Standing Ovation Awards

This year’s Standing Ovation Award winners have dedicated themselves to helping women entrepreneurs, refugees, college students, breast cancer patients, children, and many other groups throughout the Twin Cities.  Most do this on top of other obligations, including full-time work and raising a family. We thank them for all they do for the community.

Outstanding Volunteer: Janel Goff
As a young girl, Janel Goff and her mother would donate a book to the school library every year on Janel’s birthday, beginning a lifetime dedication to volunteerism that continues today. Goff, who is senior vice president of investments at the Goff Investment Group with UBS Financial Services Inc., has served as a trustee on the boards of the YWCA and TPT, has organized golf tournaments for Hope Chest for Breast Cancer, and launched the United Way Women’s Leadership Council. The latter, which focuses on empowering women to make a difference in the community through philanthropic giving, volunteerism, and advocacy, has raised more than $500,000 for early childhood development. “I feel very fortunate,” Goff says. “I’ve had a very successful career and have always wanted to help others and give back.”

Outstanding Board Member: Robin Kocina
Robin Kocina is chairperson of the board of directors at WomenVenture, an organization that guides 5,000 women a year down new career paths by providing career planning, small business development, and financial literacy. It’s a cause near to Kocina’s heart. She was once a single mother who struggled to put herself through college, and she relishes the chance to help other women. “I always want to show women the potential of what they can achieve,” she says. “So many don’t have the tools.” Even though Kocina is also owner and chief financial officer of Kocina Marketing Companies, she devotes about 25 percent of her time to volunteering for WomenVenture and donates her company’s event planning and website development skills. Her WomenVenture colleagues credit her with using her business talents to help the board diversify the organization’s funding base and leverage its resources. In the last few years, she has helped transform WomenVenture’s annual conference into a successful fundraiser that generates 6 percent of the organization’s operating budget and draws sellout crowds with high-profile speakers.

Outstanding Nonprofit Employee: Clifford Stanley
After 33 years serving in the U.S. Marine Corps, Clifford Stanley could have carved out a life of leisurely retirement. Instead, he plunged into the world of education and in 2004 he took the helm of Scholarship America, the country’s largest nonprofit private-sector scholarship and educational support organization. In Scholarship America, he saw a passion with which he identified. “This is an extension of what I am and who I am,” he says. “I recognized that my shelf life of helping extends only a certain number of years, and I want to make a difference for people.” Since taking the helm, Stanley has increased the organization’s visibility and its staff with the goal of reaching out to a greater variety of students and their parents. For many years, scholarships only went to students at the top of their classes. Stanley wants to focus efforts on smart students who, for whatever reasons, may not rise to the top. It’s not just about financial aid either: the organization, he says, has an obligation to help students realize their self-worth and their ability to become successful.

Best Service Project: Financial Literacy provided by Lifetrack Resources, Leadership St. Paul, and Vietnamese Social Services
In the process of helping an immigrant client, a counselor at Lifetrack Resources noticed the woman kept several uncashed paychecks in her purse. She said someone told her to “save her paychecks,” advice that she apparently took literally. It’s those types of scenarios that Lifetrack hoped to address when, with a $30,000 American Express grant in hand, staff submitted a project proposal to Leadership St. Paul to educate immigrants and refugees about basic financial terms and practices. Leadership St. Paul volunteers helped develop the project and the materials to get it off the ground, while volunteers from Vietnamese Social Services and Lifetrack Resources provided the financial literacy counseling that helped more than 200 individuals navigate the U.S. banking system, evaluate credit card offers, and decipher cell phone plans. Many of the immigrants had never been inside a bank, says Amber Howard, Lifetrack’s communications coordinator, who notes that eight of ten clients now have checking accounts. “It made a huge impact on these people’s lives,” she says.

Graves 601 Hotel Award
Best Fundraising Event: The Piper Breast Center’s 10th Anniversary Dinner and Dance
More than 300 guests filled the new Walker Art Center last October for the Piper Breast Center’s 10th Anniversary Dinner and Dance. The black-tie event started with cocktails and hors d’oeuvres, moved downstairs for a Wolfgang Puck-catered dinner, and then gravitated back upstairs for dancing to the Casablanca Orchestra featuring singer Patty Peterson. “It was so fun. Everyone ended up staying really late,” says Ann MacDonald, the event chairperson. The committee decided against a silent auction fundraiser and chose instead to raise money through tickets. Tables of ten were priced at $15,000 and $10,000, and individual tickets cost $500, netting more than $250,000 to buy a state-of-the-art digital mammography machine for the Piper Breast Center at Abbott Northwestern Hospital. The center’s second digital imager allows staff to better detect breast cancers, especially in women under fifty who have denser breast tissue. The center installed the new machine in early 2006 and has already seen remarkable results. “It’s been wonderful,” says Carol Bergen, clinical manager for the center. “We’ve enhanced patient flow tremendously.”