Crossnore school director wins Reynolds award

The Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation has honored three North Carolinians with its coveted Nancy Susan Reynolds Award – a farmer from northeastern North Carolina who turned his personal adversity into a lifelong of service to other struggling farmers by helping them fight the bureaucracy; a public official who used the local fire department as a means to improve race relations in his community and expand opportunities for minorities and women; and an educator who broadened her role in the lives of young people by transforming a residential foster care home into a place of healing and hope.

The recipients are Benny Bunting of Oak City, a Martin County farmer and farm advocate, for Personal Service; Benny Nichols, the Fire Chief of Fayetteville in Cumberland County, for Race Relations; and Phyllis H. Crain, Executor Director of The Crossnore School in Avery County, for Advocacy.

This year marks the 23rd year for the awards that have been referred to as “North Carolina’s Nobel Prize.” One thing that makes the Nancy Susan Reynolds Awards unique is that they recognize leadership at the grassroots level and single out individuals who previously have not been recognized.

Each award carries a $25,000 prize – $5,000 for the recipient to use as he or she chooses, and $20,000 to be given to nonprofit organizations of his or her choice. Recipients also received a bronze sculpture of Nancy Susan Reynolds, the philanthropist in whose memory the awards are presented each year. Reynolds, who died in 1985, was the daughter of Katharine Smith and R.J. Reynolds and was one of the founders of the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation.

This year’s Nancy Susan Reynolds Awards were presented on Nov. 24 at a luncheon in Raleigh attended by approximately 400 people, including public officials, leaders of North Carolina’s nonprofit community, and friends and families of the recipients. Congressman G.K. Butterfield, who represents North Carolina’s First District in the United States House of Representatives, spoke before the awards were presented.

Butterfield, an early supporter of President-elect Barrack Obama, talked about issues facing the state and nation and what he thought legislative priorities would be.

Dr. Lloyd P. (Jock) Tate, of Southern Pines, president of the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation, said, “Like Nancy Susan Reynolds, our unsung heroes always start with a positive attitude about the ability of individuals to affect conditions around them. They see needs and figure out ways to meet them. They are resourceful people. They dream dreams and then somehow find the strength and the resources to make them come true.

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He continued, “Nancy Susan Reynolds would have enjoyed sitting quietly in the audience today and seeing how the people we honor this year have stepped forth at just the right time to provide the leadership, hard work, and inspiration that people in their communities have needed.

“The wonderful thing about our winners is that communities and individuals – friends, neighbors, and fellow North Carolinians – benefit from their successes and their ability, time and time again, to accomplish what often seems to be impossible,” Tate said.

Bunting, the winner for personal service, has developed and encyclopedic knowledge of government farm programs established over the years to help farmers manage the ups and downs of growing and market conditions. When administered fairly with care and concern, these programs of the federal Farm Services Agency are a valuable resource. When they are not, they can be farmers’ worst nightmares and speed them down the road to financial ruin and bankruptcy. It is when farm families are at their lowest point generally – hopeless, in fact – that they turn to Bunting.

Bunting first learned when he was fighting for his own farm. Today, fighting for other farmers is his life. He lives alone, and his entire home has been given over to work. He gets around in a well-used pickup truck.

Much of his work is in North Carolina, but he moves around the nation as a representative of farmers whose businesses and lives are on the line as a result of flawed decisions made by governmental agencies and bureaucrats. About a third of his clients are minorities – African American or Latino – and he works closely with the Land Loss Prevention Project headquartered in Durham. RAFI-USA, with whom Bunting now works, says Bunting has been successful 90 percent of the time and has saved farm families an estimated $42 million.

Crain, who received the award for advocacy, has been a lifelong advocate for children. A former teacher who became the first female superintendent of schools in a rural northwest North Carolina County, she soon sought a more specialized role, that of Executive Director of The Crossnore School. In Crossnore, a residential facility for abused and neglected children from families in crisis throughout western North Carolina, Crain saw great promise to provide a place of healing and hope.

She turned the school around, adding new programs, professional staff, and home-like cottages and other buildings. She raised money. Far and wide, she built Crossnore’s reputation and turned it into a model that has received national attention. While caring for hundreds of children, Crain also has championed the cause of residential foster care, believing that if done well, it is far superior to the traditional foster care system of placing children in private homes with foster parents.

For the last seven years, Crain has served Crossnore in spite of her own personal adversity – Stage IV breast cancer. Now she approaches each day with a balance of calm and urgency because she knows she still has much to do for the children at Crossnore, as well as countless others who need and deserve the best foster care possible.

Nichols, the recipient for Race Relations, has spent more than three decades of his life in firefighting, working his way through the Fayetteville Fire Department to become Chief in 2004. Ten years earlier, after white supremacists murdered a black couple in downtown Fayetteville, Nichols facilitated a community forum called to find ways to find solutions to racial issues. He looked within his own fire department to find some of the answers.

First, he was instrumental in getting the city to rebuild a fire station in a predominantly African-American part of Fayetteville that had not a station for more than 20 years and was underserved. Residents had felt vulnerable because response time was a continuing problem. In addition, there was widespread resentment. African-Americans in that part of Fayetteville felt like second-class citizens.

Nichols also acknowledged that the fire department, composed primarily of white males, was in no way representative of Fayetteville’s racial diversity. Generally, neither African Americans nor women saw the fire department as a career opportunity. Nichols put together a collaborative involving a neighborhood high school, E.E. Smith High School, Fayetteville Technical Community College, and Fayetteville State University that would provide the stream of education needed for fire science. The programs are offering sound fire science education and are beginning to attract in greater numbers minorities and women to the Fayetteville Fire Department. At the same time, racial tensions have diminished and minority residents feel their voices are being heard.

The Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation was founded in 1936 and is headquartered in Winston-Salem. By its charter, it exists for “the accomplishment of charitable works in the state of North Carolina. The Foundation currently gives special attention to certain focus areas – community economic development, democracy and civic engagement, environment, pre-collegiate education, and social justice and equity. Since its founding, the Foundation has made grants of more than $400 million to organizations in all 100 counties of North Carolina.