Community Beacon Awards

The Community Beacon Award was established in 2001 to recognize individuals who have improved the quality of life for our community.

The recipients of this award are unique and inspiring. They show us how one person can make a positive difference in community-building.

These "Community Beacons" had a dream and the courage to see it through. All of us should follow their lead and make our community the best it can be.

We hope you will be inspired to work towards social change as you read about each one of our awardees. Click on the links below to learn more about their amazing accomplishments.

2007 - Evelyn Marcha-Hidalgo

2006 - Dr. Lucy Kerman

2005 - Jim Roebuck

2004 - Beth Ann Johnson

2003 - Fran Aulston

2002 - Bill Coleman

2001 - D.L. Wormley

We salute our Community Beacons, such as 2004 award-winner, Beth Ann Johson (right).

Evelyn Marcha-Hidalgo
2007 Community Beacon

Evelyn Marcha-Hidalgo immigrated to the United States with her family as a beautiful and educated young woman, nevertheless, as an immigrant, she had to restart her life in a new country.

She held the Philippine equivalent of CPA, but somehow she had also acquired an understanding of the value and strength of cultural diversity. In the United States, these two seemingly unconnected gifts would be combined at a place which would be come to be known as the Intercultural Family Services.

She found herself in West Philadelphia in 1979, when an organization called the Asian American Service Center was formed with about four volunteers. There was a recognition that some of the war refugees from Southeast Asia, the Vietnamese boat people, Laotians, Hmong, war refugees all, and Cambodians, fleeing the killing fields in that country, were basically being dumped into West Philadelphia, and some were having a difficult transition to the completely different and in many ways indifferent world in which they now found themselves, the world of inner City West Philadelphia.

Evelyn began working at this new organization as a secretary, but with her boundless energy, soon unofficially she was doing everything from working with refugees to cleaning the bathrooms, all the while keeping the office organized. Before long, this amazing woman with boundless energy, but more than that, a woman of wide vision, and the ability to nurture and to lead, found herself at the head of a very little organization with a very big job.

It was from then on that Evelyn’s light began to really shine. Her astonishing perseverance, her vision, her leadership ability, her boundless compassion, her drive, her understanding of diverse cultures, and above all, her true love of all peoples, became the anchor from which the little agency started to grow, and grow, and grow, and grow.

What began as a small resettlement agency run by volunteers with limited funds has grown into a multipurpose human service organization supported by private and public partnerships. One of Evelyn’s unsung talents is her ability at team building. She has chosen her team so effectively that it is the very model of leadership with a united vision. People from all cultures and walks of life work together and get along to a degree that makes it something to behold.

But the greatest achievement of course is the success of the agency itself, and what it does. It not only serves people, people with complex needs, but it makes their lives easier in lots of ways.

Especially, it serves children. It serves children in their own homes. If the home is on shaky ground, it provides counseling services that works toward preservation of the family. It teaches parenting skills. The agency’s youth workers really make things happen, be it summer camps, performing arts, music instruction, or getting kids to think about what they want to do with their lives when they grow up.

Intercultural Family Services also serves adults. Their adult counselors provide the Healthy Start Program, they provide council and advice to people attempting to buy their first home, they educate about AIDS prevention, they have an emergency food and clothing bank, and they even provide some basic health services.

All these services are not only provided to refugees these days, they are open to anyone who needs them. And yet they still manage to provide some special services for people making the transition to new lives in America. English as a Second language is always available to whoever wants it, and they are well equipped to help people with translation services, as well as assistance with bureaucratic paperwork in English.

And, there are considerably more than four employees these days, there are nearly three hundred, and working not just in West Philly anymore, but wherever they go, they expertly care for people who need help.

This truly AMAZING organization works so well that it is a model for similar agencies everywhere. And although Evelyn would be the first to tell you it is all because of her amazing team, and it is, still there can be no doubt that this priceless gift to our community and to us all boils down to one woman who really did make a difference. She had the God-given energy and vision, and she put it to good use, and through her guidance and leadership, tens of thousands of people have been the beneficiaries whose lives have been made better.

Evelyn Marcha-Hidalgo is a true inspiration to all who know her, and so it was a great honor for the Calvary Center to present the 2007 Calvary Center Community Beacon Award to Evelyn Marcha-Hidalgo.

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Evelyn Marcha-Hidalgo receives the
2007 Beacon Award.
We salute you!

Dr. Lucy Kerman
2006 Community Beacon

The 2006 Community Beacon Award was presented to Lucy Kerman, in honor of her support of the community through her position as Special Projects Coordinator in the President’s Office of the University of Pennsylvania from 1997 through 2006.

She brought prodigious talents to her position, to include personal qualities of passion, compassion, high intelligence, and outstanding listening and nurturing abilities, and was given several important and in some cases difficult tasks in changing the nature of the relationship between the University of Pennsylvania and its surrounding community.

