A woman who has dedicated her life to the service of others was joyfully saluted this afternoon by a packed house at the Shadowland Hall at Silver Beach for a lifetime of turning other women with dreams into successful entrepreneurs and independent business women with an enviable track record. The team at 100 Women Strong of Berrien County delivered their 2017 Leader of Distinction Award to Margaret Adams who heads up the Women’s Business Center at Cornerstone Alliance.
Citing the dozens of clients who have achieved success under the tutelage of Margaret, Sarah Spoonholtz, President of 100 Women Strong delivered the glass flame to Adams in front of a full house that left some attendees parking atop the bluff or at Silver Beach County Park due to the overflow crowd.
Margaret Adams brings 20 years of past experience working for the City of Benton Harbor, the last 15 years of which she spent as City Clerk. She is also the co-owner and operator of Adams’ Rib, an event planning and catering business. Adams has worked for Cornerstone Alliance since 1999 and received the Program Manager position for the WBC in 2004. In 2006, she was certified as a small business counselor from the Academy of Professional Small Business Consultants at Grand Valley State University.
In 2012, she received the Small Business Administration’s Michigan Women Business Champion of the Year Award. Additionally, she has helped multiple businesses — focusing on female owned and operated — open up shop in Southwest Michigan.
Before Adams was given her award, the luncheon crowd was treated to a keynote address from Lakeland Health executive Norma Tirado, who also applauded Adams for the tremendous work she has performed with countless entrepreneurs at Cornerstone. Calling her, “totally committed to the community and a truly beautiful woman,” Tirado went on to inspire the audience with her own encouragement for each of them to give back to the community.
Reflecting back on the past several weeks of hurricanes, earthquakes, shootings, wildfires and more, Tirado cited the fear that can overcome some people, but the need to continue to give back to help everyone recover.
Having grown up in San Juan, Puerto Rico and with a brother still living there, Tirado related her own tales of growing up volunteering as a math tutor for underprivileged and under-served children at a school in the projects of Puerto Rico.
She also shared how her first job in a small, community-based organization helping people who had lost jobs to find new ones proved costly to her personally. She admitted that she was so focused on helping clients with money for job interview clothing, lunch money and utility bills that she ended up nearly broke herself, having spent most of her meager paycheck on her clientele.
She says, “That’s when I truly learned the importance of philanthropy.” However, she also learned that too many people who were “helping” were doing so out of some sense of obligation rather than as a personal choice. While she strongly encourages everyone to “find success by giving back to your community,” she also watched far too many people who were providing help just to put it on their resume, or to earn the next job promotion. “Service,” she insists, “must come from the heart, rather then from a sense of duty.”
Norma’s own life was changed forever when her husband was involved in a serious accident with a semi, and “the semi won.” It was the amazing turnout of her entire community that helped change her focus forever. Mentors helped. Counselors helped. Friends and family helped. But, perhaps the most amazing eyeopener was when a man who felt that she had been promoted ahead of him for the wrong reasons became the one who established a major fundraiser to help her get through the trauma. “When tragedy struck, people rallied to make sure I had what I needed, and I will never forget that,” says Norma.
She has fully discovered and now preaches the solid connection between happiness and helping others and the success that leads to, and says that Margaret Adams is a resounding success for that very same reason.
At one point she even had the people in the audience singing “What the World Needs Now, Is Love Sweet Love,” and laughing over the inability to recall all of the lyrics. She encouraged everyone to help others if you want to be successful, reminding those who plead a poverty of time that “we all have the same amount of time as Mother Theresa, Albert Einstein and the Dali Lama.”
After asking the audience to take a moment to write on index cards at everyone’s table setting what their biggest gift is…she instructed them to ask themselves, “How can I give that gift to others?”
Keynote speaker Tirado joined Lakeland on February 1, 2010. A graduate of Marquette University, Tirado also holds an Executive Master’s in Business Administration degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and is currently pursuing a doctorate in Healthcare Administration at Central Michigan University.
Professionally she is a member of the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS), certified in Emotional Intelligence and the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME).
As a community member, she is the President of the Southwest Michigan Symphony Orchestra Board of Directors as well as a board member of Cornerstone Alliance and the Executive Committee of the KitchenAid Senior PGA Championship.
100 Women Strong provides modest, one-time financial assistance to women in Berrien County who are ineligible for other community resources, but find themselves in need of emergency help.
