Past Winners

Robert L. Woodson, Sr. is founder and president of the Center for Neighborhood Enterprise (CNE). CNE is a nonprofit, nonpartisan research and demonstration organization that supports neighborhood-based initiatives to reduce crime and violence, restore families, create economic enterprise and employment, and revitalize low-income communities. The Center has provided training and technical assistance to more than 2000 leaders of faith-based and community organizations in 39 states. Since its inception in 1981, CNE has been on the forefront of a steadily growing movement to empower low-income Americans. Woodson is often referred to as the godfather of the neighborhood empowerment movement.

For more than three decades, Woodson has had a special concern for the problems of youth. In response to an epidemic of youth violence that has afflicted urban, rural and suburban neighborhoods alike, Woodson has focused much of CNE’s activities on an initiative to establish Violence-Free Zones in trouble spots throughout the nation. This Violence-Free Zone program has achieved significant results in reducing youth violence in Washington, DC; Dallas, TX; Milwaukee, WI; Baltimore, MD; Atlanta, GA, and Prince George’s County, MD.

A strong proponent of strategies of self-help and empowerment, Woodson is frequently featured as a social commentator in the print and on-air media, including The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, Nightline, Meet the Press and other national and local broadcasts. He received a B.S. from Cheyney University and a M.S.W. from the University of Pennsylvania.

He was appointed by Secretary Michael Chertoff to the Homeland Security Advisory Council, and by President George W. Bush to the Fulbright Scholarship Commission; the Board of the National Institute of Drug Abuse (NIDA); and represented the United States on the five-member U.S. delegation to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) Conference on Tolerance and the Fight Against Racism, Xenophobia, and Discrimination.

Among the many awards he has received are the David R. Jones Award for Leadership in Voluntary Service, the Lenore and George W. Romney Citizen Volunteer Award, the Washington Times Foundation American Century Award; the Kahlil Gibran “Spirit of Humanity” Award; the Headway Magazine Booker T. Washington Award; the Martin Luther King, Jr. Family Life Institute “Real Dream” Award; the Outstanding Public Service Award from the Georgia Coalition of Black Women, Inc.; the George Washington Honor Medal presented by the Freedom Foundation at Valley Forge, and the prestigious John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship, often referred to as the “genius” award. His publications include Youth Crime and Urban Policy, A View From the Inner City (1981), On the Road to Economic Freedom: An Agenda for Black Progress,(1987), A Summons to Life, Mediating Structures and the Prevention of Youth Crime,(1988), and The Triumphs of Joseph: How Today’s Community Healers are Reviving Our Streets and Neighborhoods(1998).

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John Bolton is Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research. His research areas of interest include foreign policy and international organizations. From August 2005 to December 2006, Ambassador Bolton served with great distinction as the United States Permanent Representative to the United Nations. Steadfast in his defense of American interests, he represented this country with extraordinary principle, clarity, and patriotism.

From 2001 to 2005, Ambassador Bolton was Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security. Prior to that, he had been Senior Vice President for Public Policy Research at the American Enterprise Institute since 1997. From 1989 to 1993, Ambassador Bolton was Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs. During the last half of the 1980s, he served in the Department of Justice as Assistant Attorney General in both the Civil Division and the Office of Legislative Affairs. From 1981 to 1983, Ambassador Bolton held the positions of General Counsel and Assistant Administrator for Program and Policy Coordination at the U.S. Agency for International Development.

Ambassador Bolton’s exemplary public service also includes his membership from 1999 to 2001 on the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, created by the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998 to advise the President and Secretary of State on foreign policy issues related to religious freedom abroad. In 2006, he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts documenting Iran’s secret nuclear weapons program.

Ambassador Bolton is the author of numerous journal articles and monographs on foreign policy, national security matters, and Constitutional law. His work has appeared in the popular press and in scholarly publications. Currently, he is writing a book entitled Surrender is Not an Option: Defending America at the U.N. and Abroad. Ambassador Bolton holds a B.A. from Yale University and a J.D. from Yale Law School.

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Martin Feldstein is the George F. Baker Professor of Economics at Harvard University. For more than 20 years, he has also been President and CEO of the prestigious National Bureau of Economic Research. From 1982 through 1984, Dr. Feldstein was Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors and President Reagan’s chief economic advisor. He served as President of the American Economic Association for the year 2004.

In 2006, President Bush appointed Dr. Feldstein as a member of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. Dr. Feldstein has received honorary doctorates from several universities and is an Honorary Fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford. In 1977, he was presented the John Bates Clark Medal of the American Economic Association, a prize awarded every two years to an economist under the age of 40 who is judged to have made the greatest contribution to economic science.

Dr. Feldstein is internationally recognized for his contributions to economic thought. For the past quarter century, he has been an authoritative voice in the intellectual defense of free markets. A central insight of Dr. Feldstein’s scholarship is that individuals respond in predictable ways to economic incentives. That lesson has stimulated his innovative research on tax policy, Social Security, health economics, and international finance. It also informs his current inquiries into the economics of terrorism and national security.

