When we launched Brick & Elm in 2021, one of our dreams was to reach a point where we could introduce a community-wide awards program. Almost four years later, the Brickly Awards represent the fulfillment of that dream.
Awards programs are not new to Amarillo. But we believe it’s time for a new kind of community awards program in this area. Amarillo deserves a meaningful way to celebrate local leaders. Not based on online voting or popularity, but given according to merit.
To choose our winners, we solicited nominations from members of the community—and we received dozens pointing us toward worthy individuals, businesses and nonprofits. Then we assembled a committee of local residents and Brick & Elm contributors to evaluate these nominees and select our winners. After a passionate multi-hour discussion, we are honored to share these winners with the community. They inspire us, encourage us and represent the best of this area. — Michele McAffrey and Jason Boyett
Nonprofit of the Year
Acts Community (Chad and Joy Conner)
The idea for Acts Community emerged in 2010 when Chad Conner was a college minister looking for ways to serve the most vulnerable in our community. After helping those recovering from the destructive 2011 wildfires, he gained momentum and credibility. By 2013 he’d launched a faith-based organization and acquired a building in the San Jacinto neighborhood. Acts Community officially opened in 2014, 10 years ago. “For years after that, we knew exactly what we were doing,” he says. The nonprofit hummed along, providing a food pantry, serving a free community lunch to senior adults and scheduling afterschool programs for kids.
The organization was on cruise control and seeing results. Then came the pandemic. Suddenly, new needs became clear as people fell through the cracks. As with so many organizations, the post-COVID world offered an opportunity to reflect, rethink old strategies and redefine its mission.
Then another building became available: The old downtown YMCA at 816 S. Van Buren St. All 54,000 square feet of it.
Acts Community purchased the building in September 2022, and then Chad—along with his wife, Joy, and the organization’s board—had to figure out what to do with it. “It was too much space,” he admits. Acts had outgrown its original 10,000-square-foot building, but multiplying its physical space to that degree seemed excessive. “But no way we could turn down the opportunity to buy this incredible building, in a great spot with so much potential,” Chad admits. “On Day 1, we would be able to build the programs we want to build for the rest of our lives.”
So that’s what the organization is doing. It has embarked on an ambitious multi-year project, marked by a lot of dreaming, a lot of research, a lot of innovation and a lot of construction.
To start, the organization opened a new incarnation of its senior center in early 2023. It grew steadily that year, and then “exploded,” in 2024, according to Conner. “We are seeing an average of around 72 for lunch on a daily basis,” he says. More than a hot meal every weekday, this program allows senior adults a place to socialize, make friends, play games and break out of the isolation that can occur for those living on a fixed income.
But what about the rest of the space? That’s where Acts Community had to get creative, especially with the building’s multiple racquetball courts. Each is 800 square feet and two stories high. Conner dreamed of a better use for them than racquetball.
These are currently being turned into afterschool spaces for kids.
“There is work happening all over the building to get ready for the kids programming,” he says. “We’re going to have some of the most interesting, innovative, exciting afterschool programs I’ve ever seen anywhere.” Acts Community will launch them during this calendar year.
To start, the organization has partnered with another nonprofit, 107 Golf Academy, a program empowering underserved youth by creating access to golf training. 107 Golf Academy is a separate and relatively new nonprofit, and over the next couple of years (at least) will be housed inside Acts Community. One racquetball court is being equipped with a golf simulator. Another will become an indoor chipping green. The organization will provide multi-day camps in the coming months and throughout the summer, before launching daily afterschool programming in August.
107 Golf Academy is leasing the space from Acts Community, and as a new organization, wouldn’t have been able to ramp up so quickly—or without a huge investment of money—on its own. That’s significant.
Meanwhile, Conner has spent time learning from a Michigan-based organization called New City Kids—with operations from Detroit to Jersey City—to offer musical and artistic development programming for youth from under-resourced neighborhoods. “The heaviest focus is on music, with an offshoot focus on production and video content creation,” Conner says. “It’s absolutely incredible what these kids learn and how the program works.” Modeling after New City’s approach, he’s building out music studios for kids to learn drums, bass guitar and piano/keyboards. According to the model, older students who excel in the program will help teach younger students, and then eventually get employed by the nonprofit.
