LEWISTON — The Holocaust and Human Rights Center of Maine has announced that Betsy Parsons will be the recipient of the first Gerda Haas Award for Excellence in Human Rights Education and Leadership and will be honored at the HHRC’s annual meeting celebration from noon to 2 p.m. Sunday, June 1, in the main dining room at Bates College.

Parsons is an educator and founding member of GLSEN-Southern Maine, a regional chapter of the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network.

With the goal of creating safe kindergarten through grade 12 schools for all, GLSEN was instrumental in helping schools across the country organize Gay-Straight Alliances (GSAs), school clubs where students of all sexual orientations could be together and learn creative ways of confronting violence in their schools.

In the 1990s, Deering High School students asked Parsons to help them organize the second public school GSA in Maine.

Today Gay Straight-Transgender Alliances (GSTAs, as they are now commonly called here) are at work in about half of Maine’s high schools and some middle schools, reducing hate language and bias-based harassment through efforts like Ally Week and Day of Silence.

Parsons serves as GLSEN-Southern Maine’s GSTA coordinator, organizing educational programs, supporting GSTA faculty advisers and advising a regional team of GSTA student leaders from many high schools. She is inspired by the courage, compassion and resiliency of Maine’s GSTA youth as they make their schools more peaceful and affirming places for all.

In addition to presenting the Gerda Haas Award, the HHRC will honor several other individuals and students from the community. Jutka and Irving Isaacson will receive a Joint Lifetime Achievement Award; HHRC founder Gerda Haas and former executive director Sharon Nichols will be honored for their lasting contributions to the state; and Matthew R. Ryder will receive the HHRC Educator of the Year Award.

Eli Cohen, a senior at Mt. Blue High School, Farmington, is the winner of the Lawrence Alan Spiegel Remembrance Scholarship for his essay, “What Can I do?,” and Molly Doyle, an eighth grader at Massabesic Middle School, is recipient of the Outstanding Student of the Year Award for her website on Holocaust denial, “Folks, It’s a Hoax!”

The event will  include lunch. Suggested donations are $40 a person, $300 for tables of eight and sponsorship opportunities are available.

For more information, contact the HHRC at 621-3530 or via email at [email protected]. The HHRC requests guests RSVP by Friday, May 23. Visit the HHRC online at hhrc.uma.edu.