Humanitarian Service Awards Presented to Dollar, Moylan

Citations read at the presentation of the Humanitarian Service Award to Luke Dollar and Dr. Joseph Moylan Thursday during the Founders' Day ceremony.

The Duke Humanitarian Service Award, sponsored by Duke Religious Life, is given annually to an individual whose life demonstrates a long-term commitment to direct and personal service to others and simplicity of lifestyle.  This award was first conceived by a group of Duke Campus ministers, faculty and students who felt that such exemplary lives might serve as challenging role models for Duke students as they considered the moral implications of their chosen vocation and lifestyle.  The award was first presented in 1985.

Mr. Luke Dollar, a Ph.D student at the Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences; and

Dr. Joseph Anthony Moylan, MD, Clinical Professor of Surgery at Duke University Medical Center, Medical Director of the International Patient Center, and Founder and President of Durham Nativity School.

I will highlight just one portion of each of their extraordinary lives, beginning with Luke Dollar.  Six months out of the year you will find Luke sleeping in a tent on the other side of the globe.  For ten years he has been traveling to Madagascar, the world's fourth poorest country, with the long-term goal of empowering the Malagasy people to understand and manage their own resources. 

On these trips Luke serves as a local advocate, a community leader, and a conservation and development coordinator for the populace surrounding the protected area where he works.  In tandem with a variety of organizations, he tries to improve conditions in the lives of thousands of local villagers while consistently placing himself in the culture of his Malagasy hosts.

He helps enhance the livelihood of the surrounding villagers by improving educational opportunities, rebuilding storm-damaged property, and working with government agencies for charters to build new and more advanced schools.  In everything he does he upholds the highest standards of a humanitarianism we might all aspire to.

Dr. Joseph Anthony Moylan has similarly patterned his life according to a high humanitarian ideal, though his work has remained a little closer to home, and as far as I know does not involve tents.

Three years ago, Dr. Moylan began the Durham Nativity School, a middle school that provides education and physical, spiritual, social, and moral development for students of low-income urban families.  Classes are small and faith-based.  One of the goals of the school is to prepare its students for the rigors of college.  Teachers, administrators, and community volunteers serve as role models who promote leadership, and parents are expected to uphold the mission of the school by participating in the its activities.

Which brings me to a story.  During last year's graduation one deeply moved Nativity School parent told the crowd of his gratitude not only for the opportunities for learning and growing that his son had found there, but confessed that because of the school's expectation of parental participation he too had learned over the past year ”had learned how to be a good father.  Because of Dr. Joseph Moylan's vision, doors were opened to both parent and child; and this family will remain forever changed.

This is only a glimpse of Luke Dollar's and Joseph Moylan's extraordinary and transformative service to humankind.  As advocates, mentors, friends, and exemplars, perhaps their most valuable accomplishments have been to empower others.  Luke Dollar believed in the Malagasy people, and thousands of them are better off for that belief; while Dr. Moylan believed that there should be places in this country where low-income urban families with children can find physical, social, moral, spiritual, and intellectual development.  Neither man stopped at simply believing: they acted upon their beliefs and changed their communities.

The Duke Humanitarian Service Award acknowledges the human spirit at its best.  Please join me in congratulating this year's recipients, Luke Dollar and Joseph Moylan.