“This is the program that has the potential to be our absolute largest. The majority of the remodel work is left on this project,” he says. Again, racquetball courts are being transformed into multi-level programming for kids.
A third program, “Girls Who Game,” has a STEM education focus and will work to empower girls to succeed in technology fields. Right now it’s a dream on the cusp of getting the go-ahead, Conner says. “We’re working to develop it into a full-blown afterschool program.”
That would potentially be an introduction of three unique afterschool programs in a single calendar year—all completely groundbreaking in the city. “Can we legitimately launch three by August?” he asks. “It’s possible. Those are the types of programs we want to be launching: dynamic afterschool programming in Amarillo that didn’t exist before.”
And even after that, they’ve still got a lot of space to turn into … something. To start, Joy Conner has a passion to educate local residents about human trafficking. She’s building out an anti-trafficking program. The senior adult program will also grow. Camps are scheduled for the coming month. More meals. More opportunities.
As when it bought the building, Acts Community is open to growth. It has space to work with, the creativity to fill it, and the momentum to serve multiple generations at once, from high-energy elementary students to senior adults. “We want to always be on the lookout for people with great ideas who want to make an impact on our city,” he says. “It’s hard to be patient. But we’re really, really excited with what’s coming.”
We’re equally excited to honor the bold vision of this organization with our first-ever Nonprofit of the Year award.
Innovators of the Year
Rich Gagnon and Michael Keough
Over the past several years, these two men working in the public sector—Rich Gagnon is Amarillo’s assistant city manager and chief information officer and Michael Keough is the chief technology officer for Region 16—have spearheaded efforts to bridge the digital divide for residents of Amarillo and across the Texas Panhandle.
“We are working on multiple projects together,” Keough says, “but broadband is the core of everything.”
Before this partnership, just a couple of years ago, Amarillo was one of the least-connected cities in the United States. The pandemic exposed this problem, especially related to kids’ access to educational material.
In the years since, however, Amarillo has become a success story attracting global attention.
Through an Amarillo Area Foundation project called Panhandle Connected, the City and Region 16 are working to facilitate a comprehensive, multi-year plan to make sure Amarillo residents have affordable, high-speed internet access. Having received grant funding, this groundbreaking partnership has aligned with companies like AT&T and Vexus to lay the fiber optic infrastructure that makes this possible—with plans to make sure that access remains affordable for qualifying, low-income households.
Right now, 95 percent of Amarillo now has reliable, high-speed internet access, Gagnon says. And by the end of 2025, he expects coverage to approach 99 percent.
The innovative part of what they’re doing isn’t the broadband infrastructure itself, or the fact that it’s being put into place. The innovation comes from the multiple entities working together. “We have different visions. We all have different goals,” Keough points out. While Gagnon is working to improve access within the city limits, Keough and Region 16 are making sure it also extends to rural Panhandle towns and schools. “But ultimately, we have a core goal that can be solved by this one thing. That’s really where we can come together and say, ‘Let’s all be successful together,’” Keough says.
Gagnon entered the municipal government sector after a successful career in technology, and identifies with the pioneer spirit that originally brought settlement to the Panhandle. “It’s not an easy place to live. Nobody’s coming to save us, so there’s kind of a culture of working together,” he says. “We have generations of ‘We’re going to have to figure this out because no one’s going to come figure it out for us,’ and that’s really where we’re at.”
He and Keough are “just pioneering in a technology space,” Gagnon says.
Meanwhile, Gagnon and the city have just rolled out another element of technology that has attracted the world’s attention: “Emma,” the AI-powered digital assistant for the City of Amarillo website. She speaks multiple languages, and allows residents to find necessary information and navigate the website without having to call a city employee directly.