Lucy Kerman helped to conceptualize and launch UC Green, an organization which works with in partnership with the community and has been responsible for greening and beautification of the neighborhood through planting trees and landscaping streets, using volunteer labor from the community, the University City District, and other sources. This organization has been responsible for beautification of the streets which has gone hand in hand with the community’s rejuvenation and beautification of the outstanding Victorian architecture of the neighborhood, creating a marked and positive difference in the look of the physical environment.

The most difficult task given her or anyone else on President Rodin’s team focusing on improving the relationship with the neighborhood was the implementation of a new experimental neighborhood school, which was created via a partnership of the University and the city, but which had to function properly within the neighborhood for which it was conceived. The emotions surrounding this project were driven by many fears and by very real questions of who would be let into the school and who would be left out, what was the real agenda of the university in inculcating such a project as this, and whether this would be something that would be ultimately good for the neighborhood and its children, and finally, would the experiment fail as similar experiments had in the past, making things worse instead of better? In this volatile atmosphere, the school was implemented, and through Lucy Kerman’s stewardship, the school ultimately became the neighborhood success story that we all know today, a truly excellent neighborhood school, with perhaps the most diverse student body of any school anywhere in the city, one that truly reflects the neighborhood in which it exists.

Perhaps Lucy’s most profound contribution to the community has been the ways in which she used her good office to bring diverse elements of the community together to find ways to work together for the common good. She formed cooperatives in the arts and in education which have brought together the amazing resources dedicated to the arts and education already present in the community, and created safe spaces where dialogue could begin among them. Nurtured in this atmosphere that she created, these groups have formed two collectives which began to work together to build community and further their common interests. The arts group worked together to bring the famous Fringe Festival into the community for the first time, and they have together sponsored arts fairs and other common activities, while the education group was able to assist with community programs first in the Penn Alexander School, and later, in the community itself, with plans to be proactive in the formation of the new, improved West Philadelphia High School, among other things. She also brought together arts and educationally minded resources and groups together to present a Shakespeare festival in the Lea School, which has led to the beginnings of a community based arts program for that school. This is particularly significant because the Lea School has heretofore had no arts program of its own due to lack of available funding.

It must be noted that the degree of Lucy Kerman’s involvement in the community stood out so much because it went far above the requirements of her job description, and her ability to introduce long range planning within the community has brought new horizons in community building and in celebrating the diversity of our community, while we work together for positive change. Lucy Kerman has truly been a beacon in this community in every sense of the phrase, and the community itself is a better place because of the work that she has done and continues to do here. It is for these reasons that the Calvary Center for Culture and Community awarded the 2006 Community Beacon Award to Lucy Kerman.

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Jim Roebuck
2005 Community Beacon

The Calvary Center for Culture and Community proudly announced the fifth honoree to receive its annual Community Beacon Award in 2005. This year the award was presented to State Representative James Roebuck at the Calvary United Methodist Church’s 111th Anniversary Celebration Luncheon.

Roebuck was presented this award for his more than twenty years serving our community as Representative in the Pennsylvania State Legislature, which he has done with remarkable grace, as well as with remarkable success. It is not easy to represent such a diverse group of people, and there is perhaps no neighborhood in the state that can claim more diversity than this one.

The board noted that Roebuck does his job so well because it is obvious that he really believes in this neighborhood and really loves it, and of course, he and Cheryl are so much a part of the neighborhood. Jim is actively involved in every aspect of the neighborhood. He makes it a point to intentionally serve everyone here, and it is remarkable that he manages to do just that.

Jim is no absentee representative. He can always be seen right in our midst. He has served on so many community boards that it would be impossible to list them all, except to say that it must be something of a record. One CCCC board member noted that a case could have been made for Jim’s deserving the Beacon award alone for the fact that he serves or has served almost every local and community organization in this neighborhood.

Jim has always been an unwavering supporter of the efforts to redevelop Calvary, whose doors open in direct site of his own office doors at 48th and Baltimore, and he has helped Calvary and Calvary Center in several ways. He often shows up there at activities and events there, has obtained grants for Calvary Center, has always written glowing letters of support for our grant proposals, and he agreed to serve on the board of the Curio Theatre when it moved there, yet another board…. But, of course, Calvary Center is only one locale, and Jim supports and serves all of our unique neighborhood institutions in a uniquely personal way, with his presence, and with his office, but most of all, with his whole heart. He shows up at innumerable functions in the neighborhood, to the point that one wonders how he manages it, with the necessity of living and working in Harrisburg so much of the time.

Although modest about it, Roebuck is educationally highly achieved, and is an educator himself by profession, as is his lovely wife, Cheryl. So it is not surprising that their particular interest and focus are on education. Jim works tirelessly to improve and supports every effort to improve the lot of education in this West Philadelphia neighborhood and in this city. We always can be sure that West Philadelphia High School is always on Jim’s mind and close to his heart. That matters. And so are all the other schools in this neighborhood. And all those school kids really know who Jim Roebuck is, and there simply could not be a better role model than Jim Roebuck to stand before those kids and exhort them on to fight on to succeed, that it can be done.

