HUMANITARIAN AWARDS

West-Scantlebury and Barth honored as humanitarians

Just Communities of Arkansas inducted two new humanitarians into a council of Natural State illuminati at a banquet Tuesday night at the Statehouse Convention Center -- Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation chief Sherece West-Scantlebury and Hendrix College professor-pundit Jay Barth.

Just Communities, formerly the National Conference for Community and Justice of Arkansas, and before that the National Conference of Christians and Jews, develops programming and community outreach aimed at accepting diversity, bridging differences, and fostering peace within a community. "We believe that prejudice and bias are based on a lack of understanding," goes the mission statement.

These Humanitarian Awards go back to 1964. The first honoree was Brooks Hays, and the dinner chairman was Dave Grundfest, who himself was honored the next year.

West-Scantlebury was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., and attended Bowie State University in Maryland, then the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan. She was the founding chief executive of the Louisiana Disaster Recovery Foundation following Hurricane Katrina. Within two years she was picked to head the Rockefeller foundation in Little Rock.

A capital city native, Jay Barth was raised by a young single mother, Lyn. He has won five Faculty Appreciation Awards in 21 years at Hendrix College. In 1999 he helped found Equality, a gay-rights advocacy. (Barth married boyfriend Chuck Cliett in New York three years ago.) He was appointed to the state Board of Education in 2012, and has been a board member (or is still) for the national American Civil Liberties Union, Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families, and the state Single Parent Scholarship Fund.

Gold Circle corporate sponsors of the event were Bank of the Ozarks and the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation. Aristotle; Entergy; and Wright, Lindsey & Jennings, LLP, also chipped in, as well as a couple dozen "patrons."

High Profile on 04/19/2015

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