufus Thomas. Her grandmother always had records on the old Victrola and Deanie listened and dreamed. Always imaginative, a broomstick was her microphone. When her family moved north, she missed the music and tuned in to Nashville’s WLAC to hear the voices of the Delta. She studied piano only to be whacked on the hands for playing B.B. King, Chuck Jackson and other popular music by ear!

The family returned to Memphis from southern Ohio in 1961. While attending Hamilton High School, Deanie formed a group called the Valadors and entered a talent contest at the Old Daisy Theatre on Beale. First prize: an audition at Stax. Advice from Stax founder Jim Stewart: “You have to have your own material.” With that, Deanie went home and started writing, first “My Imaginary Guy,’’ a regional success. Deanie’s career in the music business was underway.

She worked most of her senior year at the then-Satellite Record Shop. After graduation she spent a year as a DJ for WLOK before returning to Stax in 1964 to become its first publicist. One of only two office employees, she learned on the job while continuing to write for artists such as Carla Thomas, Albert King and the Staple Singers. One of the first female publicists in the music business, she gained new skills and used her salary to pay her university tuition. She credits the late Estelle Axton as a role model.

With the closing of Stax, Deanie went on to be promotions director for WPTY-TV, marketing director for Memphis in May and vice president of communications and marketing for The Med. But through the years, music remained her passion.

When offered the job of executive director for Soulsville, USA, a then-risky proposition, she jumped at the chance. Under her leadership the organization has thrived. People with mission and spirit that reflect that of the original Stax have collected priceless memorabilia for Memphis and the world to study and enjoy in the Stax Museum of American Soul Music, thus fulfilling Deanie’s lifelong dream of celebrating Memphis’ iconic status in American contemporary music. The Stax Music Academy reaches out to young musicians and brings them along while helping stabilize the community.

Through Deanie Parker’s initiative, the heart and soul of Stax – an essential and historic part of Memphis’ heart – lives on.

Women of Achievement
2003

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

Hazel Moore

Throughout Hazel Moore’s life, the need to express beauty both inside and out has guided her initiative. Remember sea-grass dolls? Well, Hazel does. From the time she was old enough to walk, she carried a soft-drink bottle with sisal attached for hair. Hazel’s hands braided, curled, parted, plaited and ponytailed anything that stood still long enough for her to do so. Long after other girls had put away their dolls, Hazel Moore was still shaping “hair life” out of every female relative in her vicinity.

Her hands found more to do. Hazel Moore’s family felt that she should become a nurse but Hazel felt otherwise. Instead she completed cosmetology college and became a licensed instructor. She had a lucrative practice at The Peabody Hotel, moved to Goldsmith’s and then on to another shop, but she wanted more. In 1973, she opened her first shop in Whitehaven. A second shop followed in 1984. Organizer of the first Tennessee Beautician’s Trade Show, Hazel has a loyal customer base. Mothers, daughters and now granddaughters come to her for the latest and best in hair fashions.

With her husband Jayne and their four daughters at the center of her life, Hazel Moore found still more work for her hands to do, this time in her community. And a grateful community has bestowed a bevy of unofficial titles including “Mayor of Whitehaven.”

She’s provided hands-on leadership in combating drugs, teen pregnancy and illiteracy. And she’s used her talents to promote community pride, encouraging citizens to participate and have fun. The Whitehaven Holiday Festival and the Community Health Fair are good examples.

A highly regarded speaker, Hazel was once asked by students after one of her talks, “Why can’t we have more things like this?” She responded, “You can!” So in 1993 she founded the Academy of Youth Empowerment. The organization works to help teens develop social skills, manage stress, and improve study habits, a Hazel Moore recipe for success.

Her hands have led to so many accomplishments and awards that a complete list would fill volumes. Some that best exemplify the handiwork of Hazel Moore include the Pioneer Memphis Business Award (1996), the American Heart Association Outstanding Volunteer Award (1998, 2001), the Black Business Association’s Benny Award (2002) and past presidency of the Friends of Whitehaven Branch Library.