Impact Award to Weaver

Staff report
With her gentle power of persuasion and people skills — not to mention a true knack for being able to write grants on behalf of the city of Rippey — Mary Weaver, of rural Rippey, will receive this year’s Greene County Community Impact Award, organizers announced Friday.

The award established in 2010 recognizes individuals whose activities have an easily recognized impact on Greene County.

Weaver will be honored at 3 p.m. May 1 in the Greene County courthouse rotunda during the annual award ceremony.

A reception will follow.

A Friends of Rippey organizer, Weaver has a long history of volunteering.

She wrote the Vision Iowa grant for the Rippey library and community room, and a dozen more, including the Galloping Goose bike trail.

Weaver served on the Greene County Historical Society board for more than 10 years, and founded the annual Greene County Reads program.

She has portrayed Mary Davis, the first white female settler in Greene County, in fifth grade classrooms for several years.

Weaver also has been a past secretary of the Thomas Jefferson Gardens board, served two terms on the East Greene board of education and undertook a brief missionary stay in Nigeria as a nurse.

In her nursing career, Weaver served as president of the Iowa Public Health Association board, was a member of Sen. Tom Harkin’s nurse advisory board and received the Lillian Wald Award as the outstanding nurse in Iowa in public health work.

Weaver currently serves as treasurer of the Greene County Singers, a newly formed choral group.

Previous recipients of the Impact Award include Lawrence Geisler, the Town and Country Band, Carson Griffith, Vickie and Tim Robbins, Doug Hawn and Alice Walters.