In the municipal world, Emma is truly groundbreaking. This month, Gagnon will address the technology leaders of the European Union about this effort. Already he’s spoken to cities from Amsterdam to Berlin. Researchers at Oxford University called him a few weeks ago. “We’re considered the global leader in the use of generative AI for citizen services. We’re having this discussion,” he says.
Those cities aren’t hoping to learn about AI. They know about that. What they want to know is how all these partners—a city and a state-funded education agency and a local foundation and for-profit companies—can collaborate without stepping on each other’s toes. “That’s the piece that shocks people,” Gagnon says. “The conversations I have are ‘How in the world are you guys working together?’”
The world wants to know how Amarillo is doing what it’s doing—collaborating for the greater good—and Gagnon and Keough model how it works.
“At the end of the day, we all win,” Keough says. “And that’s the goal here. Let the Panhandle win.”
Entrepreneurs of the Year
Chris and Donna Griffin, Blue Crane Bakery
It’s not often that a medical crisis leads to a business idea, but that’s the case with this bakery on Historic Sixth Street in Amarillo. When it launched, Donna Griffin was operating her hair salon, Kismet, on one side of a small building at Mississippi and Southwest Sixth Avenue. Her husband, Chris, had been recovering from open-heart surgery to repair a congenital heart defect. He had also been let go from his job in Pampa.
Chris was eating healthily as he recovered, and Donna had adopted a keto diet following weight-loss surgery. Both were ready for a change.
The family-owned Blue Crane Bakery was the result, opening in May 2018. Donna divided her time between the salon and the bakery, handling the business side of things. Chris started baking keto-friendly products. Their older kids, Tabitha first and then Nigel, helped out with customers.
Before long, Chris had added vegan and gluten-free options to the Keto baked goods—most of which simply weren’t available anywhere else in the city. That’s when the business really began to flourish.
“It just opened up once we got into that groove,” Chris says.
“We had a calling for it,” Donna adds. “Nobody in Amarillo was really doing it at the time.”
The customers arrived and they were ecstatic. Families came to them for specialty desserts that allowed their diabetic children to participate in a birthday party at school. Kids with celiac disease got to have a holiday dessert.
Last Thanksgiving, Chris baked a dairy-free, gluten-free chocolate pie for a little boy who can’t eat other sweets. “That’s his favorite thing,” Donna says. “He is excited every Thanksgiving that we can make that for him and he can have something regular like everybody else.”
As often as the Griffins please individual customers, they also bring joy to their community. Local nominations for Blue Crane praised this business for giving back in formal and informal ways. The San Jacinto neighborhood is one marked by systemic poverty. Chris regularly finds himself chatting with the homeless individuals who occasionally find their way down the street, giving them water and baked goods.
They’ve also gotten to know kids in the neighborhood who walk past the shop on the way home from school. As a reward for passing report cards, Blue Crane offers those kids a free baked item. The motivation works, and the schools took notice.
Administrators from nearby Sam Houston Middle School came calling, asking them to serve on an advisory board of community members. “I guess they had seen a change in some of the kids’ attitudes,” Donna explains. “Kids were talking to one another about being good and bringing the report cards into the bakery.”
“That was such a blessing that they reached out,” Chris says.
Treating customers well. Creating a great product. Finding a niche. Serving the community. All of these things are critical to entrepreneurism and represent the heart of Blue Crane Bakery. Donna says their husband-wife approach is a “good, happy balance.” She brings ideas. He’s great with customers, which include local middle school kids and retired Europeans traveling Route 66.
“We don’t make a whole lot of money. We’re not rich from this,” Donna says.
Their gratification as entrepreneurs may not be tied to dollars, Chris points out, but the relationships they’ve built represent a more important kind of wealth. “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had people come in and say, ‘Thank you so much for what you do.’ And I don’t take that lightly,” he adds. “It almost makes me blubber up every time. Because we’re offering a service, but we’re also offering compassion for a fellow human being.”
Advocate of the Year
Skylar Gallop
In late 2023, the Texas House of Representatives voted to remove school vouchers from a massive education funding bill. The controversial provision would have allowed parents to use tax dollars to send their kids to private and/or religious schools. Amarillo resident Skylar Gallop, the regional advocacy director for the nonprofit Raise Your Hand Texas, played a significant role in helping mobilize community members and legislators alike in support of public schools—and against the provision.
Gallop advocated for rural Panhandle schools in Austin. She empowered local teachers to tell their stories in front of legislators. She made sure those making the laws understood how vouchers would impact local communities.
“Our public education system is the foundation of the future of our state,” Gallop says. “It goes so much beyond my kiddos going to a public school every day and their success or challenges. It’s increasingly a workforce issue, an economic issue and a quality issue. It shouldn’t be so hard to appropriately support our teachers and fully fund our public education system.” She points out that the Texas public education system serves 5.4 million children. “And they don’t turn any children away.”
Gallop recognizes her advocacy for public education as a unique privilege. “The fact that I’ve been blessed for this to be my day job has allowed me to invest more time than a lot of people in understanding, learning and growing my own advocacy capacity, and then being able to share that with others,” she says. “I don’t have to work on the things I care about outside of my 9-to-5 job. It is my 9-to-5 job.”
But public school funding isn’t the only subject she champions—and those extracurriculars don’t necessarily fall within the scope of her career. Gallop spent the past year as board president for Elevate Amarillo, a member organization for young professionals (ages 20 to 40) which, among other things, helps prepare them for leadership roles in civic and nonprofit organizations. Her work on behalf of these emerging leaders took place during a transitional year for the organization, which just hired its first executive director. Elevate’s cohort of eager, enthusiastic young leaders may end up impacting the city
for a generation.
Meanwhile, through her membership with the League of Women Voters and connection to Elevate, Gallop organized and facilitated candidate forums and town halls during the primary election cycle in early 2024. These gave candidates opportunities to answer direct questions on issues, and gave voters the opportunity to cast informed ballots.
To Gallop, advocacy simply means improving the community where she lives, and that’s why she works so hard to inspire people related to public education, civic engagement and voter turnout.
She attributes this passion to her journalism background before a career shift brought her to Amarillo in 2016. Gallop, who graduated from West Texas A&M University with a broadcasting degree, spent eight years around the state working in broadcast television. “What journalism gave me was a much wider lens of people—much wider than my upbringing in a small West Texas town,” she says. “I had a pass to ask questions, and that widened my lens of understanding the challenges, successes and scope of people’s lives. I just started realizing, at a younger age than most people, that you can effect change in your circles.”
Volunteer of the Year
Meaghan Collier
“For a long, long time in my life, I couldn’t write a check, especially early in my career,” Meaghan Collier says. “It was important for me to give of my time because that’s what I could do.”
Locals may know Collier from the decade she spent as a news anchor at KAMR NBC 4, or as the on-air host of The Chat on KGNC. Since 2020, she’s served as the director of community engagement at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center in Amarillo.
But her volunteer efforts are so broad that locals are as likely to encounter her apart from her career. She is involved with an incredible number of organizations and events, including the Laura W. Bush Institute’s Power of the Purse (she’s on the advisory board), the Symphony Ball (she’ll emcee the event this year), and Christmas Roundup (she’s the past president of the Amarillo Museum of Art Alliance).
That’s not all. Far from it, in fact. This year she sits on the boards of directors for the Turn Center, Storybridge, Opportunity School and the Harrington Cancer and Health Foundation’s Women’s Circle.
She’s a past member of the Canyon Independent School District Education Foundation board and the Amarillo Panhandle Humane Society board. And in 2024 alone, she emceed close to a dozen major community events.
“We grew up with very little,” Collier says of her childhood in Canyon. But her parents always made sure the family volunteered at the Salvation Army, in church community service efforts and at school. “Service was just always a really big part of my life.”
Then, in 2009, after working as a broadcast journalist in Amarillo and Colorado Springs, Collier spent a year with Teach for America as a third-grade English Language Arts teacher in inner-city New Orleans. “I became obsessed with literacy and teaching and how kids learn to read,” she says. Working with kids who grew up in poverty, without books at home, impacted her deeply. “It was a transformational experience for me.” Firsthand, she saw how access and intervention could change the course of a child’s life. That’s why volunteering for organizations like Storybridge and Opportunity School is so meaningful to her.
