Six people who have changed the status quo will be honored with Central Iowa Activist Awards presented by the Des Moines Business Record and Drake University. They are:

JONATHAN C. WILSON

Human Rights

Attorney Jonathan C. Wilson says the phone conversation he had with an Iowa mother on Jan. 25, 1995, the day after he told the other members of the Des Moines school board and, quickly, media consumers across the nation that he is gay, “has kept me going and made me confident I did the right thing ever since.”

“You don’t know me, but my husband and I have a gay son, and last night, the three of us watched the school board meeting on TV,” the woman told Wilson, who at the time was embroiled in controversy as the board considered a committee’s recommendation on how to deal with sexual orientation issues in the school curriculum. “Because of the subject matter, because of what you said and did last night, my husband and I don’t think our son is going to kill himself.”

In the local context, the curriculum discussion had been non-controversial, said Wilson, a shareholder at Davis, Brown, Koehn, Shors & Roberts. But a handful of Republican presidential hopefuls campaigning in the state at the time to garner support in the 1996 caucuses heard about the discussion and turned it into a wedge issue, Wilson said.

His family and friends had been supportive when he came out, but he never considered it a matter for public debate. Wilson said that when rumors about his sexual orientation began reaching other school board members, his colleagues worried that he would be accused of raising the curriculum issue as part of a gay rights agenda. Finally, Wilson, who was serving his 12th year on the school board, decided to go public. “I’d worked too hard to support the school district and its efforts to be the cause of something hurting the school district,” he said.

At the end of a special meeting called to discuss the topic of homosexuality in public schools, Wilson asked for a moment of privilege. At 10:24 p.m. on Jan. 24, 1995, “I acknowledged that along with a number of things that I am – a father, a son, a brother, a friend, a community servant – I also happen to be a gay man.”

The revelation led to his landslide defeat in the 1995 school board election, which had one of the highest turnouts in history, and he said, “has made me dangerous.”

“It’s really the only secret I had. I don’t have anything to be afraid of, and that is pretty empowering.”

Wilson said his defeat freed him to devote more time to his law practice and “to do other things in keeping with the role that had been handed to me.”

A few months after the election, Wilson formed the First Friday Breakfast Club for gay men, currently the largest breakfast club in Iowa with about 500 paid members. Chapters have subsequently been established in Cedar Rapids, Iowa City and Kansas City. His goal is to see First Friday chapters established around the country.

But to call Wilson a gay-rights activist is misleading. Throughout his adult life, he has championed civil rights issues, such as equality for people of color and women, and issues he discovered while serving in leadership roles with the National School Board Association and Council of Urban Boards of Education. “It gave me a crash course in issues relating to racial segregation, desegregation and resegregation that has been going on in this country, but which I had no opportunity to learn much about living in Iowa.”

That national perspective on education and an understanding of the issues facing urban school districts were among the reasons he was nominated to the State Board of Education by Gov. Tom Vilsack in 2004. His confirmation was blocked by Senate Republicans, who earlier in that session had refused to approve anti-bullying legislation that would have specifically prohibited discrimination based on real or perceived sexual orientation or perceived sexual orientation.

ROXANNE BARTON CONLIN

Feminist Leader

Roxanne Barton Conlin remembers that the first time she suggested to a church group in the mid-1960s that men and women should be viewed as equal and should receive equal pay for comparable worth, “it’s a wonder I wasn’t stoned.”

“It seemed very common sense to me,” she said, “but at that time, it was just about as radical as you could get.”

The idea isn’t radical today. Even so, “we have not reached nirvana in terms of equal employment,” Conlin said. “It’s unbelievably better, but we still have sexism, and it’s not useful to pretend sexism doesn’t exist. That’s the wrong approach. Some of it is an unconscious result of sexual stereotypes, but we have to change that.”

Other things have changed in the four decades since Conlin proposed the idea of equality between the sexes. Iowa still hasn’t elected its first woman governor, a distinction the prominent Democrat aimed for in 1982. But the state code is free of “gender words,” a change she pushed for before her gubernatorial run as an assistant Iowa attorney general and director of the Iowa Civil Rights Section for the Department of Justice. And a rape victim’s sexual history can’t be raised at trial because of a bill prohibiting the invasion of privacy that she drafted on the back of a steakhouse napkin and former state Rep. Tom Riley, a Republican, sponsored and got passed within days of its introduction.

