Betty Magness Receives 2026 Greensfelder-Elam Award

We are delighted to announce that Betty Magness, our current Executive Vice President, received the 2026 Greensfelder-Elam Award at LWV Chicago’s Annual Meeting on June 6.

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.

Catherine Mardikes, who received the award in 2025, presented Betty with the Greensfelder-Elam award in recognition of her outstanding service.

For more than five decades, Betty has been at the heart of Chicago’s civil rights, voting rights, and political education movements. From Operation Breadbasket to Rainbow PUSH, from IVI-IPO to Chicago Women Take Action, from voter registration tables to political education classrooms, Betty has done the hard work that democracy requires. The steady work. The patient work. The work that happens before the cameras arrive and long after they leave.

She once said, “In this world, it is up to us to give young people a way to follow.” That sentence is pure Betty. It encompasses her faith, her discipline, her politics, her generosity, and her fierce belief that the future is not something we can afford to wait for. It is something we must create together.

Betty has marched. She has organized. She has taught young people. She has opened doors. And she has made sure that the next generation remembers what it cost to open those doors—and what it takes to keep them open.

Rev. Jesse Jackson taught generations of people to embrace the mantra “I am somebody.” Betty has spent a lifetime making sure people believed it. That is Betty’s legacy: she does not merely lead. She multiplies leadership by making leaders.

Betty, thank you for your lifetime of courage, service, friendship, and love. Thank you for showing us what it means to be somebody, and for making sure everyone you meet knows they are somebody too.