Collier also loves using relational capital to spur others to volunteer. Brick & Elm found a common refrain among those nominating her for this award: That she personally opened the door for them to get involved with certain organizations, simply because she asked.
“It was Meaghan’s request that convinced me to say yes,” one wrote in their nomination.
Upon being told this, Collier’s eyes fill with tears. “I just see people and I think, ‘Oh my gosh. They would be really good at this.’ They have this gift that is so interesting and special. I know they will find value in this experience,” she says. But not everyone has the courage or confidence to jump into an unknown situation. Sometimes it takes a direct invitation, and Collier tries to be strategic about that. “This is just such a beautiful place, and people have so many gifts to give. We all have a lot more to give than we think we do,” she adds.
For her part, it comes down to positioning: “I’ve always just thought it was important to say yes. It’s a good way to build relationships and to build social capital. It makes our community better if we all just say yes and give of our time and our heart.”
Disclosure: Meaghan contributes to Brick & Elm as a freelance writer, and our committee debated whether we should exclude her from the award. Ultimately, we decided she exemplified the spirit of volunteerism we wanted to recognize. We’re thrilled to honor her.
Rising Leader of the Year
C.J. Flanagan
“It’s been a busy day,” C.J. Flanagan says at the start of his interview. “My family is nothing but busy people.”
If achievement runs in the family, this energetic 18-year-old Caprock High School senior represents its apex. In 2021, when Flanagan was just 14, his father passed away due to complications from COVID-19. “When I lost my dad, I wanted to give up on everything” he says.
But in the aftermath, he noticed how trusted adults in his life weren’t just looking after him personally, but were pouring themselves into the community. He looked up to Pastor Manny De Los Santos at Power Church. He had worked with Mary Bralley at Los Barrios de Amarillo (now the director of Windows on a Wider World). He’d been at Wesley Community Center with Liz Rascón Alaniz, Ph.D. (now executive director of Heal the City).
These adults made an impression on him.
“I remember watching Dr. Liz,” Flanagan remembers about the Wesley. “She was teaching me what it was to be a leader. She was doing paperwork and I asked, ‘Why are you doing all this?’ She said, ‘The change I want, I have to work for it.’”
That stuck with him, and Flanagan has been working to bring about change ever since. He shadows De Los Santos at Power Church and considers himself “Pastor Manny’s right-hand man.” He serves on the planning committee for Los Barrios, a leadership and mentorship program. He’s helping Bralley launch and lead a student board for WOWW. He’s part of the Northside Toy Drive committee and a member of the local Juneteenth planning committee.
Those are volunteer roles. For a job, he works as a funeral attendant at Golden Gate Mortuary, which he really enjoys. “Never in a million years would I have thought I’d be working for a funeral home,” he says.
Flanagan also belongs to the Amarillo Police Department Explorer Program, which helps young people learn life skills with a focus on leadership and public service. In fact, after graduation in May, he intends to pursue a degree in criminal justice on his way to a career as a homicide detective.
Meanwhile, Flanagan tutors kids at the Wesley and at local elementary schools through Americorps. Locals may recognize him as the young man who gave the closing prayer at the Community Prayer Breakfast in November, or as the recipient of a prestigious award at Amarillo’s Hispanic Heritage Luncheon in October.
And then there’s school. Flanagan started his high school career at Randall, spent a year at West Plains, and then arrived at Caprock for his junior and senior years, where he volunteers as the public address announcer/commentator—“sort of like an emcee,” he explains—for most school athletic events, including volleyball, basketball, baseball and softball.
He laughs as he comes to the end of his list of activities, recognizing it’s kind of a lot. “People ask me why I do it,” he says. “When I get to see my community happy, my city happy, I know that by serving them—making someone happy—I’m doing something right. I always want kids to know there’s good in this world.”