The National Law Journal has called Conlin, who practices primarily in the areas of civil rights, employment discrimination and professional malpractice, not only one of the nation’s 10 most influential women attorneys, but also one of the top 10 trial lawyers of either gender in America. Her resumé is eight pages of accomplishments, initiatives, appointments and accolades. But to get a sense of what is important to her, it’s important to look at the clients she represents: people, very often women, who feel powerless to fight injustice.

One of them, Paulee Lipsman, wrote in a response to a piece that Conlin wrote, “My Heroes, My Clients,” for Trial magazine that Conlin is the “real hero.” In Conlin’s original piece profiling four women she regards as heroes, she detailed Lipsman’s rape and a subsequent case against the owner of her apartment building owner, one of the few civil cases ever brought against a third party for negligence related to an intentional criminal act.

“It was not her clients’ courage, but Roxanne’s, that changed laws and exposed wrongs,” Lipsman wrote. “When Roxanne represented me, she was my strength, my adviser, my counselor, and my support. It was Roxanne who decided to dedicate her life to helping those who felt powerless. It was Roxanne who vowed to end discrimination and harassment. It was Roxanne who knew that those who hurt others, either directly or through neglect, should be held accountable.

“When Roxanne faced legal barriers, she fought and succeeded in getting the laws changed. When others tried to blame the victim, Roxanne convinced jurors that the fingers were pointing in the wrong direction.

“Roxanne takes cases because justice needs to be served, not for financial gain. Roxanne takes cases because it is the right thing to do, even if she might lose.

“Roxanne has spent a lifetime pushing, prodding, urging, and demanding that individuals, companies, and the government treat all people with respect, dignity, and fairness. Roxanne has made Iowa and the United States better places because of her efforts. As long as there are people who need her help, as long as bigotry and discrimination exist, Roxanne will continue to fight.”

In that final statement is found one of the reasons Conlin and other prominent women attorneys in Greater Des Moines recently hosted a fund-raiser for the Equal Justice project, which would give low-income women who are domestic violence victims access to higher quality legal services. “The only thing that empirically can be demonstrated to provide permanent change is legal services,” she said.

Part of Conlin’s interest in curbing domestic violence comes from her own experiences growing up with an abusive father. “My mother did not fight back, but I did,” she said, recalling that she bit her father, kicked him and screamed. “I thought he was going to kill us all, and I think he could have. I had the very good fortune at 16 to have him arrested.”

At that Equal Justice fund-raiser, she told publicly for the first time a story she had previously shared only with her husband, James. “It’s been 45 years and I cried all the way through it because I was reliving it,” she said. “Still, after 45 years, I could not talk about it without feeling fear and almost panic.

“I tried to explain to people what I know to be true: If I could have gotten a knife, not because I was angry or enraged, but because I was afraid, I would have. Women do not kill their batterers out of anger, but out of fear.

“Women without resources,” she said, “have no place go.”

With Conlin taking up the cause, now they do.

G. DAVID HURD

Environmental Stewardship

As a young boy fishing the Wabash River with his grandfather and a Boy Scout who enjoyed camping, hiking and other outdoor pursuits, G. David Hurd learned to respect the environment even if he didn’t fully appreciate its fragility.

Listening him reel off example after example of environmental harm caused by activities ranging from careless agricultural practices that promote soil erosion to harvesting ocean fish at a faster rate than they can be replaced to clear-cutting in the Amazon basin, it’s clear the retired president and CEO of Principal Financial Group Inc. appreciates the natural environment’s fragility now.

“The focus is on the short run vs. the long range,” he said of policies that may deliver short-term economic benefits in terms of jobs, but long-term consequences to the environment. “People have got to make a living, so it’s a tough fight.”

To arm environmentalists, he’s donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to groups working to preserve some of the world’s – and Iowa’s – most environmentally pristine and unique areas.

