This year’s awards luncheon was held at the historic Mayflower Hotel in Washington DC. We honored Judy Woodruff, Elaine Jones, and Nancy Pelosi as Foremothers and Flint, Michigan heroes LeeAnne Walters and Marc Edwards as Health Policy Heroes. It was a huge success and a wonderful honor to be able to hear from such inspirational leaders!
See more photos in our Facebook album. | Thank you to Liz Roll for the photography.
Judy Woodruff is one of our nation’s foremost journalists. Whether she is co-anchoring the PBS NewsHour or a presidential debate, we can always trust her to ask the right questions to inform and enlighten us. She was one of the few women serving as a White House correspondent during the Carter Administration and has been in the top ranks of journalists ever since – at CBS, NBC, PBS, and CNN. She co-founded the International Women’s Media Foundation to help mentor and encourage other female journalists to succeed worldwide. As the mother of a son with spina bifida, she has also become a tireless advocate for people with disabilities. Her work has improved the lives of millions of Americans.
Elaine Jones has dedicated her life to the Civil Rights Movement. The daughter of a Pullman porter and a schoolteacher, Jones graduated from Howard University in 1965, joined the Peace Corps, and two years later was one of 5 Black students and the only woman enrolled at the University of Virginia Law School. In 1970, she rejected a prominent Wall Street firm, to take a position at the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund, where she argued many discrimination cases and represented a black man on death row who had been accused of raping a white woman. The Supreme Court decision on that case abolished the death penalty in 37 states for 12 years. In the years since that early success, she has been an inspiring champion for fairness and equality as the first woman to serve as the President and Director-Counsel of NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund.
The Honorable Nancy Pelosi (invited) is the most powerful woman in Congress and our nation’s first woman Speaker of the House. She was instrumental in passing and protecting the Affordable Care Act, which gives millions of Americans access to quality, affordable health insurance for the first time. Wendell Primus, Leader Pelosi’s Senior Policy Advisor, accepted her award.
We gratefully acknowledge our 2015 sponsors:
Platinum Sponsor:
Gold Sponsors:
Catherine Joyce
at Morgan Stanley Wealth Management
Leadership Sponsor:
The Cooper-Rothenberg Group
at Morgan Stanley
Friends:
