MOUNT VERNON — A woman who helped lead a congregation’s revival of its Chicago neighborhood, which was victimized by riots and white flight in the 1960s and 1970s, will speak Sunday, April 29, for an annual program sponsored by Cornell College and St. Paul’s United Methodist Church in Cedar Rapids.
Mary Nelson, founding president and CEO of Bethel New Life Inc., a faith-based community development corporation on Chicago’s West Side, will speak at St. Paul’s and Cornell for the Small-Thomas Lecture Series, “Dreams of Peace: Visions of the Future.” The series addresses diversity and community from a faith perspective. Public events are:
– 9:25 and 10:55 a.m. worship services at St. Paul’s. Nelson will deliver the sermons, on the role of churches and congregations in community organizing.
– 7 p.m. lecture in Hedges Conference Room, The Commons, Cornell. Nelson will speak on her career in community organizing and community development. Her appearance serves as the final installment in another Cornell lecture series, “Community, Agency and Action: Social Change in the New Century.”
Bethel New Life began in 1979 as a community ministry of Bethel Lutheran Church, where Nelson’s brother served as minister. Church members wanted to fight the poverty and despair that plagued West Garfield Park in the wake of the riots of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Homeowners, landlords, banks, businesses and investors had fled the neighborhood. Church members purchased an abandoned three-flat apartment building to renovate for housing. More projects followed that built on the people, physical assets and faith base of the community.
Today Bethel New Life employs several hundred people in programs that include special-needs, single-family and multi-family housing development; child and senior care; and employment training and placement services. The largest project to date is the opening of the Beth-Anne Campus on a 9.2-acre rehabilitated hospital site. The campus includes day care centers, living facilities for low-income elderly, office space and a performing arts center.
Nelson was born in Duluth, Minn., one of four children in a family headed by a Lutheran minister and his activist wife. She was raised in Washington, D.C., where her father led an inner-city church. Following graduation from Gustavus Adolphus College she served two years as a schoolteacher in Tanzania before moving to Chicago. She holds a doctorate from Union Graduate School and a master’s degree in urban education from Brown University.
In addition to serving on several community boards, Nelson sits on the board of the National Congress for Community Economic Development, the trade association for organizations working with distressed communities. She has received numerous awards including the 1994 Century of Women Special Achievement Award from Turner Broadcasting System/Sprint and the Humanitarian Award from the Chicago chapter of the NAACP.
The Small-Thomas Lecture Series, now in its second year, was conceived and funded by Richard Small, a past chair of the Cornell board of trustees and a 1950 graduate, and his wife, honorary alumna and trustee Norma Thomas Small. The lecture series honors Norma’s father, Cecil Thomas, who was Cornell buildings and grounds superintendent (1956-1973) and consultant (1979-1991), and her mother, the late June Thomas.
Cornell is affiliated with the United Methodist Church.
Nelson replaces the previously announced speaker, Dolores Huerta, co-founder of the United Farm Workers. She has cut back speaking engagements for health reasons.