BY CINDY KRANZ
The Cincinnati Enquirer
If Melissa Lanier could change the rules, everyone she's worked with would share her Jacob E. Davis Volunteer Leadership Award.
"It's a very humbling thing to be singled out when you've always worked with other people," Ms. Lanier said. "You never really do anything by yourself."
The Greater Cincinnati Foundation's award, in its 12th year,recognizes volunteers who make the community a better place to live. The 65-year-old Hyde Park woman will be honored Monday at the foundation's Community Celebration at Playhouse in the Park, Mount Adams.
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LANIER BIO
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Age: 65.
Residence: Hyde Park.
Family: Husband, Addison; four children, Addison, East Walnut Hills; John, Antwerp, Belgium; Mark, Weston, Conn.; and Melissa Murphy, Hyde Park; 10 grandchildren.
Education: Attended Bryn Mawr College; Bryn Mawr, Pa.; 1990 Xavier University graduate in theology and history.
Activities: Board member of Christian Ministries Center at Old St. George and Seven Hills School; founder and trustee of Caracole, Hyde Park Center for Older Adults and Stepping Stones Center; former board president, Council on Aging.
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As recipient, she can designate a $10,000 grant to non-profit organizations of her choice. She has chosen Caracole, Christian Ministries Center at Old St. George, Healing Connections and Seven Hills School Faculty Enrichment Program to share the prize.
Ms. Lanier's resume is lengthy, but the activities that have meant the most are those where she was involved from the ground up: Stepping Stones, Caracole and Hyde Park Center for Older Adults.
A 1986 Enquirer Woman of the Year, her public service began in the early 1960s when she helped establish Stepping Stones, which provides programs for people with disabilities.
"In those early days," she said, "board members didn't sit around and make plans. Everybody did everything that needed to be done."
About that same time, she was involved with Seven Hills Neighborhood Houses, which provided a full-service neighborhood with houses, day care, medical clinics and other services. She credited Charles Sells, the African-American director of the project at that time, with teaching her what it meant to be black and living in the city.
"Looking back on my life, there are many people from whom I learned a great deal, and he was certainly one of them," Ms. Lanier said.
In the mid-1980s, she got a letter from Community Chest inviting her to a meeting to discuss housing for people with AIDS. Eight people, including Ms. Lanier, attended. Housing was needed, she said, because a number of families turned away family members with AIDS.
The eight who attended the meeting stuck with the project that became Caracole, a low-income housing complex for people with AIDS, now based in Roselawn. "We were very taken with the project and the need for it," she said.
But it was no small feat to establish the first Caracole location in a Clifton Heights house.
"People were very scared of AIDS and all kinds of rumors circulated around, like you could get AIDS from garbage that was set out to be collected, or mosquitoes," Ms. Lanier said.
She walked door-to-door in the neighborhood to explain the project and alleviate fears. Reaction was mixed. "We had some people vehement in their dislike and some people were very supportive." She has served on many community boards and is a board member at Christian Ministries Center of Old St. George and Seven Hills School.
But she never stays too long at any one project. "I have a passion about rotating boards," she said, adding that board members should get others excited about the organization and always be looking for their replacements.
What influenced her to embrace public service?
"I'm a very social animal. I like to be with people. I like to work with people. In my family and in my school, there was a strong sense conveyed to us children that we had a real responsibility to our fellow man," Ms. Lanier said.
Indeed, her late parents, Jack and Babs Emery, were part of Cincinnati's philanthropic Emery family.
Paul Sittenfeld, managing director - portfolio manager at Gradison Division of McDonald & Co. Securities downtown and a family friend, nominated Ms. Lanier.
Comparing her love for gardening to her love for community service, he wrote: "Melissa Lanier likes to get her fingernails dirty. . . . In addition to deriving joy from beautiful flowers and plants, Melissa likes to dig in, literally and figuratively, and do the weeding and tending.
"If Cincinnati is a garden, Melissa Emery Lanier has celebrated its most beautiful blossoms and addressed its most challenging weeds. She has tended long and well and continues to do so. Finally, she has brought many new gardeners to the field."
