Annual Meeting & Awards

Our Annual Meeting is a time to gather with supporters, review the past year, and look ahead to the coming year. We welcome new staff, say goodbye to those who have left, and affirm and officially welcome new members to our steering committee. The meeting is also a time to honor volunteers and community partners who have demonstrated their commitment to our mission: to change attitudes, save lives, and end abuse.

In October of 2010, our annual meeting featured a reader’s theater called My Body, My Voice, which was developed by Spruce Run and Mabel Wadsworth Women’s Health Center. The performance featured women’s stories about their experiences with reproductive coercion. These stories were gathered and adapted from Spruce Run and MWWHC, as well as some online sites. If you’d like to learn more about reproductive coercion, or to see the online sources for our stories, please click here.

The Michele Alexander Award for Volunteer Service…

…is given each year in memory of Michele Alexander, who was a member of Spruce Run’s Steering Committee prior to her tragic death in an auto accident in December 2003.  In her memory we established the Michele Alexander Award to remember and honor Michele’s many contributions to our organization. She not only worked long and hard in the service of Spruce Run and our mission, but she did so with a generous, grounded compassion for those who have been affected by abuse, and with a sense of joy, creativity and humor that made all the hard organizational work feel like a party.

October 2010 Recipent—Marvia Meagher

Marvia Meagher has been volunteering for Spruce Run since 2001 as a children’s worker. After taking a few years off to raise her own children, she returned and became a hotline volunteer. In her years on the hotline, Marvia has shown herself to be an advocate who is quiet, flexible, reliable, dependable, empathetic, compassionate, dedicated, trustworthy, and present, always in the moment with the caller she is working with. She has taken calls from the office and calls from home, at night or during the day, and she’s often pitched in when a hole needs to be filled at the last minute. We appreciate Marvia’s tireless dedication to the families we work with, and thank her for all of her good work.

The Partners in Change Award…

…was created in 2006 and is given to an outstanding community partner. Every person’s safety exists in the cultural context that we all create every day in our personal, professional, and civic lives with our words, actions, and choices regarding what we tolerate, what we challenge, and to whom we reach out. Each year Spruce Run honors a community partner whose actions reflect these ideals.

October 2010 Recipient—Jay Peters

Jay’s work in Maine has included establishing a batterer’s intervention program in Ellsworth in the 1980’s and playing a major role in establishing domestic violence liaisons within Maine Child Protective Services. Through his work at the University of Maine, he has been an ally, a teacher, and a supportive and challenging mentor and supervisor for many who choose to work in the field of domestic violence prevention.  As a researcher, he has consistently strived to demonstrate empirically the reality of domestic and sexual violence against women, and to name the elements of our culture that support that violence. As a conference organizer, he has helped therapists integrate the relationship between trauma and mental health into their practices. Jay’s work and presence have made a significant, positive and lasting impact on the institutions in our community. He has made this world a little safer and saner for families affected by abuse and for the people that seek to help those families and end abuse.   Jay has recently retired; we wish him the very best and thank him for all of his good work.

To read about past recipients of Spruce Run’s awards, click here.

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