Daily Hampshire Gazette - July 8, 2021
Photos by Carol Lollis
In 1979, Dr. Marty Nathan was a new mother and recent graduate of Duke University School of Medicine when her world changed forever. While participating in an anti-Klan rally, her then-husband, Dr. Michael Nathan, was one of five killed by neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan.
Following such a great loss, Nathan could have retreated and focused on work and family. Nobody would have blamed her. Instead, when Nathan and other survivors of the attack sued and won a judgment against the city of Greensboro, North Carolina, and the KKK, she used money from the judgment to help start a justice fund that for 20 years made grants to small activist groups in the South.
In 1995, Nathan and her husband, Elliot Fratkin, PhD, moved to Pioneer Valley. As a physician, Nathan chose to work in clinics all over the Valley, seeing low-income patients. Nathan helped start La Cliniquita, a clinic attending to the needs of undocumented and uninsured immigrants. And she continued her justice work, co-founding the Markham-Nathan Fund for Social Justice in 2009; it has since given out $400,000 in grants to local activist groups.
Nathan has long worked on issues of environmental justice. She is a co-founder of Climate Action Now in western Massachusetts. She marched with Frances Crowe, opposing militarism. And she writes a monthly column in the Gazette, helping educate the public about climate and peace issues. Nathan’s impact is felt far and wide.
With the challenges of the last year, when many physicians chose to retire, Dr. Khama Ennis chose to work more and assume greater leadership responsibility at Cooley Dickinson Hospital. She was president of the medical staff, and as the associate director of the Emergency Department, Ennis was instrumental in putting in place a temporary annex that helped the hospital cope with the influx of COVID-19 patients. As a result, the hospital was not overwhelmed like others, and providers suffered few COVID infections.
At the same time, as the inequities of systemic racism boiled over, Ennis prioritized the dismantling of structural racism, locally and nationally. At the hospital, she became involved with addressing the social and behavioral determinants of health that contribute to, and often drive, racial disparities in healthcare outcomes.
Ennis has spread the message of diversity, equity and inclusion in health care via columns in The Washington Post, board of director work for Parents magazine, and she has presented from Boston to Australia.
Christian Ciolkos is a 15-year-old student from Hadley who attends Hopkins Academy. With the pressures of remote learning, Christian could have focused solely on studies. Instead, he made time to help even more than he had already, giving time, labor and funding to help less fortunate neighbors.
As a result, his volunteer work — going back eight years to the age of 7 — has included helping at Meghan’s Light annual 5K for cystic fibrosis, at his church’s monthly meal program, at Hadley Mothers Club events, at the PTO snack distribution (writing notes on hundreds of bananas) and reading to younger children. He has taken service trips to Nicaragua and Costa Rica — all of that on top of high school clubs, sports and serving on his class board.
This year, the Daily Hampshire Gazette and United Way of Hampshire County honor Nathan with our Frances Crowe Award, recognizing a person representing the essence of Frances Crowe’s change-making legacy; Ennis as our Person of the Year; and Ciolkos as our Young Community Leader.
When challenged, each chose to look outward, and more importantly, act. When circumstances gave an option to retreat, they choose to surge forward and channel their challenges into service to others.
We all face such choices, great and small. Helping is a choice. Service is a choice. Fighting for what is right is a choice. And giving hope is a choice. In the face of great need, our award recipients remind us to choose compassionately, because the positive impact is more than personal, it can be communal, national and global.
John Bidwell is executive director of United Way of Hampshire County, focusing on poverty and low-income challenges and supporting the agencies that serve those populations.