LEWISTON – Mark Schlotterbeck, city missionary for Calvary United Methodist Church, will receive the 2003 Take a Stand award in a ceremony on Sunday, May 18.

Bates College Chaplain Kerry Maloney nominated Schlotterbeck for the Holocaust Human Rights Center of Maine award, which will be presented at the Marriott at Sable Oaks in South Portland.

Maloney cited the missionary’s recent work within the Lewiston-Auburn community to welcome Somali neighbors.

Immediately after Mayor Larry Raymond wrote a letter last October asking Somalis to slow their migration to the city, Schlotterbeck helped organize a friendship walk in support of the Somali families.

But that was only the beginning. “When Matt Hale of the World Church of the Creator and his Nazi followers targeted Lewiston as a fruitful field for recruitment, Mark and Calvary took their friendship with the Somali community and their commitment to all other groups targeted by the WCC to the entire state, indeed to the nation, in the rapid organization of the Many and One Coalition and Rally,” Maloney said.

“There is no adequate way to convey the complexity and the enormity of this undertaking, which was indeed a community-wide project, but an enormous portion of the work, the initiative, the anxiety and the fatigue fell on Mark.”

The Take a Stand award recognizes a Maine resident of any age who, at considerable personal risk, takes a public stand against a situation, person or action in which another person’s rights or personal integrity were being denied.

Such action need not have been grandiose. It need only have demonstrated a courageous determination to speak out against the denial of fair and unprejudiced treatment of a fellow human being, lest such abuse feed and grow strong on the silence of bystanders.

The Holocaust Human Rights Center of Maine teaches about the Holocaust and issues of human rights.

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