1997: Pamela Yardley Paul

The Junior League of Jacksonville

Causes/Issue Area(s): Child Welfare

Achievements: Innovator in children’s services

Pamela Yardley Paul gives credit to The Junior League for teaching her organizational skills. It was a lesson well learned.

After receiving Provisional training in New York and Jacksonville, Pamela helped to develop a Junior League of Jacksonville referral hotline-- the area's first-- for families in need. Through this experience, Pamela became aware that calls to the hotline, which later became First Call for Help, almost always included a plea on behalf of children.

That experience as a League volunteer led to a career in voluntarism that has mixed hands-on service and advocacy. In the early 1980s, as president of the Florida Center for Children & Youth, she transformed the Tallahassee-focused think tank into a statewide, membership-supported advocacy organization. She also became the first woman to chair the United Way of Northeast Florida, overseeing a campaign in which 12,000 volunteers raised more than $14 million, setting a record as the highest increase in total contributions of any United Way in the nation.

During the 1970s, she also co-founded a group to tackle child abuse in the Jacksonville area, which led to the creation of the state-funded Children's Crisis Center. Looking to fund other programs to help children, she worked with then-State Attorney Ed Austin to put a referendum on the ballot for a Children's Services Board.

The initiative failed, but she worked in Jacksonville’s city government for 12 years—at a dollar a year—first with Austin, when he was elected mayor in 1991, and later Mayor John Delaney. Under Austin, Pamela helped create the Jacksonville Children's Commission to finance children's services, including after-school care.

More recently, she’s been focused on forming Jacksonville’s New Town Success Zone to support at-risk children from birth through their teenage years.