Jim and Cheryl promote family by example. His marriage and the courage with which he and Cheryl have faced life’s challenges together are a real inspiration to us all.

He intentionally embraces the blessings of diversity and his doors and his mind and his heart are truly open to everyone, and that means, as we say about Calvary itself, open to everyone, no exceptions.

Jim is devoted to his neighborhood, his city, his state and his country. Therefore it is with great pride that the board of the CCCC extends the gratitude and thanks on behalf of the whole community to Jim Roebuck, surely the true embodiment of what it means to be a community beacon.

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Fran Aulston
2003 Community Beacon

Almost 20 years ago, Fran Aulston formed the West Philadelphia Cultural Alliance, an organization dedicated to bringing the people of West Philadelphia access to the arts in a way that reflects the multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, and multinational quilt that is our community. "The economic and social health of a community is directly related to the community's commitment to support an appreciation of the arts," says Fran.

Fran's journey in pursuit of the arts in West Philadelphia led her to Paul Robeson, surely one of the most famous people ever to live in our community. She single-handedly found the vision to preserve and enshrine the Paul Robeson House at 4951 Walnut Street. Fran was determined to make the Robeson House a beacon for civic responsibility, as she herself describes it; a place where the community can congregate, and children can learn, that one person can stand for something good and that leadership can be cultivated.

Our community is a much better and more cultured place because Fran Aulston has contributed so much to it. CCCC thanks Fran for her efforts and her leadership. She is an inspiration to us all.

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Fran Aulston makes a difference in our community.

Bill Coleman
2002 Community Beacon

From his student days and for decades thereafter, Bill Coleman has lived in West Philadelphia in many locales, notably with the Life Center, and ultimately bought a house on the 4800 block of Trinity Place. He operated a food delivery business, was active in the early life of the Mariposa Food Co-Op, and went on to open Palmetto's at 46th and Chester. But Bill is best known for his pivotal role in the creation and maintenance of the Firehouse Farmers' Market at 50th and Baltimore. He has been involved with it since the mid 1980s, when the Cedar Park Neighbor's board brought him in to manage the fledgling project.

Bill's community involvement has ensured that the Firehouse Farmer's Market is a whole lot more than just a food market. Yes, the Firehouse Farmer's Market brings quality food service to an underserved area of West Philadelphia, but it also provides jobs and houses small businesses. Through Bill's leadership, the Market provides our community with a recycling program, neighboorhood barbecues, and the summer Firehouse Jazz series. Working with Denise King, the jazz series became so successful that several jazz venue spinoffs now operate in locales throughout West Philadelphia, making our community something of a jazz mecca.

Bill's work in the community has by no means been confined to the Market. Bill has managed to funnel financial resources and support into the neighborhood in many ways, and has supported many endeavors in West Philadelphia. Among the projects he has supported is the Calvary Center itself, finding grant money at several points on its own long road to recovery, just a stone's throw from the Firehouse Farmer's Market on Baltimore Avenue.

Because Bill lives up to the highest principles, because he has done so much to build a better community in West Philadelphia, because he has restored and redeveloped a truly beautiful and important building at 50th and Baltimore, because he cares so deeply about urban issues, and because of the sacrifices he has made to stand behind his values, CCCC is proud to present him with 2002 Community Beacon Award.

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Bill Coleman (center) inspires us to work for a better community.

D.L. Wormley
2001 Community Beacon

Our first Community Beacon Award recipient, D.L. Wormley has worked tirelessly to make our community a better one.

A resident since 1984, D.L. has worked in two community organizations, Squirrel Hill Community Association and Cedar Park Neighbors, where she served on the executive board. She is also on the board of the University City Historical Society, has served on the Firehouse Farmer's Market board, and was chairperson of the University City New School's board of directors.

D.L. is also an ardent member and serves on the Vestry of the Cathedral of the Savior, where she is extremely active in the redevelopment of that congregation and church, which has formed a 501-c-3 organization to promote the arts.

Her community service doesn't stop there. In her professional life, D.L. works at the University City District, coordinating dialog with area landlords, promoting better stewardship, and coordinating the common work of business associations. She also runs a program of workshops on the maintenance and restoration of historic homes.

Prior to her work at UCD, D.L. worked at the University of Pennsylvania, where she spearheaded an effort to encourage faculty and staff to live in the community where they work, resulting in over 170 home sales in our community.

D.L. finds time to serve her alma mater on the board of trustees of Hobart and William Smith Colleges and is involved in regional planning, serving on the board of directors of the Reinvestment Fund. She is also a member of the board of regional advisors for the Metropolitan Philadelphia Policy Center.

CCCC thanks D.L. Wormley for her efforts to better our community. She is truly a Community Beacon who radiates the finest values of our diverse and vibrant community.

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