That belief in good starts with his own faith. “I give it all to God. Without God, I don’t know where I would be,” Flanagan says. “I want my testimony to be the reason somebody wants to keep going.”
Rising Leader of the Year
Perry Steph
“I want to be more than just a student,” Perry Steph says. “It’s important for a person to have lots of different kinds of things to be involved in.”
She says this minutes after a pre-season soccer practice ends. Steph, an 18-year-old senior, is the captain of the varsity girls’ soccer team at Tascosa High School.
But that’s only one of her titles.
Steph is the National Honor Society president at THS. She leads a spirit club called the Rowdy Crowd. She spent most of her high school years singing in the Tascosa varsity choir. (“I had to move out because of classes,” she says. “I couldn’t fit everything in my schedule.”)
She has served as an acolyte at St. Andrews Episcopal Church since she was a kid. “My favorite part of what I do there is being part of the breakfast team,” she says of St. Andrews. Every Sunday, Steph joins other volunteers to prepare breakfast for church members and homeless individuals. Then she eats with them. “Every situation is different. You learn not to judge a book by its cover,” she says. “It’s great to be there and at least provide one thing that will make their day or week a little easier.”
Steph caught our attention last year due to her involvement with the Friends in Service for Hunger Club at Tascosa. That club provides food items for students experiencing food insecurity, and it gave rise to a subcommittee when Steph noticed that a few girls at Tascosa didn’t have essential hygiene items. A lack of period products was keeping girls from attending school three or four days a month, so Steph created what she and her friends affectionately call “Team Tampon.”
At Tascosa, students anonymously request from teachers items like tampons, pads, soap, shampoo, deodorant and other supplies. Team Tampon then makes these accessible for pick-up in strategic locations. More than 200 students use the service. The Beloved Community ministry at St. Andrews has adopted Steph’s initiative and helps pay for supplies, and the program has now expanded to other local high schools and even Sam Houston Middle School.
(Brick & Elm featured this grassroots effort in our September/October 2024 issue.)
From church to the soccer field to the halls of Tascosa, Steph keeps finding “different kinds of things” that warrant her involvement, but those extracurriculars haven’t kept her from excelling in the classroom. Her GPA currently puts her among the top five students in her class of 509. She graduates in May, has applied to multiple colleges to study engineering, and is working on a research project at THS. Steph missed multiple seasons of soccer due to two ACL injuries, and is studying how sports surfaces like turf or grass can impact those injuries. She wants to prevent other athletes from suffering the same kinds of injuries.
“I’m not the most outspoken person, but I like to lead by example,” Steph says. “Yes, I love soccer and teamwork, but being involved in a club teaches you to deal with real-life situations. I feel like if I didn’t do Team Tampon, I wouldn’t know as much about my school. It has taught me so much as a person.”
Community Builder Award
Teresa Kenedy
Amarillo’s historic Barrio neighborhood is quietly experiencing a renaissance. The annual Barrio Bash in late summer attracts thousands of people and businesses. Fundraising is ongoing for La Plazita, a new pocket park. Residents are launching businesses.
And this fall, the predominantly Hispanic area saw the start of a multimillion-dollar streetscape project along Southest 10th Avenue, a major renovation that will bring ADA-accessible sidewalks, crosswalks, bike lanes, streetlamps, benches, landscaping and more to this artery from downtown Amarillo toward the Fairgrounds.
The neighborhood was established in 1889, and this is its biggest upgrade in decades.
Residents and businesses from around the city—including city employees—have contributed to the Barrio’s recent revitalization. But these wins owe much to the tireless efforts of Teresa Kenedy, who helped spearhead the city’s 2018 adoption of the Barrio Neighborhood Plan, an attempt to reverse decades of inattention to the neighborhood.
She’s spent the past six years making sure that plan came to fruition.
A retired Amarillo Independent School District social worker, Kenedy moved to Amarillo to attend West Texas A&M University after having grown up as the only Hispanic family in a Utah mountain town. In the Panhandle, where 1 in 3 residents are of Hispanic heritage, she found a robust culture and history.
