Nominate a Community Leader for the Humanitarian Service Award
Duke Chapel is accepting nominations for its Humanitarian Service Award, which recognizes individuals who have demonstrated both a long-term commitment to serving others and a lifestyle marked by simplicity. People whose service has enhanced the quality of life for people within the Durham community will be given priority consideration. Nominees must have a Duke affiliation.
The recipient of the award is honored with a grant ranging from $1,500 to $3,000 given to a nonprofit they designate that demonstrates genuine and sustained care for others through practical help and community engagement. The recipient is also recognized at a reception on Sunday, September 27, 2026, following the Founders Sunday Service at Duke Chapel.
Past recipients include a minister who welcomes people onto his front porch for food and conversation, a Duke employee who supports education for African American boys in Durham, and the head of a local nonprofit that offers dignity and community for people with disabilities.
The award has its roots in a relationship between two Duke professors. In 1990 Duke University religion professor, sociologist and United Methodist minister, C. Eric Lincoln started the Humanitarian Service Award endowment to honor Dr. George R. Parkerson, Jr., the chairman of and a professor in the Department of Community and Family Medicine at Duke University School of Medicine. By establishing this endowment, Dr. Lincoln sought to recognize Dr. Parkerson’s “caring love and concern for humanity” and to encourage others to do the same.
Both Parkerson and Lincoln have exemplified lives in service of others. Dr. Lincoln’s life was dedicated to service through reconciliation, hospitality, care, mentoring, and ecumenism. Throughout his career, Dr. Parkerson’s concern for humanity has been revealed in his work in family medicine and as he has helped his students “see life whole.”
To see life steadily and to see it whole; to know and to make knowing an instrument of freedom and creativity … to recognize that human contingency is but a counterpart to human interdependency – that is our challenge. We are all a part of the main.
— C. Eric Lincoln in "Coming Through the Fire"