Harlan R. Beckley Award Presented to Katrina Rivers Thompson, Berea College
The Shepherd Higher Education Consortium on Poverty (SHECP) presented the second annual Harlan R. Beckley Award to Katrina Rivers Thompson, Ph.D., for her exceptional leadership and support of SHECP’s efforts to transform poverty studies.
Thompson, a professor of child and family studies at Berea College, was instrumental in the formation and shaping of the Shepherd Alliance on Poverty, forerunner to SHECP, as the faculty director and founding member of Berea College’s internship program, in 1997.
It was Thompson who recommended that the alliance, consisting then of Berea, Washington and Lee University, and Spelman College, hold its first internship orientations at the Highlander Center in Tennessee, where Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., and others met to plan for the emerging civil rights movement.
She believed that the diversity of our institutions would better enable our students to learn from each other based on their common experiences.
As the alliance outgrew the Highlander, Thompson planned and implemented the program’s opening conference at Berea, from 2002 to 2010. Thompson also provided guidance and leadership to SHECP during its early formation and served as Berea’s representative to the consortium from 2011 to 2017.
Above all, Thompson has remained personally committed to the success of SHECP’s interns, and is actively involved in the recruitment, selection, placement and evaluation of 10 to 15 summer internships annually — more than 150 interns to date — who affectionately refer to her as “Dr. KRT.”
The Council of the Shepherd Higher Education Consortium on Poverty commends Katrina Rivers Thompson for the lasting impact her insight and example has had on her students, the consortium and the countless lives touched by the program’s efforts over the past two decades.
About the Shepherd Higher Education Consortium on Poverty: The Shepherd Higher Education Consortium on Poverty (SHECP) is a consortium of colleges and universities that are committed to the study of poverty as a complex social problem, by expanding and improving educational opportunities for college students in a wide range of disciplines and career trajectories. SHECP institutions support undergraduates toward a lifetime of professional and civil efforts to diminish poverty and enhance human capability. For more information, please visit ShepherdConsortium.org, or on Twitter at @TheSHECP.
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