An influential teacher, Dr. Feldstein has inspired a generation of young economists who have themselves shaped and defined government policy supportive of economic growth and prosperity. He is the author of more than 300 research articles in professional journals and the business press. Dr. Feldstein is also a regular contributor to the Wall Street Journal. He is a graduate of Harvard College and Oxford University

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Stephan Thernstrom is the Winthrop Professor of History at Harvard University. Abigail is vice-chair of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. Both are also Senior Fellows at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research. The Thernstroms are coauthors of No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning for which they were awarded the 2007 Fordham Foundation prize “for distinguished scholarship.”

They previously co-authored America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible, praised as a “masterwork” by Hoover Institution Research Fellow Shelby Steele. The Thernstroms are also the editors of Beyond the Color Line: New Perspectives on Race and Ethnicity. Currently, they are writing a book tentatively titled Don’t Call It Segregation: The Myth of American Apartheid.

Abigail also serves on the board of advisors of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission. She was a member of the Massachusetts state Board of Education for more than a decade until her third term ended in November 2006. Since publication in 1987 of her award-winning Whose Votes Count? Affirmative Action and Minority Voting Rights, Abigail has been a leader in the movement to restore and uphold equal protection of the law irrespective of group identity. She is currently completing the book Voting Rights and Wrongs: The Elusive Quest for Racially Fair Elections. A scholar of American social history, Stephan has contributed to the body of knowledge on liberty and opportunity in the American political and social order. Stephan is the award-winning author of several books on American history and has written widely in opinion journals for general audiences. In 2002, President Bush appointed him to the National Council on the Humanities.

Both independently and collaboratively, the Thernstroms have advanced the principles of equal citizenship, equality of opportunity, and civic responsibility. Theirs has been a much-needed voice of reason in American discourse.

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James Q. Wilson is the Ronald Reagan Professor of Public Policy at Pepperdine University. From 1961 to 1987, he was the Shattuck Professor of Government at Harvard University and from 1985 to 1997 the James Collins Professor of Management at the University of California, Los Angeles. One of the nation’s most influential social scientists and public intellectuals, Professor Wilson is the author or co-author of fifteen books, the most recent of which is The Marriage Problem: How Our Culture has Weakened Families. Others include The Moral Sense, Moral Judgement, Bureaucracy, and Thinking about Crime. His textbook American Government is more widely used on university campuses than any other book on the subject. Professor Wilson has also edited or contributed to books on urban problems, government regulation of business, and the prevention of delinquency among children. Many of his writings on morality and human character have been collected in On Character: Essays by James Q. Wilson.

In 1990, Professor Wilson received the James Madison Award from the American Political Science Association for a career of distinguished scholarship. In 1994, he received the John Gaus Award for “exemplary scholarship in the fields of political science and public administration.” In 2003, President George W. Bush presented Professor Wilson with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian award.

Professor Wilson has served on a number of national and presidential commissions on crime, drug abuse prevention, foreign intelligence, and bioethics. For more than twenty years, he has chaired the Council of Academic Advisors of the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research. Professor Wilson received a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. He holds honorary degrees from seven universities, including Harvard.

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Fouad Ajami is the Majid Khadduri Professor and Director of the Middle East Studies Program at Johns Hopkins University’s Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D.C. Previously, he was a faculty member of Princeton University’s Department of Politics and a fellow at Princeton’s Center of International Studies and a research fellow at the Lehrman Institute. Born in Arnoun in the south of Lebanon, Ajami is one of the mostinfluential Arab-American intellectuals of his generation. He has been an ardent and outspoken proponent of democracy in the Middle East. “The spectacle of ordinary Iraqis, old women, old men, Iraqis returning from far away to vote, people holding up their forefingers dipped in purple ink,” Ajami said in an interview after the first round of Iraqi elections last year, “gave the lie to the idea that democracy is alien or need be alien to this region.”

A prolific and elegant writer, Ajami is the author of numerous books, including Vanished Imam: Musa al Sadr and the Shia of Lebanon, Beirut: City of Regrets, The Dream Palace of the Arabs: A Generation’s Odyssey and The Arab Predicament: Arab Political Thought and Practice Since 1967. His most-recent book is this year’s The Foreigner’s Gift: The Americans, the Arabs, and the Iraqis in Iraq.

Fluent in Arabic, Ajami is also contributing editor to U.S. News & World Report, a consultant on Middle Eastern affairs for CBS News, and a member of the editorial board of Foreign Affairs and the board of directors of the Council on Foreign Relations. He is a frequent contributor to The New York Times Book Review and The New Republic, as well. Ajami earned his Ph.D. at the University of Washington.

Clint Bolick is the President and General Counsel of the Alliance for School Choice (ASC) in Phoenix. Previously, Bolick co-founded and was vice president and general counsel of the Institute for Justice (IJ), a public-interest law firm in Washington, D.C.

