The Department of Planning, Public Policy and Management is honoring three individuals with the department’s top awards for 2013. Genevieve (Genny) Nelson is being recognized for Outstanding Service to Oregon. Terry Moore, MA ’77 public affairs, MUP ‘77, is being honored as Distinguished Alumnus. And Jennifer M. Wagner, BS ‘05, is being recognized as Distinguished Recent Alumna.
Nelson has been an advocate for Portland’s Old Town/Chinatown for more than thirty-five years. In December 2009, she retired as co-founder of Sisters Of The Road. As a young social service worker, she had asked hundreds of people experiencing poverty and homelessness what they needed, and found that was a safe place to eat, a place in which they could barter their labor in exchange for food, a place of hospitality. Sisters’ Old Town Cafe opened as an oasis of peace, dignity, and hospitality.
Nelson’s career at Sisters began with $10 in rent and barter work for the café space. Nelson and Executive Director Kurt Liska worked with Senator Mark O. Hatfield to present legislation to be able to accept food stamps for meals in nonprofit restaurants. After two years of effort, Sisters became the first nonprofit cafe in the country to accept food stamps for prepared, hot foods. Nelson has been awarded numerous honors including the National Caring Award, an honor she shared with Mother Teresa, Jimmy and Rosalynne Carter, and the Dalai Lama. Nelson has been a tireless advocate, ensuring that unhoused people are at the table with policymakers. Dorothy Day, co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement, once said: “It is when we treat strangers specially that the world is transformed.” Nelson has been an active participant in helping to transform the world and the lives of people by going to the root causes of homelessness in our region and beyond.
Moore has consulted on planning issues in Central and South America, Europe, New Zealand, China, and Africa. He joined the consulting firm of ECONorthwest in 1979, where he has been owner, board member, vice president, and project manager. Moore has managed more than 500 projects in land use and transportation planning, economic development, and growth management. In 2001 he was selected as a Fellow of the American Institute of Certified Planners. In 1996 he received the American Planning Association's “Current Topic" Award for Transportation Planning.
Moore has bridged the gap between practice and academia. He has been an adjunct professor at the University of Oregon since 1979, was a Fulbright Scholar in Peru in 1986, and in 2007 and 2009 was a visiting scholar at the National Center for Smart Growth. He is principal author of three books: Economic Development Toolbox (2006), a second edition of The Transportation/Land Use Connection (2007), and Zoning as a Barrier to Multifamily Housing Development (2007). His research has appeared in numerous professional journals and he has contributed chapters to books including Land Market Monitoring (2001), Engaging the Future (2007), and Planning Support Systems (2008). He coauthored the chapter on “Smart Growth” for the ICMA Greenbook on Local Planning, and a chapter on fiscal impacts for the Oxford Handbook of Urban Economics and Planning (2011).
Wagner is director of clinical research at Pain Research of Oregon and executive director of the Western Pain Society. She has taken an active role in pain management policy at both the state and national levels, helping develop community-based pain initiatives. Wagner lectures frequently on a variety of pain management topics, including pain policy and legal issues, opioid guidelines, brain neuroplasticity and pain, and pain at end-of-life. Most recently she was recipient of the Oregon Health Sciences University’s Pain Awareness Award in 2012 and the American Academy of Pain Medicine’s Presidential Commendation in 2010. She was also awarded the Pain Society of Oregon’s 2009 Pioneer in Pain Medicine Award, and the American Pain Foundation’s Presidential Medal of Honor in 2008.
Wagner, who has been a nurse since 1993, served on the Oregon State Board of Nursing for six years and is primary author of the Oregon State Board of Nursing’s Pain Management Position Statement. She was recently appointed to the Pain Action Alliance to Implement a National Strategy (PAINS) Project, an alliance of national leaders charged with implementing the Institute of Medicine’s report “Relieving Pain in America: A Blueprint for Transforming Prevention, Care, Education and Research.”
The three were honored in an awards ceremony June 6 at the Ford Alumni Center on the UO campus.
