5 Receive Community Service Awards At Juneteenth Celebration
5 Receive Community Service Awards At Juneteenth Celebration
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David Slone-dslone@timesuniononline.com
5 Receive Community Service Awards At Juneteenth CelebrationFive people were recognized with awards for their community service Saturday at the Juneteenth celebration in Warsaw.
Kosciusko Senior Services Executive Director David Neff received a community service award from Sara Strahan, One Warsaw and Juneteenth committees member, for helping seniors through the Senior Center.
“He has went really hard advocating for a lot of our seniors. I know he’s been fighting tooth and nail to get an extra bus because if it wasn’t for the bus that David has over there, my dad would not have been able to get dialysis,” she said.
Accepting the award, Neff said the one thing about aging is that it doesn’t discriminate. “We all will get old and seniors are hard to advocate for. Kids are a lot easier, and it’s been a struggle, but we’re hanging in there, and we do rides for senior citizens for medical appointments, we do the home-delivered meals and we have activities for seniors. Believe it or not, there’s as many people in Kosciusko County 60 and older as there are 18 and under. And it’s my job to advocate for the older folks, and I’m going to do it as long as I can,” he said.
Strahan then presented a community service award to the keynote speaker for the Juneteenth event. Shaun Mudd, a Kosciusko County Sheriff’s Office deputy, also co-founded Bowling Against Bullying.
Another community service award was presented to JW Anderson from Chris Cephus, who works at Zimmer Biomet with Anderson, and Strahan. African and Black Leadership for Excellence (ABLE) was started at Zimmer Biomet in 2017, and both men also are involved in ABLE.
On Anderson, Cephus said, “If there was a picture of service in the dictionary, it would be a picture of JW. Everything I’ve known about JW, he represents the word service.”
Along with being an employee of Zimmer Biomet since 1991 and involved in ABLE, Anderson is a member of the Old Landmark Church of God in Christ; an EMT/first responder/firefighter with the Winona Lake Fire Department, being named Firefighter of the Year in 2010; a master mason for Lodge 73, and has served as the Lodge master; and works at Auto Zone part time. He’s also a game management administrator for the University of Notre Dame.
Anderson said none of those things would be possible without his wife Mary.
Frank Metelues, of DePuy-Synthes, presented the next community service award to William Muhammad, DePuy-Synthes.
“I’m really grateful about this, at least have an opportunity. I work with William Muhammad for a while,” he said. “This guy has a heart of gold, trust me.”
He said he met Muhammad about 13 years ago and Muhammad was the sole chairperson of African Ancestory Leadership Council (AALC) at DePuy-Synthes then. The vision of AALC, which is similar to ABLE at Zimmer Biomet, is to address the underserved market of orthopedics, which Metelues said Muhammad was passionate about. Muhammad also convinced Metelues to be a chairperson.
Accepting the award, Muhammad said, “Thank you very much for presenting me with this award. ... I’m really, truly thankful to be here and serve the Kosciusko County community. I’ve been here now for 23 years. I came here from Los Angeles. The warmth that I felt in coming here has truly given me the passion to serve. There weren’t a lot of African Americans at DePuy when I first came, but we grew to a really close-knit family.”
Lakesha Green, Juneteenth committee member and executive director of the Wagon Wheel, and Strahan presented the final community service award to Barbara Ridley. Ridley was named the Woman of the Year in January at the Kosciusko Chamber of Commerce annual dinner.
Ridley volunteers with The Beaman Home, Court Appointed Special Advocates, on the board of the Kosciusko County Community Foundation and many other organizations.
“She is definitely a force to be reckoned with. She is definitely a woman of integrity. She is definitely a woman who is fierce, and she is definitely a woman that I look up as a mentor that has definitely taken me in since I’ve moved here. And I’m so grateful for you, for your sisterhood, for your motherhood, everything about you is amazing. You’re not just the Woman of the Year, you are my hero and I love you dearly and thank you so much,” Green told Ridley.
Ridley said she was “forever grateful and thankful for this community and I am more than happy to serve it.”
As the keynote speaker, Mudd talked about his family’s own history and how and why he founded Bowling Against Bullying.
“Something that was a major theme I’ve seen while I was growing up was bullying,” he said. “Whether it’s a slave in a plantation in the 1800s or simply a kid wearing the wrong sneakers in 2023, bullying has no place and we must do whatever we can to eradicate it.”
This will be the fifth year for Bowling Against Bullying, an event Mudd started where kids can bowl and have fun together.
Mudd said last year he partnered with Lisa Harman from Live Well Kosciusko to set up partnerships with local community members and businesses to serve hundreds of kids in the community.
This year, Bowling Against Bullying has signed with the Kosciusko County Community Foundation to offer a scholarship called “Bowling Against Bullying Rise-Up Scholarship.” Their goal is to raise $25,000 so they can offer an annual $1,000 scholarship to a child that has endured bullying and rose above it.
Finally, he talked about how serving with the sheriff’s office has been his personal joy.
“The police aren’t to be feared. We got into this to be helpers,” Mudd said.
Also during the Juneteenth celebration, Charles Cotton played a couple selections on his soprano saxophone, an audio snippet of the NetFlix documentary “Juneteenth: Faith & Freedom” from Our Daily Bread was played and members of the Warsaw Community High School Coalition for Black Culture sang “Life Every Voice and Sing.”
Emma Lusinde, president of the WCHS Coalition for Black Culture, explained that the Coalition is a club at the high school that “is a way to bring a safe space for people of color in our school and to create support and just have a group of people that can help in time of need.”
She also talked about what is Juneteenth to her.
“Events and holidays like this definitely have a special place in my heart. Juneteenth finally became a holiday in the United States to commemorate the emancipation of enslaved African Americans. The historical legacy of Juneteenth shows the value of never giving up in certain times,” she said. “The fact that it took two years for this message of freedom to reach all people should remind us to take action now instead of waiting to make changes.”
Green moderated an economic panel featuring Raquel Hoyt, Glitter Hair & Beauty Supply; William Smith, Ivy Tech retiree; and Alicia Taylor, real estate agent. Much of the discussion was on education and scholarship.