At ASC, IJ, and earlier at the Landmark Legal Foundation, Bolick has tenaciously fought for the rights of low-income parents to choose where to send their children to school. At IJ, among other things, he led a litigation team that helped successfully defend the constitutionality of school-choice programs across the United States. In 2003, American Lawyer recognized Bolick as one of the country’s three best lawyers of the year for his work on choice.

Bolick loves to quote Thomas Paine. In a 1997 paper for The Heritage Foundation, for just one example, Bolick wrote that Paine “made a prophetic observation: ‘Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.’ This is good advice. Members of Congress, state legislators, and parents dedicated to giving their children the best of educational opportunities should not forget it.”

Genial in person but resolute on principles, Bolick is the author of numerous books -- including The Affirmative Action Fraud: Can We Restore the American Civil Rights Vision?, Transformation: The Promise and Politics of Empowerment, Leviathan: The Growth of Local Government and the Erosion of Liberty, and Voucher Wars: Waging the Legal Battle Over School Choice. His newest book, David’s Hammer: The Case for an Activist Judiciary, will be published later this year. Bolick earned his undergraduate degree from Drew University in Madison, N.J., and his law degree from the University of California-Davis.

Hernando de Soto is the founder of the Institute for Liberty and Democracy (ILD) in Lima, Peru. De Soto played a major role in designing reforms that modernized Peru’s economic system, and he is working with indigenous think tanks in two dozen underdeveloped countries to push similar reforms. De Soto has advised presidents and prime ministers around the world. Personally engaging and an insightful and engaging writer on the roots of poverty and the advancement of prosperity, principally through legal structures that respect property rights, he is the author of The Other Path: The Invisible Revolution in the Third World, The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else, The Other Path: The Economic Answer to Terrorism, and The Road to Capitalism and the Spontaneous Generation of Law. In his first book The Other Path, explaining why some countries were rich and others were poor, de Soto observed that Peru’s de facto owners were locked out of the formal, legal economy. That, he noted, was the root of the problem. “They have houses but not titles; crops but not deeds; businesses but not statutes of incorporation,” he lamented.

In 1999, Time chose de Soto as one of five leading Latin American intellectuals, and Forbes has named him one of 15 innovators who will reinvent the future. He is also a past winner of the Cato Institute’s Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty. De Soto did post-graduate work at the Institut Universitaire de Hautes Etudes Internationales in Geneva. He has served as an economist for the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, as president of the Executive Committee of the Intergovernmental Council of Copper Exporting Countries, as managing director of Universal Engineering Corporation, as a principal of the Swiss Bank Corporation Consultant Group, and as a governor of Peru's Central Reserve Bank.

Award-winning actor and philanthropist Gary Sinise has stood as an advocate for America’s veterans and active service members for more than thirty years. His commitment began in the early 1980s with his support of Vietnam veterans groups and the creation of Vets Night, a program offering free dinners and performances to veterans at the Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago. In the 1990s, Mr. Sinise worked on behalf of the Disabled American Veterans, which he continues to actively support. Since the attacks of September 11th, 2001, his dedication to our nation’s active duty defenders, veterans and first responders has become a tireless crusade of support, service and gratitude to all those who protect our freedom and serve our country.

Mr. Sinise’s portrayal of Lt. Dan Taylor in the 1994 landmark film Forrest Gump created his enduring connection with servicemen and women throughout the military community. After several USO handshake tours in 2003, Mr. Sinise formed the “Lt. Dan Band” and began entertaining troops serving at home and abroad. The band now performs close to 30 shows a year for military bases, charities and fundraisers supporting wounded heroes, Gold Star families, veterans and troops around the world.

Mr. Sinise has earned many distinguished awards for his efforts in service of the nation, including the Bob Hope Award for Excellence in Entertainment from the Medal of Honor Society; the Spirit of the USO Award; the Ellis Island Medal of Honor; the Doughboy Award; and the Dwight D. Eisenhower Award from the National Defense Industrial Association. In 2008, he received the Presidential Citizens Medal, the second-highest civilian honor awarded to citizens for exemplary deeds performed in service of the nation. In 2012, Mr. Sinise was presented with the Spirit of Hope Award by the Department of Defense and was named an honorary Chief Petty Officer by the United States Navy. In 2013, he was pinned as an honorary Marine by General James Amos, commandant of the United States Marine Corps. In 2015, Mr. Sinise received the prestigious Sylvanus Thayer Award from the West Point Association of Graduates, an honor bestowed upon a civilian whose character, service, and achievements reflect the ideals prized by the U.S Military Academy.

In 2011, to expand upon his individual efforts, Mr. Sinise established the Gary Sinise Foundation to serve and honor our nation’s defenders, veterans, first responders, their families and those in need. The Foundation’s mission is to ensure the sacrifices of America’s defenders and their families are never forgotten.

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