Meyer Foundation Announces 2010 Exponent Award Recipients

The Eugene and Agnes E. Meyer Foundation, a private foundation serving the Greater Washington, DC region, announces the recipients of its 2010 Exponent Award. The award celebrates visionary nonprofit leadership in the region and includes a $100,000 cash award for the recipient’s organization.

The 2010 award recipients are:

• Jean-Michel Giraud, Executive Director, Community Council of the Homeless at Friendship Place,a native of France who has been successful in helping homeless men and women transition from the streets into housing and a respected community leader deeply involved in efforts to provide comprehensive and coordinated responses to homelessness in DC.
• Kim Y. Jones, Esq., Co-founder and Executive Director, Advocates for Justice and Education, a third-generation DC native whose own experience serving as an advocate for a brother severely injured in a crash led her to become one of DC’s leading advocates for special needs students and their families.
• Layli Miller-Muro, Esq., Founder and Executive Director, Tahirih Justice Center, founder of an organization that provides free legal services to vulnerable immigrant women and girls who are victims of gender-based violence such as human trafficking, female genital mutilation, rape, torture, and domestic violence.
• Adam Tenner, Executive Director, Metro TeenAIDS, a leader in the fight against HIV/AIDS for more than two decades who had built his nonprofit into one of the region’s leading HIV/AIDS prevention, education, and advocacy organizations.   
• Scott Schenkelberg, Executive Director, Miriam’s Kitchen, a strategic thinker and trusted voice on homelessness for media, policymakers, and funders who took the risk of expanding evening services to meet needs in a time of high economic uncertainly.

 Accomplishments, bios, photos, and video clips of the five Exponent Award honorees are available here. 

The goal of the Meyer Foundation’s Exponent Award program, now celebrating its fifth anniversary, is to provide winners with the resources to boost their leadership skills and to support and sustain them at a critical moment. Many nonprofits regionally and nationally are facing the most difficult time in their tenure, with an economy that has dramatically increased need, reduced resources, and included additional challenges, such as decreased or delayed funding. “Nonprofits are community lifelines,” says Julie L. Rogers, president and CEO of the Meyer Foundation. “Our goal is to raise the visibility of their work so our community will step up its support.”

In addition to effective leadership, The Foundation considered each nominee’s success at increasing the impact of the organization’s work, instituting sound management, and serving as a collaborative community leader. “Each of these leaders demonstrates astute business skills, an unwaivering passion for their mission, and the creativity, resilience, and agility needed to navigate their organizations through challenge and change,” says Rogers.

The Meyer Foundation created the Exponent Awards as a response to its national study Daring to Lead 2006, which revealed that three out of four nonprofit executive directors of small and mid-sized organizations are likely to leave their jobs due to a number of factors. An independent evaluation of the program confirmed that the Exponent Awards significantly increased the visibility of its recipients and has generated $3.5 million in additional funding for these organizations. (Meyer will release an update of Daring to Lead in the spring of 2011.)

Click here for more about the criteria for the award and its history.