“I didn’t really learn my culture until I moved to Amarillo,” Kenedy says. In the Barrio she found a lot of pride, hard work and resourcefulness—but not many resources. She met families while working at Sanborn and Glenwood elementaries. Their homes were old. Sidewalks were broken or nonexistent. “Very little renovation had been done in over 100 years’ time,” she says.
After retirement, Kenedy had been volunteering at her church. That’s when her pastor, Brady Clark—who now heads Square Mile Community Development—approached her. “He said, ‘I love that you’re working in our church, but what I really want is you working in our community,’” she remembers. Kenedy accepted the challenge. Looking for a place to volunteer, she turned her attention to the Barrio.
That turned out to be a neighborhood-transforming decision. Today, Kenedy serves as the president of the Barrio Neighborhood Planning Committee, a nonprofit organization working to implement the Barrio Neighborhood Plan she helped develop. She’s also the author of Amarillo Barrio Historical District: Past, Present and Future, a 2018 book that tells the story of the buildings and families that built this neighborhood. “That took nine months to write,” she says of the book. “I’m really proud of that.”
Kenedy has helped introduce free classes that help residents start a business, learn internet safety or understand how to buy a home. She has organized job fairs and public events. Today, she sees a proud, thriving community. “From the early residents to our residents today, they enjoy and celebrate their Hispanic culture, family, music, art, making and sharing food, owning their homes and coming together daily—as leaders and workers—to improve our city,” she says.
Her focus and commitment are changing the face of the neighborhood. The going may be slow, but it’s starting to pay off. “I’m not patient about red tape,” Kenedy adds. “But I’ll go through the process, the paperwork, fundraising, applying for grants. I’ve just learned to be the turtle and not the hare.”
Triumph Award
Samuel UWIMANA
“When people see what I have accomplished, they wonder how. But my experiences have shaped me,” says Samuel Uwimana, the 26-year-old founder of United Refugee Services in Amarillo. “I give credit to those harsh past experiences.”
Samuel runs a community center at 24th Avenue and Grand Street, where he welcomes fellow East Africans who live in Amarillo. He speaks six languages and helps them navigate public services and resources. He serves as a role model for youth in detention centers. He teaches Congolese women how to drive.
This energetic young man is so effective at his work because he’s experienced it all himself: Samuel and his family arrived in Amarillo in 2018. Prior to that, they had spent two decades—most of Samuel’s life—as refugees displaced across the Congo, Rwanda and Kenya.
His story is harrowing. Part of the Banyamulenge ethnic group from the eastern region of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Samuel’s father grazed cattle. His mother is from Rwanda. Samuel was the youngest of eight children, and he was born around the time the Second Congo War was becoming one of the globe’s deadliest conflicts since World War II. Their family ended up in Nairobi, Kenya, as refugees—and then Samuel’s father died. Samuel was 13 at the time. He had just been admitted to a prestigious school on a scholarship, but was forced to drop out to provide for his family.
He spent months selling sausages and boiled eggs on the streets of Nairobi before finding his way back into the educational system. Then in 2014, when Samuel was 16, local persecution of the Banyamulenge people resulted in Kenyan soldiers surrounding his church. At gunpoint, they jailed him and his family. After three days in prison, they were transferred to Dadaab near the Somali border. Dadaab, at the time, was the largest refugee camp in the world and a symbol of the refugee crisis. It was notorious for poor sanitation, food insecurity and for spawning Islamic militants.
Samuel and his family were in the extreme minority as Christians.
“It was terrifying,” he remembers. The family spent two weeks with little to no food. They feared being slaughtered at night—trapped inside a tent—so they slept outside “in the sand with the bugs, looking up to the moon,” Samuel says. When food trucks arrived, adults would race children to receive it. “We were dying. Everyone was fighting for their own lives.”
(Samuel tells this story in full in The Unbeatable Uwimana, a picture book published by Refugee Language Project.)
