President Rex E. Lee will honor two individuals with Presidential Citations April 21 at the 119th commencement exercises at Brigham Young University.
Humanitarians Donald Alvin Eagle and Mary Ellen Edmunds will receive their awards in Marriott Center in front of the 1994 graduates. The citations were established in 1983 to honor outstanding individuals and groups. Lee will recognize the recipients for their civic, professional and religious accomplishments.Eagle, an ordained minister in the Disciples of Christ Church, has led a life characterized by service. He started his professional life as the pastor of two Christian churches in Iowa, and while there in the early 1960s, began working with the National Conference for Christians and Jews. He became the executive director of the Iowa and quad-cities region in Des Moines, and after moving to Phoenix in 1965, became executive director of the Arizona region of NCCJ.
Eagle organized a police/
community relations program in Phoenix for the city and surrounding cities to help soothe tensions present in the 1960s and early 1970s. It included workshops designed to ease communications challenges along racial, economic, sexual and political lines.
He also instituted Anytown, a program where young people of all races and religions come together for a week and examine their prejudices, biases and stereotypes. As the driving force behind this program, he appeared on the Today Show in 1985 to explain Anytown to the nation. Today, Anytown has spread to 18 states with 35 workshops each summer.
He willingly confronts religious bigotry and has defended, among others, Muslims, Catholics and Mormons. In addition to BYU, other organizations that have honored Eagle for his humanitarian work include the B'nai B'rith, which named him a Man of the Year, the Jewish Federation of Phoenix and the Islamic Cultural Center of Tempe.
Edmunds is known to hundreds of missionaries and thousands of members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints worldwide for service on their behalf.
As the daughter of physician/nurse parents, Edmunds showed her own interest in medicine as a child by opening a crippled grasshopper clinic on the family home's front porch in Cedar City. These altruistic instincts were supported in 1962 when she received a degree in nursing from BYU.
Soon after graduating, she served the first of several missions for the LDS Church. She worked in Hong Kong and Taiwan and was among the first woman missionaries in the Philippines.
A position in the BYU College of Nursing followed, as did a supervisory stint at Utah Valley Hospital. She later returned to the Philippines as a missionary and developed creative approaches for teaching maternity-infant health and nutrition.
She was coordinator of health missionaries for two years and prepared hundreds of instructional and motivational materials. When a change in the Church welfare organization in 1975 resulted in Edmund's return to traditional nursing, it was not for long. In 1976, she accepted another call as a health missionary, this time to Indonesia as its first female Mormon missionary.
For the past 16 years, she has been director of training at the Missionary Training Center, interrupting that service for a year to direct the Thrasher International Program for Children in Eket, Nigeria.
She is vice chairwoman of the Utah County Board of Health and a member of the board of trustees for CHOICE (Center for Humanitarian Outreach and InterCultural Exchange). She also serves on the Relief Society General Board for the LDS Church.