4-Time Olympic Gold Medalist Janet Evans to Emcee Event on September 19th

LOUISVILLE, Kentucky (August 18, 2015) — Legendary and multi-talented artist and social justice activist Harry Belafonte will receive the prestigious Muhammad Ali Humanitarian Award for Lifetime Achievement and Academy Award-winning actor, humanitarian, and women’s advocate Geena Davis will be honored as the Muhammad Ali Humanitarian of the Year at the Third Annual Muhammad Ali Humanitarian Awards presented by the Yum! Brands Foundation. Peace activist and crusader for women’s rights, Rose Mapendo will be honored with the Muhammad Ali Humanitarian Award for Gender Equality. And, Dr. Andrew Moore from Lexington, Kentucky, who founded Surgery on Sunday, will be named the 2015 Kentucky Humanitarian of the Year. Four-time Olympic Gold Medalist Janet Evans will be the emcee and host for the evening. More information about each of these individuals is provided below.

The Muhammad Ali Humanitarian Awards celebrate the greatness of people from around the world who are making differences in their communities and beyond. At the forefront of the event program will be the symbolic “passing of the torch” to the next generation. It is synergistic that 4-time Olympic Gold Medalist and 1996 Olympic Torchbearer Janet Evans will be reuniting with Muhammad Ali after so many years since she proudly passed the torch to Muhammad at the Opening Ceremonies of the Centennial Olympic Games in Atlanta.

Six young people, 30 years and younger, are honored with an award for each of Muhammad’s Six Core Principles: Confidence, Conviction, Dedication, Giving, Respect, and Spirituality.

The Six Core Principle Awardees are:

Kyla LaPointe, age 24 of Bathurst, New Brunswick will be honored for her Confidence as a leading advocate for child rights nationally and internationally.

Hadiqa Bashir, only 13 years old, will be honored for her Conviction in dedicating her young life to the advocacy of women’s and girl’s rights against forced child marriage in Pakistan.

Christopher Ategeka, 31, will receive the honor for Dedication. Born and raised in rural Uganda, orphaned at age 7, was educated at the University of California and, in 2011, used his hard-won experience to start Rides for Lives to address health inequity in his home country.

Veronika Scott, age 26, is receiving the Giving Award for she enables others to become givers. She has created a sustainable program that addresses a root cause of homelessness—unemployment—by providing homeless women with jobs as seamstresses who create thermal, waterproof coats for other homeless individuals.

Sasha Fisher, age 26, will be honored for the Respect core principle. Sasha is the co-founder and executive director of Spark MicroGrants. Spark enables remote villages in east Africa to design and launch their own social impact projects through a six-month facilitated collective action process.

Tanyella Evans, 28, will be honored for her extraordinary sense of Spirituality.  Driven by the philosophy that education is a basic human right, essential to prosperity and peace, Tanyella co-founded Library For All, an organization that offers a digital library platform to make quality educational resources available to individuals across the developing world.

For more information about the Six Core Principle Awardees, please go to alicenter.org and click on the “PRESS” link.

More Information About Featured Awardees

Harry Belafonte, Muhammad Ali Humanitarian Lifetime Achievement Award:

Harry Belafonte exposed America to world music and spent his life challenging and overturning racial barriers across the globe. Belafonte met a young Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on King’s historic visit to New York in the early 1950s and developed a deep and abiding friendship. Belafonte played a key role in the civil rights movement, including the 1963 March on Washington. In 1985, disturbed by war, drought, and famine in Africa, Belafonte helped organize the Grammy-winning song “We Are the World,” a multi-artist effort to raise funds for Africa. Belafonte was active in efforts to end apartheid in South Africa and to release Nelson Mandela.

Belafonte served as the cultural advisor for the Peace Corps, a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador and was honored as an Ambassador of Conscience by Amnesty International. Recently, Belafonte founded the Sankofa Justice & Equity Fund, a non-profit social justice organization that utilizes the power of culture and celebrity in partnership with activism.

Harry Belafonte received the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in November 2014.

Geena Davis, Muhammad Ali Humanitarian of the Year Award:

Academy Award winner Geena Davis, one of Hollywood’s most respected actors, is recognized for her tireless advocacy of gender equality in media nearly as much as for her acting accomplishments. She is the Founder and Chair of the non-profit Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, which is successfully influencing film and television content creators to dramatically increase the percentages of female characters — and reduce gender stereotyping — in media targeting children 11 and under.

In 2015, Davis launched the Bentonville Film Festival (BFF), an unprecedented initiative in support of women and diversity in the entertainment industry and serves as its Co-Founder and Chair. In 2012, Davis was appointed Special Envoy for Women and Girls in ICT for the UN’s International Telecommunication Union (ITU).  She is an official partner of UN Women and is also the Chair of the California Commission on the Status of Women.

