GROVE HILL, Ala. — United Way of Southwest Alabama recognized volunteers, businesses and community partners for their service to Clarke County during its annual meeting and awards luncheon Sept. 10 at the Grove Hill Senior Center.
The program featured awards for community leadership and fundraising, along with keynote remarks from Clarke County native, investigative reporter and anchor Shelby Myers.
Nearly 6,000 Pounds of Food, 330 Households
The awards program opened with recognition of the organizations behind the Thomasville food distribution.
Westervelt Lumber sponsored the December distribution, which provided nearly 6,000 pounds of food from Feeding the Gulf Coast to 330 households.
Recognized for their roles in the effort were the Boys & Girls Club of Southwest Alabama, Feeding the Gulf Coast, International Paper’s Pine Hill mill, Jackson Academy and Westervelt.
The arithmetic works out to roughly 18 pounds of food per household — a meaningful supplement in a rural county where the nearest full-service grocery can be a considerable drive and where December brings added household expense.
The Award Winners
Clarke County Sheriff DeWayne Smith received the Heart of Gold Award for nearly three decades of law enforcement service and for his work with young people, leadership education and second chance opportunities.
Alesia Burrell of International Paper Pine Hill was named outstanding campaign coordinator for her leadership of the company’s United Way golf tournament. The 2025 tournament, combined with International Paper’s corporate match, raised more than $40,000. From 2023 through 2025, the tournament raised more than $105,000.
Westervelt Lumber received the outstanding campaign award after its 2025 United Way campaign raised more than $83,000 — the company’s highest campaign total to date.
Julia Ann Deas received the inaugural Julia Ann Deas Heart of Platinum Award. A longtime Clarke County committee member and United Way supporter, Deas had the award created in her honor to recognize her years of service, commitment and efforts to bring others into the organization.
Louisiana Pacific received the outstanding community partner award for its longstanding investment in Clarke County and support of the community.
An Award Named for a Living Volunteer
Creating an award in someone’s name and then presenting them with its first edition is an unusual gesture, and a deliberate one.
Most named awards honor people who are no longer present to receive them. Establishing one for an active volunteer serves a different function: it sets a standard by pointing at a specific person and saying, in effect, that this is what sustained commitment looks like. Every subsequent recipient will be measured against a named example rather than an abstraction.
The Workplace Campaign Model
Two of the awards — International Paper’s golf tournament and Westervelt’s $83,000 campaign — reflect the mechanism that has funded United Way for most of its history: the workplace campaign.
The model is straightforward and unusually durable. An employer hosts a campaign, employees pledge contributions through payroll deduction, and the company frequently matches some portion. The advantage over one-time solicitation is predictability: payroll deduction produces steady, forecastable revenue that lets an organization plan a year of funding for its partner agencies.
The role of a campaign coordinator — the position Burrell was recognized for — is what makes it work at any given site. Coordinators are almost always employees taking on the role in addition to their actual jobs.
Industry as a Fundraising Base
The award list is also a portrait of the Clarke County economy. International Paper’s Pine Hill mill, Westervelt Lumber and Louisiana Pacific are all forest products operations.
Southwest Alabama’s timber industry has anchored the regional economy for generations, and in counties where a handful of large industrial employers represent a substantial share of good-paying jobs, those employers also represent a substantial share of charitable capacity. A single mill running a strong workplace campaign can move a county’s total meaningfully.
That concentration is a strength and a vulnerability at once. It produces large campaigns; it also means local charitable funding is exposed to the fortunes of one industry.
A Century of Operation
United Way of Southwest Alabama serves Choctaw, Clarke, Mobile and Washington counties.
The organization was established in 1926 as a community chest and has raised and invested more than $279 million in the region.
The community chest model — a single coordinated fundraising drive supporting multiple local agencies, rather than each charity soliciting separately — was the innovation that became the United Way system nationally. The premise was that one well-organized annual campaign would raise more, and cost less to run, than a dozen competing ones.
A hundred years and $279 million later, the organization is still operating on that premise in the same four counties.
The Keynote
Keynote remarks came from Shelby Myers, a Clarke County native who works as an investigative reporter and anchor.
Inviting someone who grew up in the county to address a room of local volunteers is a choice with its own logic: the speaker understands the place, and the audience recognizes the path.