Pat Meredith: A Heart for Children In Need, Here In The US and Around the World
WWB Volunteer Receives 2020 Bell Award
Our wonderful friend Pat Meredith, visiting our office with an armful of colorful water socks and a jar filled with money to fund another Water Woman.
Pat and her late husband Russ:
During this week’s Coffee Chat we will be celebrating our wonderful volunteer/donor Pat Meredith, winner of the 2020 bell award.
She will try to bring along a couple of her Epsilon Sigma Alpha Sisters (Pat and two of her sisters are pictured above with Sr. Larraine). These great ladies are philanthropists par excellence, and a lot of fun to be with.
Pat Meredith was with her Sisters in Epsilon Sigma Alpha at the Middletown Fall Festival selling crocheted items for charity when she met Sr. Larraine Lauter.
“She said she needed someone to crochet covers for the water filters,” Pat said. “We call them water socks.”
Now, more than five years and thousands of water socks later, Pat Meredith will receive one of the 2020 Bell Awards, one of the Louisville area’s most important honors. It recognizes not only her volunteer work for Water With Blessings, but also her year’s of service to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, a long-time partner with the ESA Sorority.
“I had never heard of it before,” Pat said. “Two of my nieces and my daughter nominated me. And Sr. Larraine wrote a beautiful letter.”
In addition to volunteering, Pat and her late husband Russ became faithful donors to Water With Blessings, always taking advantage of the matching-gift program Russ’ employer offered. That’s dozens of Water Women sponsored over the years.
Sr. Larraine said, “I first met Pat and Russ several at the Middletown Festival, lured by the spectacle of a grandmotherly figure waving a bright marionette over a crowd of awed children. Pat explained that she and Russ had a special hobby: raising funds for children’s causes.
“When I told them about our mission for God’s thirsty children, they were immediately hooked. And Russ was the originator of our logo pins.”
Pat keeps working for us, making masks for our teams and Water Women in Haiti and Honduras, and crafting beaded hooks to hold the syringes onto water buckets in the Navajo Nation.
“Water With Blessings is working so hard to get filters into countries where the children were and still are dying,” Pat said. “It touched our hearts that these children were taken care of. And there’s still a lot we can still do.”