Davis has also received the 2006 Golden Globe Award for Best Performance by an Actress in a Television Series Drama, an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her role in “The Accidental Tourist” in 1989, and numerous other nominations and accolades. Davis broke ground in her portrayal of the first female President of the United States in ABC’s hit show “Commander in Chief.”

Davis is also a world-class athlete (at one time was the nation’s 13th-ranked archer and a semi-finalist in the Olympic Trials).

Dr. Andrew Moore, Kentucky Humanitarian of the Year:

Dr. Andrew Moore, a plastic surgeon for nearly 40 years, witnessed throughout his career the need for a program to serve individuals who “fell between the cracks” of the health care industry. Dedicated to a population of people often overlooked, Dr. Moore made it his mission to see the working poor receive outpatient surgeries they would not otherwise receive due to their inability to pay.  In 2005, he founded Surgery on Sunday, a program that provides essential outpatient surgeries and procedures to the uninsured and underinsured who do not qualify for state or federal programs. It is the first program of its kind in the United States. Relying entirely on volunteers, Surgery on Sunday performs outpatient surgeries the third Sunday of each month at the Lexington Surgery Center, utilizing volunteer physicians, anesthesiologists, nurses and administrative personnel. To date, volunteers have contributed over 90,000 hours of service to assist patients in need. Since inception, the organization founded by Dr. Moore has assisted over 5,600 patients, with that number growing monthly.

Rose Mapendo, Muhammad Ali Humanitarian Award for Gender Equality:

Rose Mapendo was born in Mulenge, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in 1963 to a Banyamulenge Tutsi family. She was married at the age of 16 and began raising a family. In the early 1990s, ethnic violence in the DRC changed her world almost overnight. After surviving a harrowing experience that included the arrest of her entire family, execution of her husband, birth of their twin sons in prison, grim negotiations with prison guards to save the lives of her 10 children, Rose Mapendo experienced a seemingly miraculous chain of events that resulted in her family’s rescue and resettlement in Phoenix.  While Rose adjusted to life in the United States, she never forgot the women that she left behind and emerged from her experience advocating forgiveness and reconciliation. She established the Rose Mapendo Foundation in Phoenix that focuses on instilling a sense of worth and empowerment for women and girls, and emphasizes hope for change.

Janet Evans, Host and Presenter:

Four-time Olympic Gold Medalist Janet Evans, was a natural-born swimmer, completing laps by the age of two. In 1987, when she was just 15, Janet burst onto the international swimming scene, breaking world records in the 400m, 800m and the 1500m freestyle.   A year later at the 1988 Olympic Games in Seoul, Janet won Gold Medals in all three of her races. In 1992 in Barcelona, Janet defended her gold in the 800m freestyle and added a silver in the 400m freestyle.  At the 1996 Atlanta Olympic Games, Janet swam in both the 400m and 800m freestyle but failed to medal.  Even so, it was at this Olympics where Janet had a winning lifetime experience that provided a powerful opportunity to see another side of the Olympics:  carrying the torch at the Opening Ceremonies and passing it on to Muhammad Ali to light the Olympic cauldron—an Olympic experience which changed her forever.

Widely considered to be the greatest female distance swimmer in history, Janet has broken seven world records in three events. Her 1500m world record stood for 20 years, her 800m for 21 years, and her 400m record for 19 years. She retired from competitive swimming at the end of the Atlanta Games, but made a comeback competing in the Olympic Trials in 2012 at the age of 40.

Sponsors

In addition to the YUM! Brands Foundation, this year’s Muhammad Ali Humanitarian Awards are also supported by:  The Brown-Forman Corporation, LG&E and KU Energy, Horseshoe Southern Indiana, the Harold C. Schott Foundation, Tandem Public Relations and Marketing, River Bend Farms, and Ashbourne Farm.

Tickets to the Muhammad Ali Humanitarian Awards

Tickets to the awards can be purchased through the Ali Center’s website, or by contacting Kelly Watson at kwatson@alicenter.org or (502) 992-5338.  For more information, visit alicenter.org/awards

For more information on the third annual Muhammad Ali Humanitarian Awards to be held September 19 at the Louisville Marriott Downtown, visit alicenter.org/awards. To promote the Muhammad Ali Humanitarian Awards on social media, please use this hashtag: #Ali Awards.

For questions, please call 502 (584) 9254 or visit https://alicenter.org.

EDITORS NOTE:  Photos are available upon request. Media credentials are necessary to attend and cover the Muhammad Ali Humanitarian Awards. The application can be accessed here.