St. Mary's women feted at annual awards banquet

If Patrice Campbell wasn’t so busy with her Building Bridges Foundation, perhaps she might be in the hardware business as she has racked up some pretty impressive trophies recently.

The third of those awards was being named as the Woman of the Year at the St. Mary’s County Commission for Women’s annual Women’s History Brunch on Saturday at the SMART Building in California.

“I was really excited,” Campbell told Southern Maryland News on Tuesday. “I wasn’t feeling well on Saturday and then Saturday night [after the luncheon] I couldn’t sleep and I think it was just really setting in because Sunday morning I was like, ‘Wow, that was amazing.’”

“I think it was her commitment to the children and trying to make a difference in the next generation,” Norma Pipkin, the commission’s vice-chair, said.

Great Mills High School junior Aubrey Williamson, who was named the Young Woman of the Year, was nominated by David Randle of the school’s NJROTC squad.

Williamson volunteers with the Bay District Volunteer Fire Department and started an organization called Tumbling Elves to provide Christmas stockings to those in need.

The event program stated Williamson is “passionate about everything she does and continually receives praise from her teachers for her hard work, dedication and kindness to others.”

Longtime St. Mary’s school board member Mary Washington was unanimously selected as the winner of the Ruth Bader Ginsberg Lifetime Achievement Award.

“Once we had our theme of diversity, equity and inclusion, we looked around the community to see who we felt met that criteria,” Pipkin said, “and who would also emulate Justice Ginsberg’s principles, and we felt she met that criteria perfectly.”

Frances “Franny” Ann Cullison — who was the first female EMS chief in the county — and was an active member at the Ridge Volunteer Rescue Squad for more than 50 years, posthumously received the Hometown Shero Award.

Pipkin said the commission was “really blessed to have so many nominees,” and added the Woman of the Year and Young Woman of the Year awards are decided by independent panels, though the commission does select the lifetime achievement award winner.

The Woman of the Year award was just another in Campbell’s trophy case after the Lexington Park resident was presented with an award by the local chapter of the NAACP in October and more recently was recognized by her Calvary United Church in Sunderland.

Campbell said Building Bridges “advocates for students to be connected and be able to spend more time in school to be able to get the educational support that they need and bridge whatever gap they need. Sometimes it’s just structure, sometimes it was behavioral. Whatever it was, it was a gap and that’s not what I imagined Building Bridges to be. I actually pictured Building Bridges to be tutoring, mentoring, helping the kids bridge the educational gaps, and when they came in and needed so much more it was, ‘Hey let it be what it has to be.’”