When circumstances finally gave him a new start in Amarillo, he was determined to pursue his education and become a leader. His first American job was at the Tyson plant. He earned his GED. During the pandemic, he worked alongside Amarillo Public Health interpreting for Congolese and other African people. With Catholic Charities, he has mentored refugee students, and at Eastridge Elementary School, he helped Congolese parents navigate the school system. He even launched a refugee soccer tournament last year at Caprock High School.
Samuel is now a U.S. citizen—as are the members of his family—and says his multicultural community center gives him an opportunity to pay it forward for immigrants, refugees and others living in one of the city’s most under-resourced zip codes. “We are open to everyone,” he says.
In his family’s original language, Samuel’s name, “Uwimana,” means “God’s son.” He believes God has shown up in his life, making a way for him despite his suffering. That suffering took place across the ocean, but today residents of our city benefit from his unbridled energy, enthusiasm, work ethic and humor. He’s now a son of the Panhandle, and we are better for it.
Special Judges Award
Visit Amarillo
Technically, Visit Amarillo is a nonprofit. Otherwise known as Amarillo Convention & Visitors Bureau, this dedicated tourism office is tasked with promoting the city to people who live at least 50 miles away. The organization was nominated in our nonprofit category—and deservedly so—but our team thought it deserved a different kind of recognition.
That’s how this year’s “Special Judges Award” was born. Visit Amarillo has had a banner year highlighting this area to the travelers who spent more than $1 billion here in 2023. (The 2024 numbers haven’t yet been tabulated.)
The organization’s 2024 Texas Route 66 Festival was a huge success. This 10-day event doubled its attendance from the inaugural 2023 event. More than 60 local businesses and 100 vendors participated as the organization worked to position Amarillo’s national reputation before the 2026 centennial celebration of Route 66.
The festival grew out of a pandemic-related change in thinking. When tourism temporarily shut down, the Visit Amarillo team used its social media platform to tell local stories. “We did a lot of highlighting partners in the community and throughout the Panhandle, and sharing those things that spoke back to the true essence of the [Amarillo] brand,” says Executive Director Kashion Smith. “And so as we came out of COVID, we had really taken a partnership mentality.”
That meant not just promoting major attractions like Palo Duro Canyon, but spotlighting local businesses, as well. “We wanted to highlight people’s skills and talents and find those hidden charms in the community. That authentic experience plays very well with the visitors,” Smith says.
Meanwhile, Visit Amarillo continued to align with strategic events like the Working Ranch Cowboy Association’s World Championship Ranch Rodeo, ensuring this major local draw could effectively expand its offerings and manage its growth.
And Visit Amarillo’s support of the inaugural Amarillo International Film Festival helped this event garner more than 100 submissions from filmmakers around the world. Smith and colleague Sherman Bass, who became the Amarillo Film Commissioner in 2023, had already been discussing a film festival when they heard resident Kate McSwain and her Amarillo Film Society had a similar idea.
The visitors bureau and film society teamed up in October for a successful film festival, the impact of which may resonate for years.
“The best way to sell our region as a destination is for a production company—whether it’s a commercial, an independent film, a feature, a television show—is for them to see it,” Bass says. “So I was pleased at the number of filmmakers that actually came [to the festival], that actually got out in the community.”
It didn’t hurt that television shows like 1923 and Yellowstone had recently been filming in the area, and that Amarillo—including The Barfield Hotel—got highlighted in two episodes this fall. Bass worked directly with those production companies for months before shooting began. He called Yellowstone “a high-profile event” for the city, given that the Taylor Sheridan-produced series is the most popular American TV show in recent memory.
“The more we can see films here, the more likely we can develop a good film tourism base for the future,” he says. “Film tourism is a real thing, and it’s certainly a real thing when you get into epic television and movies. Yellowstone is one of those.”
In the age of digital media, those kinds of moments have what marketing folks call a “long tail.” They are virtually everlasting. TV viewers will be seeing The Barfield and hearing about Amarillo on those Yellowstone episodes for a long time.
Visit Amarillo sells the city to outsiders, elevating our businesses, scenery, events, attractions and people to others who want to spend money here. That’s incredibly important, and our judges are thrilled to celebrate their efforts.
