The Brown Overstreet Greer Award

The mission and purpose of the Brown Overstreet Greer Community Award of Excellence is to recognize the efforts and contributions of everyday citizens who make a difference in our community. We live in a world where athletes, celebrities, religious leaders and politicians are often given awards for their accomplishments. Ordinary citizens are more often than not overlooked. Society and people in general fail to realize that without the dedication of sanitation workers, nursing assistants, mechanics, delivery personnel, people who flip hamburgers, etc., our quality of life would come to a screeching halt. This award seeks to identify, recognize and salute their efforts. We want to say THANK YOU to them for their commitment to excellence.

What We Look For

Courage, Grace and Devotion are the three basic qualities that the award embodies and any individual(s) considered will have demonstrated these qualities in his or her day-to-day life.

The award is named and dedicated to the memory of Laurie Brown, Emma Overstreet and Thelma Greer-Saunders. All three personified the qualities of courage, grace and devotion. The past recipients of the award are John and Debbie Cole, President and Vice President of the African American Forum, Inc. and the late Lieutenant Brenda Denise Cowan, the 1st African American female Firefighter at the Lexington-Fayette Urban County Division of Fire & Emergency Services. The award was officially introduced to the Lexington community on Saturday, January 24, 2004 at the 11th Annual African American Ball.

For more information about the Brown Overstreet Greer Community Award of Excellence contact John Brown at 859.253.2533.

If you’d like to nominate an individual for the Brown Overstreet Greer Community Award of Excellence, nomination forms will soon be available online.

Recipients

2007

This year’s recipient is Sara Jones, a Nicholasville native who has called Lexington home since 1959. She is a 1961 graduate of Paul Laurence Dunbar High School. Since the age of 15, she has mastered the art of multi-tasking in service to her family and our community with a smile! We salute and honor this extraordinary woman of courage, grace and devotion by simply saying THANK YOU!

2006

The 2006 recipients of the award, the Paul Laurence Dunbar High School Class of 1955, truly exemplify the three (3) basic qualities that the award stands for: courage, grace and devotion. They have and continue to embrace such qualities as a solid unit who believe that "Caring and Sharing" of thyself can make all the difference. Most importantly, their class has committed themselves to the three basic qualities for over fifty (50) years, which makes them an obvious and long overdue choice!

We were delighted that more than twenty (20) members of this extraordinary class graced us with their presence to accept the award on Saturday, January 21, 2006. So on behalf of the Brown Overstreet Greer Community Award of Excellence Committee, we proudly salute the Paul Laurence Dunbar Class of 1955.