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The William H. and Camille O. Cosby
The purpose of The William H. and Camille O. Cosby Philanthropic Award is expected to help focus the need of financially capable African Americans, in addition to their traditional giving to religious institutions, to engage in planned, endowment and other forms of tax advantageous giving. Associated with The William H. and Camille O. Cosby Philanthropic Award will be a cash grant to finance a leading-edge, innovative study or project designed to advance educational progress and understanding of health and human service issues affecting African American participation in American society. ............................................................................................................... The 2006 recipient of
Like her physician father, she has enthusiastically embraced music, the arts and culture. As an entrepreneur, she embodies the legacy of her mother’s pre-disposition toward business. Like both and probably from both, she inculcated excellence as an indispensable value and guide to high performance. So adept was Johnson at playing the violin that she was awarded a full scholarship to study at the University of Illinois from which she received degrees in performance and education. High performance and high distaste for mediocrity have been driving forces throughout a life marked by great accomplishment as a teacher, business person, diplomat and, yes as a mother-----the facet of herself of which she is most proud. As America’s first certified Black female billionaire, Johnson, born in McKeesport, Pennsylvania and raised in Chicago, enjoys all the trappings that come with great wealth. However, the vast assets she owns are not her fire. The current that electrifies Johnson is, as the French say, “joie de vivre”. Love of life is the driving force behind her interest and involvement in the arts, diplomacy, the design of luxury linens, and ownership of a sports franchise---the WNBA’s Washington Wizards basketball team. More importantly and far broader than these sources of personal comfort and satisfaction for herself and her family, Johnson’s love of life is a deeply felt expression of an abiding and real concern for a better state of the human condition----for the care and nourishment of children, for their education and health and, indeed, for their future. Johnson has a special sense of concern for disadvantaged children. Blessed with abundance, she sees the benefits of sharing her wealth to make a better island for all. Johnson endowed the Sheila C. Johnson Foundation with $27 million to help address the health and educational needs of impoverished children She has given generously to the United Negro College Fund, Howard University, Bennett College, the Parsons School of Design, and to Katrina storm victims, among a plethora of other causes. Winston Churchill said: “we make a living
by what we get, but we make a life by what we give”.
In her many ways, like Bill and Camille Cosby, Ms. Johnson
is helping to make life
better now and better in the future.
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With the agreement of William H. and Camille O. Cosby, Associated
Black Charities has established The William H. and Camille O. Cosby
Philanthropic Award to recognize philanthropic participation by
an African American or, in selected instances, a non-African American,
who, in any given year, most exemplifies the Cosby's philosophy
or notion of philanthropy in service of improved education and health
and human services to less fortunate African Americans.
To
say that Sheila C. Johnson dimensional is to vastly understate
the various facets of her life and personality. The daughter of
a neurosurgeon who was also an accomplished pianist, and a mother
who was an accountant, she has evolved as a person who has seamlessly
integrated her parents’ distinctive attributes as well as
their shared dimensions.