Tonight, Moorestown Friends School plans to present several people special awards. One of these people is Warren Sawyer, who will be presented with the Moorestown Friends School Alumni Association’s Service Award.
Sawyer, who resides at Medford Leas with his wife, Florence, will be honored for his generous support and service to the school.
At MFS, Sawyer has served many roles, including trustee, leadership fundraising volunteer, parent, grandparent, faculty spouse and advocate for service learning,. His three children, Martha Sawyer DeLuca ’66, Janet Sawyer Thomas ’67 and Stephen Sawyer ’76, all attended MFS after his family moved to Moorestown from Kentucky in the 1960s.
Sawyer’s involvement with the school was deepened through his late wife Ruth Darnell Sawyer, who attended MFS and served on its faculty and as a school trustee. The MFS Quaker Studies Center is named after Ruth, a gift of Sawyer and their children.
Sawyer joined the MFS School Committee (board of trustees) in 1982, serving through 1988. During that period he also served as a member of the Steering Committee of the Third Century Capital Campaign.
Sawyer, who spent most of his business career in Moorestown as a real estate broker at Edgar Realty, is the only surviving founding member of MEND, the Moorestown Ecumenical Neighborhood Development Corporation, a group founded to help provide affordable housing, beginning with the revitalization of the Beech Street neighborhood in Moorestown in the early 1970s, and growing to help develop over 500 affordable housing sites throughout the county.
An avid world traveler, Sawyer has visited many countries and was a volunteer immediately after World War II taking livestock to Poland by ship. Some of his trips have been in aid of the cause of social justice, such as visits to Cuba and Nicaragua, while other journeys have been to work on schools in Indonesia, Belize, Tanzania, Arizona and Mississippi. As part of Heifer International, he travelled to Cambodia and Vietnam.
After retiring at age 87, Sawyer volunteered for many years for the Alternatives to Violence Program in South Jersey, a program designed to educate and foster new response patterns among prisoners to teach better relationship skills. He reads newspapers and other printed material for the sight-impaired each week for the Associated Services for the Blind in Philadelphia; in 2009 he received a Philadelphia Eagles Community Quarterback Award in recognition of this volunteer work. Additionally, Sawyer transports food donations weekly from Moorestown Meeting to New Visions in Camden.
In December 2009, National Public Radio broadcast and posted on its website a long feature story about the courageous work Sawyer did during his service as a conscientious objector in World War II. Assigned to work as an orderly in Byberry, a Philadelphia mental institution, Sawyer and others uncovered inhumane conditions there, and brought them to the attention of the public — culminating in a photo feature in LIFE magazine, and leading to much-needed reforms.
The MFS Alumni Association Service Award is presented to one who, through unselfish interest, loyalty or personal commitment, has enhanced the quality of life in the Moorestown Friends School community.
The award will be presented at the Dinner Among Friends, one of the major events held during Alumni Weekend 2011, at 6 p.m.tonight in the school’s dining hall commons.
