Fun Facts
BET: Teresa Clarke Receives the 2010 Shot Caller Award – BLACK GIRLS ROCK!
Recognizing her leadership and global impact. In her acceptance speech, she reflects on purpose, representation, and the importance of deepening ties between Africa and the United States.
How many black women born in 1914 went on to non-profit board service in predominantly white organizations?
Not many.
Meet my late grandmother, Elvira Farrar Clarke, born in 1914 in Bridgeport, Connecticut, who served on various non-profit boards in Fairfield County, Connecticut. Grammy attended Howard University in Washington, D.C., where she majored in Home Economics. She enjoyed a long career in several positions of service to the public and her community. She was a junior high teacher, employment counselor, program director for a portfolio of Head Start programs, and a librarian.
In the 1950’s, she was a pioneering non-profit board leader in her home state of Connecticutt, where she served as President of the Board of Directors of Visiting Nurse’s Association of Bridgeport, member of the Fairfield County Girl Scout Executive Board, the Board of Directors of the United Way of Bridgeport, and Board of Directors of the Bridgeport Inter-Group Council.
She was appointed to Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley’s Advisory Committee on Child Care, and she assisted in drafting of California legislation that governed child care centers, and authoried a manual on how to start of child care center in California. She was interviewed on television in the 1970s on the topic of child care, and in 1976 she received an award for the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare for her “long and valued service to the children in Project Head Start.”
More about her life can be found at worldsbestgrammy.co