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2007 Employee Recognition Award Recipients
Presented April 30, 2007, San Francisco
COMMUNITY SERVICE AWARD
Pam Simonds has received our Community Service Award. The Community Service Award is given in recognition of a commitment to helping others through public service or community involvement in a non-Sierra Club cause. Pam is our Program Assistant for the Office of Development. Pam devotes much of her free time to Hospice work and she is an active member of ONE, which is an organization focused on ending poverty and AIDS.
VIRGINIA FERGUSON AWARD
Carmen Morales has been honored with the Virginia Ferguson award. This Virginia Ferguson Award honors an employee who has demonstrated consistent and exemplary service to the Sierra Club. Commitment to the organization is demonstrated not only through competence and longevity of employment, but also in congenial attitude, extraordinary spirit, and unquestionable integrity that makes this individual's performance an inspiration to the rest of the staff. This award is named after Virginia Ferguson who was the first paid Sierra Club employee. She served for many years as the sole employee of the Club, working directly under Will Colby and performing multiple staff functions for the Club. Carmen Morales is our Member Records Associate in Member Services. Having been at the Sierra Club for more than 20 years, Carmen Morales is definitely a "go-to" person in Member Records and Services. Carmen always displays a congenial attitude and a willingness to help.
BEHIND THE SCENES HERO AWARD
John Barry is honored with our Behind the Scenes Hero Award. This award is given to salute an employee whose tremendous efforts, skills and talents have repeatedly and consistently supported and enabled others to advance the Club's mission in a significant way, or to accomplish a large and important project. This employee is an invaluable behind-the-scenes contributor who can be consistently relied upon by others for his or her highest service standards. John is our Editorial and Design Editor for Conservation. For nearly a dozen years, John was the driving force behind the Planet, the Sierra Club's activist newsletter, serving as managing editor for nearly all of that time. The Planet was a widely used tool that helped further the Sierra Club's grassroots campaigns, recognize our front-line activists, and recruit new allies. Starting in 2003, John launched Clubhouse, an on-line resource where Club activists and leaders can get all the necessary information they need to do their jobs well. His combination of editorial and design skills, his vast institutional knowledge about the Club and its campaigns, and his can-do attitude make him an extraordinarily valuable member of the Communications staff.
SPECIAL ACHIEVEMENT AWARD
Darryl Malek-Wiley has won our Special Achievement Award. This award is given to acknowledge an employee's special achievement that has benefited, changed, or streamlined the work of the Club, or enhanced its public image. Darryl is our Regional Representative from Baton Rouge. Darryl's response to Hurricane Katrina distinguished both himself and the Sierra Club. He was tireless in his efforts during recovery and rebuilding to assist communities and expose and correct threats to the environment and public health. Although displaced from his home himself, Darryl began working immediately after the storm to field requests for interviews, getting the Sierra Club on to the media map and "branding" us as a player and shaper of post-Katrina environmental issues.
MIKE MCCLOSKEY AWARD
Melinda Pierce is our Mike McCloskey award winner. This award is bestowed upon an employee whose work has reflected and strengthened the meaning, purpose, and mission of the Sierra Club, and who has contributed to the prestige of the Sierra Club in the world community. The Mike McCloskey award honors a distinguished record of achievement in national or international conservation causes. Melinda is our Associate Director for National Campaigns out of our Washington DC office. Melinda's work has contributed to the protection of literally millions of acres of wildlands. Year after year, she has led our successful campaign to stop drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. When the Endangered Species Act was threatened with being weakened, Melinda was a key architect of the campaign to defend it. Every political season, Melinda has found a way to contribute her skills to our successful political campaigns.
THE LARRY MEHLHAFF AWARD FOR EXCELLENCE
This year only, the first recipient of the Larry Mehlhaff award will be announced at our Annual Dinner on September 29, 2007. The award will be presented by Larry's widow, Marion Klaus. The recipient of this award has a distinguished and consistent record of many achievements in developing new ideas and strategies, implementing systems, programs and/ or services through collaborations or team efforts that have resulted in substantial improvements, efficiencies and/ or savings to services and operations Club-wide. The employee must have at least three years of service with the Club.
20-YEAR EMPLOYEES
Congratulations to our colleagues who have each completed 20 years of service at the Sierra Club.
