User:Adjoajo/mary

Mary Mims was born in Minden, Louisiana. She was a community organizer, teacher, educator, humanitarian, lecturer, and a pioneering sociologist. She was the founder of the “community organization movement” in cooperative extension. She was a Extension services specialist in community organizing and worked for Louisiana State University.

Early Life
It is stated in Mary started teaching at the age of seven. After she learned to read, she got seven Negro children together, and starting teaching them how to read. Her father ordered seven readers for the seven children.

Career
Mims teaching career started in Bienville Parish. She went on to become Louisiana's first female principal. She later became the first parish superintendent of education. Mims is known as an advocate for community development. She is the co-author of the book "The Awakening Community", along with Georgia Williams Mortiz. She was a community organizer. She viewed communities as "seedbeds of democracy." And as a vital part of the government. Mims was a well known national orator during her time. She spoke alongside of president Calvin Coolidge. She spoke at conferences nationally and internationally; and alongside of national leaders in the United States and with nobility in Europe and other parts of the world. Mims started her career as teacher in Bienville Parish, Louisiana. She was the state's first female principal. She later became parish superintendent of education. In 1925 she was recruited to work for the Louisiana State University Agricultural Extension. The work that she did the LSU extension became a model for the United States in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. She was Louisiana's first extension sociologist. As an extension agent her tasks were to promote, economic, intellectual, civic, health, and recreational life programs to communities. She was a part of the early decades of educational organizing. Mims assisted agents in organizing communities in the state of Luisiana. As a specialist she help in the organizing of public work initiatives in the 1920s and 1930s.

Mims developed the "community organizing method" in the cooperative extension service in the 1920s. Her work extended across the South to over 1000 poor black and white communities through the 1930s.

Mary Mims worked with Essae Martha Culver to establish and promote library services in the Louisiana parishes.

She traveled to Denmark to study community building work and their folk schools. Folk high school are also known as adult or Popular education. In the 19th century N. F. S. Grundtvig pioneered the folk schools. What Mims learned in Denmark, she brought back to the United States. These were schools for life and their core value life long learning. And to give the peasantry those from the lower echelons of society a higher educational level.

In 1932 Mims published the book "The Awakening Community." The book advocates for the development of strong communities. It because a model for community development.

There is a 4-H Club called Camp Mary Mims to honor Dr. Mary Mims.

Quotes
“One senses the lack of any lift or pull by cooperative momentum,” Mims had said about unmotivated agricultural towns, villages and hamlets. “One sees the struggling church, the divided community, the poor school, the ineffective local organization.”

“Every community should have good wholesome recreation programs…and remember, recreation was not intended to wreck life, but to recreate life,” she said. “There is no environment more vital to the life of the youth of the state than the community in which they live.”

“I beg of you,” Mims said in a speech to young adults, “to go back to your communities, study their needs and do something about them.”

“So-called ‘social workers’ cannot hammer a community into shape,” she argued in her book, The Awakening Community. “If a community grows, it must do so from the inside.” Mary Mims