Pat Wilder Receives 2024 Greensfelder-Elam Award

Pat Wilder received the 2024 Greensfelder-Elam Award at LWV Chicago’s Annual Meeting on June 8.

Established in 1981, the award has been presented to a member who has demonstrated extraordinary long-term dedication and effectiveness in League work. It was named after Olive Greensfelder, a child welfare activist and a charter member of the League, and Elinor Elam, a former Chicago League President who played a crucial role in identifying a budget error.

Tana Durnbaugh, who works closely with Pat on League initiatives, presented the Greensfelder-Elam award in honor of Pat’s success in running voter registration and education efforts at local high schools. 

After 35 years living in Lincolnshire and a 16-month road trip visiting National Parks, Pat moved to Chicago in the winter of 2013. She wanted to learn more about her new home, so she joined the League of Women Voters.

While in Lincolnshire, she served eight years on the Stevenson High School Board of Education, was President of the Stevenson Foundation, Executive Director of the Lincolnshire Chamber of Commerce and coordinated the Career Program and acted as a Voter Registrar at Stevenson High School.

Her love of politics began when she attended the Young Democrats Convention in Racine, Wisconsin as a high school junior and met John F. Kennedy, who was running in the Primary against Hubert Humphrey. Although most of her volunteer work had been on behalf of candidates, the League gave her the opportunity to combine her love of working with high school students with her belief in the importance of voting, so, for the past ten years, she has organized voter registration events in Chicago high schools. This past winter, a team of ten volunteers visited eleven local high schools and registered over 600 students.

As a volunteer with the Adlai Stevenson Center on Democracy, she expanded her interest in international policies. For the past ten years, along with Tana Durnbaugh, she has co-organized the spring Great Decisions program, a foreign policy discussion group, on behalf of the League at Sulzer Library. With Sulzer’s donation of resource books, they were recently able to expand to a fall program at the Budlong Woods Library. 

Thank you, Pat, for your outstanding contributions to the League!