At the urging of his friend Fred Weitz about 20 years ago, he became involved in The Nature Conservancy, an international non-profit organization dedicated to protecting plant and animal species and the habitats they need to survive. The Nature Conservancy has chapters in all 50 U.S. states and Hurd has served as the Iowa chapter’s chairman.

As part of his involvement, he visited the Broken Kettle Grasslands, located north of Sioux City in Plymouth County. Those grasslands are part of Iowa’s Loess Hills, wind-blown bluffs rising 200 feet above the flat plains and forming a narrow band running 200 miles, from roughly the north to south borders of Iowa, along the Missouri River. Created by wind when the glaciers from the last Ice Age retreated, similar geological formations are found only in China.

As Hurd stood on a ridge taking in the breathtaking vistas of the Broken Kettle Grasslands without another human being in sight, he fully expected to see a group of Native Americans appear on the scene. “I was suddenly taken completely out of modern society and put back in a natural environment,” he said.

He thinks other Iowans ought to have the same experience, so he has donated more than $500,000 to preserve the 3,000-acre area, the Iowa chapter’s largest preserve. The Broken Kettle area, which Hurd calls “precious and rare,” is part of the largest tract of contiguous prairie remaining in Iowa, feature a variety of plant and animal species that are typically founded further west in the Great Plains, and provide habitat for numerous species of prairie butterflies, such as the dusted skipper, regal fritillary, Ottoe skipper and Pawnee skipper.

“A lot of people have put in money,” he said of the efforts to preserve the Loess Hills. “We were so excited by the idea of trying to hang on to one of these fragments of what is left.”

Other Iowa environmental groups have also benefited from his philanthropy. About a decade ago, he became involved in the Iowa Environmental Council, a collaboration among a diverse group of agencies and organizations to develop a safe, healthy and sustainable environment for Iowa. The group works in four focus areas: air quality, water quality, conservation preservation and renewable energy.

Hurd served as the IEC’s chairman for a number of years and currently is a member of its executive council. Though that group, he is working with others on initiatives to clean up Iowa’s waters that will be announced in the near future.

He considers the work he does for various environmental groups as important as his role as head of Principal Financial Group, the only company he ever worked for after he got out of the Army in 1954.

“You have got to figure out why you are here and what’s expected of you. What is your function, what is your purpose?” Hurd said. “I think you want to wind up doing enough things in your life to serve a broader purpose, to justify your existence and the use of resources on the planet.

“I hope I have managed to encourage other people and set a good example. By my being interested, it stimulated others to be interested and thereby help a number of things long term. You have to have a long-term view.

“The same set of words could be applied to my interest in downtown, and helping us think about our becoming a world-class community. It’s very difficult for any one person, but in talking and working with others cooperatively, it stimulates others to get things done.”

BECKY MORELOCK

Neighborhood & Community

Becky Morelock says she’s been “involved” in neighborhood work for about 15 years. “Impassioned” is a better word.

“I can’t keep my mouth shut if I feel there’s an issue that’s important,” she said.

Strong neighborhoods clearly are important to Morelock, and Des Moines has them in abundance, she said.

“Neighborhoods are the lifeblood of the city,” she said. “The city, in my opinion, does a really good job in getting the world out about things that are happening.”

Her involvement started simply enough, as most activism does, around a single issue. She and her family were living on an acreage in Bloomfield Township in the Easter Lake area that had been annexed by the city of Des Moines in 1987. When development plans surfaced in the early 1990s, she and her neighbors became concerned.

Lot sizes were small. Trees were cut. Little was being done to protect the shoreline of the lake, the feature that attracted people to the area in the first place, from siltation. Drainage patterns were altered once development began occurring, creating more problems for those living near Easter Lake.

“Developers were telling me back then that when an average house cost $140,000 to $150,000, they could build a $400,000 house on a 50-foot lot,” she said. “We wanted to see some green when they were done instead of just houses.”

“We knew development was going to happen,” said Morelock, who at the time was the president of the Bloomfield/Allen Township Neighborhood Association, “but we wanted to get the best development we could and protect as much of the land as we could.”

Morelock also served for many years on the city of Des Moines’ Plan and Zoning Commission. In that position, she was able to advocate for high-quality development in her neighborhood and put the issues residents of her neighborhood faced into a larger context. “It helped to have someone on the commission,” she said.

