Proudly Announcing the 2018 Excellence in Mentoring Award Recipients
Recognition, National Mentoring Summit
MENTOR: The National Mentoring Partnership is proud to announce this year’s recipients of the Excellence in Mentoring Awards! These awards are presented annually to individuals who have demonstrated a longstanding commitment to meeting the mentoring needs of young people at the national, state or local level. Nominations were submitted by MENTOR’s Affiliates, Government Representatives, and national mentoring and youth-serving partner organizations. Held at a special Library of Congress reception, this event will kick off the eighth-annual National Mentoring Summit.
The Honorees
Eddie Gale
Vermont Program Director for The A. D. Henderson Foundation
Eddie Gale has been the Vermont Program Director for The A. D. Henderson Foundation since 2001. During that time, the Henderson Foundation has taken a nurturing approach to grant making, allowing Gale to work closely with applicants to think through their projects, link their actions to outcomes, scheme about other funding opportunities and clearly articulate exactly what it is they wanted to do. Gale and the Henderson Foundation partnered closely with the Permanent Fund for Vermont’s Children to couple best practices and financial support for Vermont’s mentoring organizations. In 2012 when Mobius, a regional mentoring network in Vermont’s largest county, was in danger of closing its doors, Gale and the Henderson Foundation collaborated with philanthropic partners the Permanent Fund, the Vermont Community Foundation, and several local mentoring organizations, to recreate Mobius as a state wide mentoring support network. Gale joined Mobius’s board of directors until a broader coalition of business, education, and mentoring leaders could take over governance of the organization. The Henderson Foundation has continued to support Mobius’s model of grant making to local mentoring organizations, partnering with the Vermont Agency of Human Services and holding local organizations accountable for excellence while raising the visibility of mentoring statewide.
Jamal Joseph
Executive Artistic Director & Founder, IMPACT Repertory Theatre
Jamal Joseph is an American writer, director, producer, poet, activist, and educator. Joseph was a member of the Black Panther Party. He was prosecuted as one of the Panther 21. He spent six years incarcerated at Leavenworth Penitentiary. Joseph served 5½ years in Leavenworth, where he earned two college degrees and wrote his first play. To date, he has written five plays and two volumes of poetry. He earned his BA summa cum laude from the University of Kansas while at Leavenworth. His first position after incarceration was at Touro College, in East Harlem. While there, he was instrumental in arranging for historic graduation ceremonies at the Apollo Theatre with a graduation address by Ossie Davis, preceded by a spectacular Graduation Procession down the middle of 125th Street. He is a full professor and former chair of Columbia University’s Graduate Film Division and the artistic director of the New Heritage Theatre Group in Harlem. He has been featured on HBO’s Def Poetry Jam, the PBS film The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution, BET’s American Gangster and on Tupac Shakur’s The Rose That Grew from Concrete Volumes 1 and 2. He is the author of the interactive biography on Tupac Shakur, Tupac Shakur Legacy. Joseph was nominated for a 2008 Academy Award in the Best Song category for his contributions to the song “Raise It Up”, performed by IMPACT Repertory Theatre and Jamia Nash in the 2007 film August Rush. His memoir Panther Baby was published in February 2012 by Algonquin Books.
David Milliken
Director in Residence, Hutton Settlement Children’s Home
David Milliken joined the Hutton Settlement Children’s Home in June 1997 and has since served in various child welfare roles including case management, education, and organizational leadership. His formal education in psychology and leadership provides the foundation for his work in youth development and community resilience. Specifically, Milliken focuses on fostering lasting lifelong connections with youth who have faced family hardship and displacement in the Inland Northwest. In 2005, he founded the SALUTE program on the Hutton Settlement campus to provide sustainability education, creative arts, and leadership development for all residents. Over the years, the program has exposed the youth to local food justice efforts through the campus farm, global social action projects in Thailand and Mexico, and various outdoor adventures throughout the Pacific Northwest. Milliken currently serves as the director in residence at the Hutton Settlement Children’s Home with a focus on developing a transformational community of care.
Sergeant Mamie Lanford Singleton
Founder and Director, Youth Initiative Mentoring Academies (YIMA)
Sergeant Mamie Lanford Singleton was born in Winsboro, SC. Sgt. Singleton retired after 29 + years serving in patrol, investigative, and administrative divisions of the St. Paul Police Department. Sgt. Singleton was one of the first African American females in Minnesota law enforcement and served as one of the first female field training officers. She then worked in Washington, DC with Homeland Security. She studied in the Criminal Justice program at St. Thomas College, Southern Police Institute, Louisville, KY, Concordia College, Saint Paul, and U of M. Active in church and community, Sgt. Singleton is the founder and director of the non-profit Youth Initiative Mentoring Academies (YIMA) which partners law enforcement and community adult mentors with at-risk youth in mentoring and Aviation Flight Training. She invests retirement funds and personal resources to ensure the needs of YIMA are met and to provide a brighter and better future for the youth. She’s a founding member of the Ramsey County Community Sentencing Program, co-founder of the African American Breast Cancer Alliance of Minnesota, board member of the Minnesota Association of Black Physicians, a licensed Evangelist Missionary, and past Assistant District Missionary of the Capitol City District, MN Jurisdictional C.O.G.I.C. St. Paul’s Mayor presented Sgt. Singleton with the City’s Karl Neid award in 2002. Sgt. Singleton owns and operates a private investigative firm licensed in Minnesota.
The National Mentoring Summit, convened by MENTOR, is the only national forum that brings together practitioners, researchers, corporate partners, government and civic leaders, national youth-serving organizations and the network of affiliate Mentoring Partnerships to explore and advance mentoring’s positive impact on individuals and communities.