2017 Legends Award
Left to right, Pat Morgan, Edith Kelly-Green and Barbara Holden Nixon. (Photo: Monroe Ballard)
Legends Award goes to three women
The Women’s Foundation for a Greater Memphis has honored three women with its annual Legends Award for contributions they made to the Memphis community.
Each year the Women’s Foundation pays tribute to women who are trendsetters, visionaries, and innovators. They are honored through original art and prose.
Stained Glass window created for the Honor Legend Award Winner, Pat Morgan. Commissioned by the Women’s Foundation for a Greater Memphis.
Pat’s award is in the Catalyst category
“The Catalyst Award is presented to a visionary woman who demonstrates selfless dedication to creating positive change in the community and through activism, public and civic services has empowered constituencies, strengthened participation, inspired movements, and/or has instituted an organization, foundation, or was the first in her field.”
The pieces are created in collaboration between an artist and a writer to represent the honorees’ life and community impact. The Legends Award art tours the Mid-South before going on permanent display at The Hall of Legends in the Baptist Memorial Hospital for Women.
3 Women to be Honored at Legends Luncheon
BY MICHAEL WADDELL
Pat Morgan is being honored with the Catalyst Award for her three decades of work to break the cycle of homelessness locally, statewide and nationally. Her Legends Award artist is Suzy Hendrix, and her writer is Jae Henderson.
“I’m absolutely thrilled,” said Morgan, who started out as a volunteer helping to develop and run the Drop-In Center for Street Ministries out of the basement of Calvary Church. “I got so frustrated with the lack of resources that I decided I needed credentials to go with what I had learned from the street people and the mental health specialists who were helping me.”
She went back to college at age 50, attending Rhodes College and was named one of the 20 outstanding college juniors and “rising stars” in America. During the 1990s, she interned with Al Gore’s office, then worked with President Bill Clinton’s campaign and his presidential transition team.
“That’s when I told them I wanted to work on homelessness,” Morgan said. “I received a presidential appointment to the staff of U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, and I was also a special assistant working in the community development area under Andrew Cuomo.”
She returned to Memphis in 1999 and accepted an offer to be the director of Partners for the Homeless, which is now the Community Alliance for the Homeless. After 11 years in that role, she retired and wrote a book entitled “The Concrete Killing Fields: One Woman’s Battle to Break the Cycle of Homelessness,” and it has won five national book awards.