BeLoved Asheville Wins WNC Community Service Award
The community service organization BeLoved Asheville has been chosen to receive the 2021 Evan Mahaney Champion of Civil Liberties Award, presented annually by the WNC Chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union.
Named for the former local activist and long-time president of the WNC Chapter, the Mahaney Award is presented to individuals or organizations in the community whose work has moved the needle on social justice.
Beloved Asheville, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, is a service agency working to alleviate poverty and to provide mutual aid for community members most at risk: elders; people experiencing homelessness; Black, Indigenous and people of color (BIPOC) individuals and communities. Its programs focus on social justice, human rights, racial equality, and healing.
The organization provides free farmer’s markets for food access and offers rapid response to ICE raids, natural disasters, and community emergencies such as the Covid-19 pandemic. Its actions during the onset of Covid included seeking and winning early release of Buncombe County inmates with nonviolent offenses; advocacy toward stopping evictions and water shut-offs; support for public portable restrooms and handwashing stations; and expanded shelter leading to the opening of the Civic Center during the pandemic.
BeLoved Asheville has taken active stands to reduce police brutality, to call for immigration reform, and to abolish ICE. Focused on building community power, the organization recently started Camp Clean, a program supporting residents who are homeless and living in camps located in public areas.
The WNC-ACLU chapter is citing BeLoved Asheville for creating “innovative solutions to some of the toughest challenges we face as a country, while providing for those in need and helping us remember our humanity.”
Past recipients of the Mahaney Award include Bob Smith, long-time head of the Asheville-Buncombe Community Relations Council; Howard Hanger, founder of the Jubilee! Community; the organizers of the first Women’s March on Asheville in 2017; attorney Frank Goldsmith and team for freeing wrongfully convicted Edward Chapman from death row; and Tyrone Greenlee, director of Christians for a United Community, a nonprofit coalition of churches mobilizing around social justice issues, particularly focusing on dismantling racism and the disparities it causes.
The award itself bears the name of a longtime social justice worker in the community. Evan Mahaney retired to the Asheville area from the Southwest in the 1990s following a lengthy journalism career in print and television. He was responsible for reinvigorating the dormant local ACLU chapter in the late 1990s.
Local and state ACLU veteran Jim Cavener remembers Mahaney as a “larger-than-life” mover and shaker whose energy lives on through the award named in his honor. When he died unexpectedly in 2004, the chapter created and posthumously gave the first “Champion of Civil Liberties” award to Mahaney himself.
Cavener also speaks with great appreciation for another Mahaney achievement, the Pazole Party that he and his wife, the late Marsha Lockwood (a librarian in the Buncombe County Public Library system who retired from the Skyland/South Buncombe Branch in 2008), used to host annually on New Year’s Day. Transported with them when they moved here from the Southwest, Pazole was a New Mexico version of New Year’s Day open houses, Cavener remembers, complete with the hominy, pork, cumin, garlic, and onion stew it is named for—and reflective of the transplanted couple’s celebration of community.
The Mahaney Champion of Civil Liberties Award event will be held at 3 p.m. on June 26, 2021 at Land of the Sky United Church of Christ, 15 Overlook Place, Asheville. It is free and open to the public; refreshments will be served. For further information, contact Sam Katz at [email protected].
