2014 ATHENA Nominees
WPC has nominated two outstanding women for this year’s ATHENA Award and ATHENA Young Professional Award. Please mark your calendars for this year’s ATHENA Award Ceremony: March 26th at Centennial Park.
WPC’s Young Professional Award Nominee
Sarah Tanksley Stockton
Sarah is the Public Information Officer with Health Care Finance and Administration, the state agency which oversees TennCare, Cover Tennessee and other state-funded health care programs. Prior to joining HCFA Sarah was a Senior Account Representative for Peritus, a public relations and public affairs firm with several offices throughout the southeast. She also has experience working for a national trade association in Washington, D.C as a Grassroots Coordinator working with the members of the association and key members of Congress. She was also a Field Representative for Tennessee Victory 2006 and the Bob Corker for U.S. Senate campaign.Sarah has a Masters of Public Administration from Tennessee State University and a Bachelor of Science in Political Science from Middle Tennessee State University. Sarah and her husband David live in Murfreesboro with their twin daughters, Hannah and Sydney.
WPC’s ATHENA Award Nominee
Kathy England Walsh
Kathy Walsh is the Executive Director of the Tennessee Coalition To End Domestic and Sexual Violence. Ms. Walsh works with state and federal policy makers crafting new laws to improve safety for victims and increase offender accountability. Over the past twenty-six years, Ms. Walsh has been instrumental in creating more than one hundred new laws including increasing accessibility to orders of protection, making spousal rape a crime, mandating arrest, twelve hour hold and conditions of release for domestic abuse offenders, requiring law enforcement agencies to adopt domestic violence policies, establishing stalking laws, making strangulation a felony, creating state funding for domestic violence shelters and rape crisis centers, prohibiting abusers from possessing or purchasing firearms, developing a statewide victim notification system, establishing state rules, certification and monitoring of court-ordered batterers’ intervention programs, ensuring rape victims will not be charged for their rape exam, creating the Senator Tommy Burks Victim Assistance Academy and the Domestic Violence State Coordinating Council, and reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act and the Family Violence Services Prevention Act.Ms. Walsh co-authored the Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault Law Enforcement Interdiction Curriculum being used by law enforcement agencies throughout the country, the Tennessee Model Law Enforcement Policy, State Standards for Domestic Violence Programs, Domestic Abuse Bench Book, Model Domestic Violence Court Policy, State Rules, Certification and Monitoring of Batterer’s Intervention Programs, and Tennessee’s Uniform Order of Protection Forms. She also assisted in the creating the Best Practices for Sexual Assault Agencies and Tennessee’s State Plan on Violence Against Women.Ms. Walsh serves as a member of the Domestic Violence State Coordinating Council, the National Network to End Domestic Violence, the National Network’s Public Policy Committee, the Office of Criminal Justice Programs’ Advisory Committee on Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault, CABLE, and the Women’s Political Collaborative of Tennessee.
