2007 Nancy Susan Reynolds Award Winners

Click on the link below to view the 2007 Nancy Susan Reynolds Awards Videos

http://www.swiftwatermedia.com/NSR2007

2007 Award in the category of Advocacy

Susan Hill

Raleigh

Few subjects have created more controversy during the last decades than abortion, which has prompted religious indignation, political divisiveness, violence, and even murder.  Susan Hill has been in the midst of this maelstrom involving women’s health issues and the right of women to make decisions about their own bodies.

Hill remembers the days before Roe v. Wade when abortions were illegal.  There were cryptic notes on bulletin boards at the women’s college she attended directing students to persons who would help them end pregnancies.  She saw one friend return to school near death with a raging septic infection. At the same time poor women in rural areas were dying in tenant houses from botched abortions. As a social worker, she had special insights, and she understood the perils of the nation’s underground abortion world. 

One week after the Roe v Wade ruling in 1973, Susan Hill went from being a social worker to working in the first abortion clinic in Florida.  Two years later, she founded the National Women’s Health Organization, clinics and surgi-centers throughout the United States specializing in gynecological and abortion services. Since then she has been a leader in providing abortion services in underserved areas of the United States, including Mississippi, where she operates the only such facility in the state.

Her clinic in Raleigh, which is known for the quality of its services and the compassion and understanding its employees extend to its patients, is the scene of weekly protests. Demonstrators invaded her quiet, inner-city Raleigh residential neighborhood, harassing her and her neighbors with loud and outrageous conduct.

For every good reason, security concerns are a top priority.  Facilities operated by Hill have been the object of 17 arson attempts.  There have been 2,400 arrests at her facilities.  There are constant threats, which are not idle.  One staff physician, Dr. David Gunn, was murdered in Pensacola, Florida.  Death threats against Hill are posted across the Internet, and new ones appear daily.

Despite this, Hill remains an ebullient, positive personality who is loved and respected by her employees and associates.  Petite, but evidencing inner strength and conviction, she says she awakes excited each day about the role she plays in assuring that all women have access to safe abortion and gynecological services. In spite of Roe v. Wade, she does not take these rights for granted.

Hill and her organization have successfully sued anti-abortion foes more than 30 times in federal and state courts, and she has never lost. Some suits have involved zoning, advertising and the right of physical access to facilities by employees and clients. She received national attention for the landmark RICO suit she brought against anti-abortionists that applied anti-racketeering laws against them. This lawsuit went on for years and involved tremendous expense.  She also has testified before Congress regarding violence against abortion providers and before the Food and Drug Administration concerning RU-486, the abortion drug.

Susan Hill knows that a woman’s right to make decisions about her own body and to obtain legal abortions is a right that could easily be lost.  For that reason, while fending off death threats and operating clinics that require business acumen, she has remained on the offensive – a powerful ally of other pro-abortion activists and an inspiration for millions of American women who share her determination to preserve women’s reproductive rights. Even her ongoing battle with breast cancer, which she has waged with her usual optimism and determination, has not totally sidelined her

2007 Award in the category of Personal Service

Lillie Sanders

Magnolia

Lillie Sanders was surprised when a friend referred to her as a “philanthropist.”  Philanthropists are rich people, Sanders said, and she lives a Spartan existence believing the Lord will provide for her as she tries to provide for the needs of others.

But Sanders has perfected the art of giving – whatever she has on any given day. Consequently, she has become a model for others, especially in low-resource communities such as Magnolia in Duplin County, which is about equally divided between whites, blacks and Latinos. She ministers to everyone.  ‘There is no difference in the tears of the needy,” she says.

Duplin County is largely agricultural, jobs are scare and wages are low. There is no United Way, no Salvation Army, none of the services larger communities take for granted.  So over the years, the hurting and the needy have turned to Lillie Sanders, who time after time has helped.

She is motivated in part by a childhood experience.  As a 12-year-old, she went to care for her grandmother. In the dead of winter, Sanders, who had no coat, was sent off to school in the best her grandmother could provide – an old housecoat.  Children teased her and afterwards she would hide the housecoat in the woods on the way to school and retrieve it in the afternoon.  She resolved that someday she would make sure no child had to go to school without a coat. 

People give her things – clothes, furniture, appliances, food – and she makes sure those who need them get them. She now has a clothes closet where anyone can come and get whatever they need for free. The furniture in Sanders’ house is forever changing.  If someone needs something she has, she gives it to them.  She places the day’s bounty – donated eggs, tomatoes, potatoes, odd items – on a table in her front yard for takers.  She has no rules. “Sometimes I tell people I serve the needy and the greedy, but I don’t think it’s my place to try to distinguish.”

