“mso-bidi-font-style: normal;”>
“font-family: Verdana;”>The St. Louis American
started its Salute to
Excellence awards and networking programs in 1988 with the Salute
to Excellence in Education, which remains the flagship event at the
heart of (now) the St. Louis American Foundation, which has
provided substantial financial support for scholarships to area
students, as well as local community grants, with the funds raised
at these events. Recognizing a need for an elite annual award event
that recognizes African-American excellence in other critical
fields of endeavor, we then added the Salute to Excellence in
Business in 2000 and the Salute to Excellence in Health Care in
2001. Over the years, we have considered adding a fourth event,
recognizing an absence of significant public recognition and
celebration in St. Louis of African Americans in the arts and in
government service, to name just two Salutes we have contemplated.
But, for a variety of reasons, we decided in 2011 to make our focus
generational and interdisciplinary and to inaugurate the Salute to
Young Leaders.
All of our
Salute events are community-driven and begin with recommendations
from our readers and from community institutions. With the Salute
to Young Leaders, we saw an avalanche of worthy submissions to
select the 20 inaugural St. Louis American Foundation Young
Leaders. The final awardees were selected by a committee of their
peers (African-American professionals under age 40).
This group
is definitely interdisciplinary and eclectic, featuring young
leaders in banking, health benefits, the judiciary, veterans’
services, energy, scientific research, administration, health,
finance, investment, engineering, community relations, law,
medicine and faith. If we inaugurated this award program because we
suspected there were a number of impressive young leaders in our
community who merited serious public recognition, we introduce this
inaugural group of awardees today with a renewed sense that
prospects for our future are enhances because of these capable
young professionals who are committed to improving their
community.
In his
2011 State of the Union address, President Barack Obama took a
giant leap above the petty, spiteful divisiveness of the current
political climate to survey this country and its citizens from a
global and futuristic perspective, asking in all sincerity what we
need to do differently today to ensure that the children and youth
of this country will be in a better position to succeed and make
positive changes in the future. It was striking to see this
historic president, who is targeted daily by a rival political
party that specializes in stirring up fears of older white voters,
look America squarely in the eye as a nation that is getting
younger and more diverse. To give our diverse youth a nation worth
inheriting, President Obama said, we must focus on education,
infrastructure and innovation. We need to invest in the next
generation (education), shore up the impressive public systems and
facilities we have established (infrastructure) and stimulate and
reward new ways of thinking that will create the productive
businesses of then future that, for most of us, are currently
unthinkable (innovation).
Long after
the hate and backwardness of today’s political skirmishes have been
thankfully forgotten, we believe, this speech will be remembered as
offering the right guidance at the right time. In the inaugural
2011 group of St. Louis American Foundation Young Leaders, we
believe we have identified some of the young people who are
emerging to help execute President Obama’s forward-looking vision
for improving the future.