In 1996, Morelock became president of Des Moines Neighbors, a coalition of the 52 recognized neighborhood associations of Des Moines, and held that position until last year. One of her most significant accomplishments during that time was the development of the Des Moines Neighborhood Leadership Academy.

Prior to its establishment, many fee-based leadership programs were available. Most were targeted at corporations or in a particular program area, and they were expensive. None were directed at average citizens who wanted to fill leadership voids in their communities, yet had no formal training in how to bring about change. Working with community and government leaders, Morelock garnered support for a community leadership academy that incorporates ideas from successful programs in communities throughout the United States. Making Connections in Des Moines, a local group aimed at strengthening families and neighborhoods and supported financially by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, funded the Des Moines Leadership Academy, which has graduated its first class.

Participants learn a variety of skills from business leaders and government officials, who serve as instructors. Participants also complete a community project to help them hone their skills and learn how to bring about meaningful changes in their neighborhoods. Morelock is the director of the Des Moines Neighborhood Leadership Academy.

Morelock thinks the city’s neighborhoods are changing rapidly as they become more ethnically diverse, and the Leadership Academy can help community activists learn how to effectively interact with people from other cultures. “Assimilation is challenging,” she said. “There isn’t a neighborhood leader in town who doesn’t feel that challenge.”

Though she’s left the Des Moines Neighbors position, Morelock still keeps a finger on the pulse of neighborhood issues through her part-time job as executive director of the Neighborhood Investment Corp., a non-profit community development organization. She is retired from the Internal Revenue Service, where she worked as an employee development specialist.

BYRON JARRETT SR.

Education & Youth Advocacy

As a kid growing up in the Watts neighborhood in Los Angeles, Byron Jarrett Sr.’s life could have taken a much different turn. He’s co-founder and CEO of Solid Foundations Inc., a family centered social services organization that works with young people who have made some of the wrong choices that he was able to avoid.

His ticket out of the projects and away from the spray of gunfire that made a trip to the bus stop a harrowing journey was his prowess on the football field. After his graduation from high school in 1989, he played football for Upper Iowa University, which was easy academically, he said, but divided by racial tension. He transferred to a college in Woodland Hills, Calif., but after a year, “something brought me back to Iowa,” he said. “God had a different plan.”

This time, he landed at Iowa Wesleyan College in Mount Pleasant, where he met his future business partner, Edward Thompson. Both were criminal justice majors, and worked for a time in corrections and other social services agencies that provide tracking and other services for juvenile offenders before deciding they could do the same work more effectively. To pursue that goal, they incorporated Solid Foundations in February 2001.

Their program takes the best practices from the agencies they’d worked for and melds them in a program tailored to each youth’s needs. After all, the youths they serve have vastly different backgrounds. Some are from inner cities, others from rural areas; some are from wealthy families, others are from families living in poverty.

“It’s not etched in stone,” Jarrett said, explaining that oneof the problems he and Thompson had when they worked at other social service agencies was those organizations’ one-size-fits-all approach. “Every kid has something different going on and each responds differently.”

Regardless of the reason a youth is referred to Solid Foundations, one theme is a constant: personal accountability. Jarrett accepts nothing less. Though he recognizes that some of the young people referred to him by the juvenile court or the Iowa Department of Human Services come from unstable homes and are victims as well as offenders, he doesn’t allow them to use their family circumstances as an excuse for poor behavior.

He’s also brutally honest, creating an atmosphere where it’s safe for the youths to talk about anything that concerns them. He wants the young people he works with to “have all the information,” not just bits and pieces they pick up on the street.

“We talk straight out about things,” he said. “Earlier today, I passed out condoms. We tell them how it is. You can’t go through life getting things sugarcoated.”

He also clearly lays out the consequences for the young people whose previous lapses in judgment have landed them in the juvenile justice system. He said a typical conversation might go like this: “What’s going to happen if your behavior doesn’t change? You are going to jail. If you keep running your mouth like you are running your mouth, when you turn 18, somebody is going to beat you up.”

