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| At Lutheran Day 2004: (from left) Pastor Dan Schwick, director of the Lutheran Network for Justice Advocacy (now Lutheran Advocacy-Illinois) ; Illinois Lt. Governor Pat Quinn; Patti Simon; Gene Svebakken, president, Lutheran Child and Family Services (LCFS); Lisa Madigan, Illinois Attorney General; Harvey Welch, former LSSI Board member; and the Pastor Frederick Aigner, LSSI president. Lutheran Day 2004 was co-sponsored by LSSI, the Lutheran Network for Justice Advocacy and LCFS. These organizations, along with the family of the late U.S. Senator Paul Simon, launched the “Paul Simon Courage in Public Service Award.” The award was created to honor Illinois public officials who best exemplify Paul Simon’s steadfast commitment to the public good, with the first to be given at Lutheran Day 2005. |
The roots of Lutheran Day are in two joint board meetings of Lutheran Social Services of Illinois (LSSI) and Lutheran Child and Family Services of Illinois (LCFS) that took place in Springfield in the spring of 2003 and 2004. At those meetings the leaders of those two major Lutheran human service provider organizations, recognized that they had common concerns relating to their partnerships with state government, specifically with inadequate state funding for human services and the larger issue of inadequate and unsustainable state revenue to cover the cost of all state programs. As a result of those meetings, the two organizations resolved to reach out to other Lutheran human service provider organizations in Illinois to combine and organize our voices and our constituencies in support of strengthening the public-private human services safety net in Illinois.
To view the white paper and resolutions that came out of the joint LCFS-LSSI meetings, click here.
During the planning for the second joint board meeting, we were saddened to hear about the untimely death of retired US Senator Paul Simon, a life-long Lutheran and a tireless and courageous champion for people in need in Illinois, across the US and around the world. At the 2004 joint board meeting, Senator Simon's widow, Patti Simon, joined with leaders of LSSI and LCFS to inaugurate the "Paul Simon Courage in Public Service" award that would be given in subsequent years to an Illinois public official who in some way exemplified the late Senator Simon's commitment to compassion and justice.
To read more about the the Paul Simon Courage in Public Service Award, click here.