Reverend Howard Nash Community Leadership Award

Two women in leadership roles to receive awards




NEW HAVEN — The president of Gateway Community College and a Yale University political scientist will receive the 2008 Reverend Howard Nash Community Leadership Award at a breakfast at 8 a.m. May 7 at the New Haven Lawn Club, 193 Whitney Ave., officials from Community Mediation, Inc. said.
CM Executive Director Charles Pillsbury said in a prepared statement that Gateway President Dr. Dorsey L. Kendrick, above right, and research scholar Cynthia Farrar, above left, will receive the award “for their leadership roles in promoting civic engagement through dialogue and deliberation in the New Haven area, most recently last October by organizing and hosting the By the People deliberative forum on immigration at Gateway Community College.”
Kendrick became president of Gateway in August 1999. Farrar is a research scholar and director of the program on deliberative democracy and local governance at Yale University’s Institution for Social and Policy Studies, and a lecturer in political science and in ethics, politics and economics, the statement said.
The Reverend Howard Nash Community Leadership Award was established in 2002 to honor community leadership in the area of dialogue and to support The Dialogue Project. The award is named in memory of the late Rev. Howard Nash, formerly of St. Bernadette’s Roman Catholic Church, New Haven, who helped found the Dialogue Project, the statement said. Nash also was known throughout the community for “his tireless work for justice and reconciliation,” the statement said.
Community Mediation began the Dialogue Project 11 years ago in response to severe racial tensions in greater New Haven, in partnership with Interfaith Cooperative Ministries, Inc. The Dialogue Project continues to focus on creating constructive community dialogue around issues of faith, race, gender and other potentially divisive issues, such as immigration, its current focus, the statement said. The Dialogue Project is funded by The NewAlliance Foundation, United Church on the Green, Trinity Episcopal Church and Center Church on the Green. In 2006 and 2007, the Father Nash Award Breakfast was sponsored by the Archdiocese of Hartford, the Knights of Columbus , United Illuminating Co., Yale-New Haven Hospital and Yale University.