Juvenile court officials have taken note of Jarrett’s effective approach. “All in all, Byron fills a niche that is difficult to fill in Des Moines,” said Jim Perlowski, a juvenile court officer who has referred youths to Solid Foundations for services such as tracking and monitoring, skill building and tutoring. “Most of the kids that he provides services for are kids that would have no one else to work with. He has built a high level of trust from me by being someone who is responsive to families’ needs.”

Much of Jarrett’s success, Perlowski said, comes from his deep understanding of the different issues facing the families of the youths he works with. “He knows a lot about the individual dynamics of families, he learns what the kids’ peer groups are like and he advocates for them,” Perlowski said. “He also is straightforward with them. If they’ve been messing up, he makes sure they know they’re messing up.”

DANIELLE STURGIS

Student Activist finalist

Earlier this fall, Danielle Sturgis, a junior majoring in journalism and sociology at Drake University who describes her political views as “right of center,” founded a local chapter of the Network of enlightened Women (NeW), a non-partisan group that seeks to widen the voice with which women on campus are represented.

The Drake chapter is the organization’s third in the United States, and Sturgis in the process of helping students at Simpson College establish their own chapter of NeW.

Sixty-five percent of Drake students are women, yet Sturgis believes women’s groups on campus reflect the views of a radical minority. “The women’s movement on campus is doing an effective job for those it represents, but does not speak for all of us,” she said. “It pigeonholes women.”

One of her goals with NeW is to create an atmosphere in which women can express conservative viewpoints without fear of being ostracized, something Sturgis has endured. She said ridiculed by a professor for holding women like Phyllis Schlafly and Star Parker up as role models, and is regarded by some of her peers as a “fascist, heterosexist, racist and Nazi” because of her pro-America, pro-family views.

However, she said NeW “is not an extension of me” and will evolve as its members decide.

“Drake is a more politically aware campus because of the activity of this ambitious young woman, and Drake students are being exposed to a different side of feminism through the Network of enlightened Women,” Juliana Anderson, executive director of Drake University College Republicans, wrote in her nomination letter.

BEN PARROTT

Student Activist finalist

As an undergraduate at Simpson College in 2002, Ben Parrott traveled to Nicaragua. Indirectly, the experience propelled him into activism with I-CARE (Iowa Central American Relief Effort) and DU-CARE, a chapter at Drake University, where he is now a third-year law student. The non-profit groups, whose treasury Parrott seeded with a $500 donation, are raising money to improve hospital conditions in Nicaragua.

After he had returned to the United States after his undergraduate trip, his host mother in Nicaragua was diagnosed with breast cancer and had a mastectomy. When he visited her earlier this year, he had an opportunity to tour the hospital where she was receiving treatment and was astonished by the conditions.

“It was eye-opening,” Parrott said. “It treats a lot of cancer patients from rural Nicaragua who live in incredible poverty, and the clinic is poor. They don’t have money to buy essentials like towels and bed linens, and if patients need them, they have to provide them themselves. Rural patients can’t afford that.”

His I-CARE and DU-CARE groups are working with hospitals across the Midwest to collect supplies for the hospital. “Once bed linens and towels have served their lifespan, they can serve a useful life down there,” he said.

Another component of the project would be to buy new bed linens and towels for the hospital where his host mother received treatment, as well as raise enough money to modernize the clinic with air conditioning, plumbing and fresh paint.

“It shocks you conscious if you can actually see it,” Parrott said. “I felt like we had to do something.”

SARAH MAYBERRY

Student Activist finalist

Sarah Mayberry was one of the forces behind last week’s Freedom Week sponsored by the Drake University College Republicans and Network of enlightened Women. The weeklong event, which included events like “Love Your Second Amendment Day,” which took participants to a shooting range.

“Sarah is partisan and no-holds-barred,” said Danielle Sturgis, who nominated her for the award. “She is unabashedly conservative, but this does not mean she is not working for social change. Sarah has devoted a lot of time to getting Drake students both politically aware and involved. She stands her ground, yet argues respectfully and takes the time to understand another’s view.”

Mayberry, a junior majoring law, politics and society at Drake, believes campus organizations don’t represent the views of conservative. One of the founding members of NeW, she believes that women who want to take a few years off from their careers to be stay-at-home-moms “aren’t exactly looked upon favorably” at Drake.