John DeCock's combined service with the Sierra Club and then the Sierra Club Foundation stretches over 25 years. He started with the Sierra Club in 1981 as our Mailroom Supervisor. In 1983 he transferred and spent over 10 years in our Outings Department. He worked his way up from Outings Reservationist and Trip Budget Coordinator, to Reservations Manager, and eventually was promoted to Director of Outings in 1989. He made outstanding contributions to the Outings Department and his leadership helped the program expand in many significant ways. The Chapter outings support expanded, the Activist Outing program was developed, Service Trips were increased, and water-craft and mountaineering trips restored. In 1996 he became our Associate Director of Conservation and assumed oversight responsibility for strategic information services, the Office of Volunteer and Activist Services, the environmental law program, the state government program, grants compliance, web content and the Colby Library and art collection. John added the first activist elements to the web pages and hired the Club's first web master. He also had responsibility for the Sierra Club's first voter education campaign in the 1996 election. In 1998 John left the Club, but did not go too far, as he assumed the role of Executive Director for The Sierra Club Foundation.
Reed McManus came to Sierra from PC World magazine, soon after he graduated from Stanford and escaped work as a paralegal in San Francisco. He has a great sense of humor and can make even the most tedious topics sound exciting. Reed has long handled the bulk of our "wild journeys" coverage--and has written some memorable pieces himself. (If you want to read a good adventure yarn, go back to Reed's "Deep Rapture: Coral Reef Diving" from 1996, about his sufferings and sightings exploring the Great Barrier Reef in Australia.) Reed does political stories, too. He presciently helped assemble "Positive Energy," a special issue about energy solutions, in 1991. And he loves to spice up serious pieces with clever headlines. Anybody here remember "Is Cod Dead?" from 1995? That was Reed, too. Reed is also the only person we can think of who has been on Sierra's cover twice--once on his bicycle and later disguised as Lewis (or was it Clark?). Reed McManus, editor and model! Lately Reed's been coordinating the annual "Wild Journeys" issue, which won a Maggie award in 2005. He also handles "Lay of the Land," our environmental news section, and numerous features. This year he unveiled a new section called "Innovators," to highlight people who use technology to solve our most pressing environmental problems.
Carmen Morales started in the Office of Development as an Address Change Clerk in July 1986. Promoted within Member Services to Renewal Clerk - where she processed membership renewals by hand and then on a typewriter before the Club automated this function - she then moved to Finance for a short period of time. After moving back to Development, she's been promoted a few more times over the last few years and she currently serves as the Member Records Associate overseeing the distribution of work to staff, coordinating high-dollar and exception processing, managing Chapter/Group zip code assignments and Foundation Project Account receipts. She also handles many of the unit's complicated and complex data and systems projects. As you already know, Carmen is also this year's Virginia Ferguson Award recipient.
Vicki Munson has served as the staff cornerstone of the North Star Chapter for 20 years. Her official duties over these two decades are summed up in words like 'bookkeeping', 'data management', and 'administration', but in a much more fundamental way she has provided the soul of the staff presence in Minnesota. Countless volunteers recollect how Vicki's bright, infectious enthusiasm lured them into their earliest involvement in Minnesota. Generations of staff members have relied on her to help them maneuver through thickets of paperwork and bureaucracy. Leaders have leaned on her knowledge of the history of not only the chapter, but the entire environmental community in the state. And through good times and troubled times, Vicki has been there to lift up the battered spirit and to celebrate every victory. We welcome the opportunity to celebrate Vicki's dedication to the Sierra Club and to the many hundreds of lives that she has enriched through her time and commitment.
Helen Sweetland joined the Sierra Club staff in February of 1987 as Editor-in-Chief of Sierra Club Books for Children. In that role, she acquired and published many award-winning kids' books, including Come Back, Salmon; Desert Song; Fernando's Gift/El Regalo de Fernando; and the celebrated "Tree Tales" series by author-artist Barbara Bash. Helen was named Publisher of Sierra Club Books in May of 1997 and has since focused mainly on SCB's adult trade book program and Sierra Club Calendars. Outside the office, Helen and her longtime partner, Scott, enjoy playing lowbrow music in dive bars and other questionable establishments as members of the local bluegrass band, Highway One.