Professor emerita commits more than $ 1million for School of Social Welfare

A pioneering KU professor emerita of preventive medicine and public health has committed more than $1 million for the School of Social Welfare.

Through her estate plans, Norge Winifred Jerome of Shawnee, Kan., committed $1 million to establish upon her death the Norge Winifred Jerome Public Scholar/Faculty Program Fund at the Kansas University Endowment Association. The fund will be endowed, which means that the principal will remain intact and a percentage of the interest earned each year will provide financial resources for a professor and an outstanding doctoral-level graduate student in social welfare. To meet the goals of the program, the chosen recipients will collaborate with communities of color to improve their quality of life.

In conjunction with the larger commitment, Jerome pledged $30,000 cash over the next three years to establish the Norge Winifred Jerome Doctoral Public Scholar Program Fund. The fund provides annual support for an outstanding student pursuing a doctoral degree in social welfare. The fund is expendable, which means the principal and any income can be spent entirely. Upon Jerome's death, the Public Scholar Program will be merged with her estate gift to serve both faculty and students in their community-based research with communities of color. Graciela Couchonnal, a doctoral candidate researching grassroots leadership by women, has been named the inaugural Jerome scholar.

"A groundbreaking researcher in the field of nutrition, Dr. Jerome has been a part of the University of Kansas community for more than 30 years," Chancellor Robert Hemenway said. "We are delighted that, in addition to her many years of teaching and research, she has chosen to provide such generous support for the School of Social Welfare."

Jerome, who was born and raised on the island nation of Grenada in the Caribbean, wants the Jerome faculty and scholars to help improve the quality of life in multicultural communities.

"Recipients of the Jerome fund have a responsibility to assist communities in meeting their needs while simultaneously addressing scholarly interests," she said. "Traditionally, researchers conceive a problem, define it and go to a community for data-gathering purposes without collaborating with the community to address the community's priorities. Under this old model, journals and books which are often shelved are generated from the data; direct benefits to the target community are rare or nonexistent."

Jerome said she wants the communities to define the needs that they face on a recurring basis and work with the researchers as collaborators of equal standing - not solely as research subjects - to address those needs.

"In other words," she said, "the community becomes a member of the research team and is an active, rather than passive, entity, helping to drive the research."

Ann Weick, dean of social welfare, said Jerome's lifelong commitment to community-based research and community empowerment fits well with the school's mission and research activities.

"Dr. Jerome has spent her life conducting research to help community members improve their health and well-being. There's a wonderful link between her interests and those of the school. Through her generous gifts, Dr. Jerome will ensure that her vision for improving lives and strengthening communities of color will continue beyond her lifetime," Weick said.

While she was a student at the University of Wisconsin, Jerome pioneered a field now known as nutritional anthropology. Rather than using the same model of human nutrition for all people, she said, nutritional anthropology takes local culture—such as how food is defined by a group, or local patterns of eating and drinking—into account when trying to make improvements in food habits and nutrition. This approach is now being taught at universities nationwide.

In 1960, Jerome graduated magna cum laude from Howard University in Washington, D.C. She completed her master's degree in 1962 and her doctoral degree in 1967, both at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. In 1967, she began her career at KU as an assistant professor in the department of dietetics and nutrition. She was named an associate professor of human ecology in 1972 and a full professor of community health in 1978. She was director of the Community Nutrition Division from 1981 to 1995 and interim associate dean of minority affairs at the School of Medicine from 1996 to 1998. Jerome also served as director of the Office of Nutrition at the Agency for International Development from 1988 until 1992, where she was responsible for AID's nutrition programs worldwide. Since 1996, she has been a professor emerita in the KU department of preventive medicine and public health.

Jerome said she donated for the School of Social Welfare because she wanted to leave a gift for a university that could carry on her approach to community-based, collaborative research.

"The School of Social Welfare is already in the community doing work that meets community needs," Jerome said. "That is my vision: I am sold on the value of community development and community empowerment, and when I'm gone I want that to continue. Death can be so silent that it's important to leave something thunderous or monumental behind so that your beliefs and values will always be heard. In other words, my gift is one way of conquering death."

Jerome's gifts count toward the $500 million goal of KU First: Invest in Excellence, the largest fund-raising campaign in KU history. KU Endowment is conducting KU First on behalf of KU through 2004 to raise funds for scholarships, fellowships, professorships, capital projects and program support. KU Endowment is an independent, non-profit organization serving as the official fund-raising and fund-management organization for KU.