If someone needs a bed for a night or two, she shifts family around to make room.  One elderly friend, lacking family to care for him, came and stayed for years until his death. She has a special place in her heart for those who lose their homes to fire. As a young mother, she lost everything and family had to take her in. She will work tirelessly to find temporary housing and to replace lost household goods. Her dream is to build two apartments on land she owns as housing for burnt-out families and to send them on their way eventually along with all the furnishings.  It will cost $250,000, and she is raising the money a dollar at the time.

Lillie Sanders understands the needs of young people.  She has started a program with grandparents, asking them to provide small monetary incentives to students who work at their math and English. She has turned a small house into a recreational center.

She makes “bereavement baskets” – small baskets full of hard candy with a poem she has written – that she takes to homes where there has been a death. “It gets me in the door,” she says, and then she can offer assistance. Often families lack resources for burial expenses. “It’s bad enough to lose someone and then on top of that to have the whole community know you are too poor to bury them.” She has started a small fund to help but, more important, has gone to funeral homes and negotiated payments so loved ones could be laid to rest with the family’s dignity intact.

Sanders’ giving knows no limits. She attended an international philanthropy conference so she could share her story.  All expenses were paid, and she was provided spending money. Later she revealed that she had given her money to other conferees – women doing similar work around the world -- $5 and $10 at the time, to help with their projects. “It made me feel good that money from Magnolia, North Carolina, could be helping out all over the world,” she said.  

2007 Award in the category of Race Relations

Dave Genova

Asheville

In a way, Dave Genova views his early years in a public housing project in New York as a gift.  There he learned the benefits of living in a diverse culture and the importance of respecting people regardless of their color or ethnic background. They were lessons that have guided him through life – as a young person,  an enlistee in the Navy, a college  student who went on to get an advanced degree in counseling,  a corrections officer, and finally as an instructor at North Carolina Outward Bound School for almost half his life.

At Outward Bound, he has had a profound effect on the organization and its staff and board, but most of all on the young students who participate in its rigorous courses.  He often is thought of as “the conscience of North Carolina Outward Bound,” and for good reason.

Twelve years ago, in the wilds of the Pisgah National Forest, he overheard a young white student say she was glad there weren’t any African Americans in her crew, except she used a pejorative for “African Americans.” Genova was stung by the prejudice and insensitivity he heard in a place where leadership was the focus. His dismay wouldn’t subside, even as the Outward Bound season ended. When the complete Outward Bound faculty and staff had its next meeting, Genova stood up, reported what he had heard, and said something had to be done.

Out of that experience came the Unity Project, a program he envisioned, created, and implemented.  It is a simple model that is having profound effects on young people in North Carolina and is being replicated throughout the U.S. and in the Middle East. Each summer, groups of 12 students representing the diversity of their high schools participate in a nine-day Outward Bound project that, while based on other Outward Bound programs, has the additional component of understanding diversity and improving race relations.  There are 11 Unity Project schools in Asheville, Chapel Hill, Charlotte, and Greensboro.  Thus far, more than 1,000 students have completed the summer programs and gone back to their schools to lead community projects to bring about social change. Scores of students have written about how their own changed attitudes and behavior have had a ripple effect throughout their schools.

One of the most striking outgrowths of the Unity Project was a similar project that brought two diverse groups of 10 young people from Israel to the mountains of Western North Carolina for two summers for an experience similar to the ones North Carolina high school students have. One of the participants said, “We came as five Jews and five Palestinians, but we left as ten human beings.”  The project was so successful that it has led to an Outward Bound program in Israel modeled after the one in Western North Carolina.

The Unity Project is the most tangible example of Genova’s work to effect social change, but it is only part of his life’s work.  Throughout all aspects of Outward Bound, Genova pushes for inclusiveness in recruiting staff and students.  He has succeeded in making diversity and respect for people of different races, economic backgrounds, and religions part of the organization’s culture.  Whenever he sees prejudice and disrespect, he speaks out.

Perhaps most importantly, however, is that Genova lives his life in way that it is a model for compassion and understanding.  Quietly and unassumingly, he sets an example by asking students and staff about their lives, and gets to know them as individuals.  He introduces people to each other and plants the seeds for conversation that often grows into personal relationships. He keeps up with the students after they leave Outward Bound, encouraging them as they live fuller lives back home and supporting them when they write of experiences in which they have shown courage.  He and his wife Peggy adopted an African-American child, and they instilled in their daughter Kelly the values that led to her service in the Peace Corps.

His courage, compassion, and dedicated leadership have had a profound effect on race relations and cultural understanding across North Carolina and, now, in other parts of the world, demonstrating the positive social change one person with commitment can effect.