The W. D. Boyce Council, Boy Scouts of America will honor Dr. Rita Ali, Executive Director of Diversity at Illinois Central College, with the 2011 Whitney M. Young Award. The event, chaired by Dr. John Erwin and Dr. Sharon Kherat, will be held at 5:00 p.m. on Sunday, June 12, 2011, at the Country Club of Peoria. The keynote speaker for the evening will be Ernest G. Green, one of the “Little Rock Nine”.

The celebratory event will honor Dr. Ali for her tireless and continuous efforts in improving the lives of youth throughout Central Illinois. She currently is the executive leader of college diversification at Illinois Central College where she creates, develops, and administers programs and services related to campus and community diversity.

Ernest G. Green attended Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas where he and eight other black students were the first to integrate Central High following the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education that declared segregation illegal. They later would become known as the “Little Rock Nine”.

The Whitney M. Young Celebration is named after Whitney M. Young, Jr., who was an educator and civil rights leader. The evening’s celebration will benefit the ScoutREACH program which works to provide youth from urban and rural communities an opportunity to join Scouting.

The celebration, in its third year, is put together by community leaders who believe in the positive impact Scouting has on our community. The Country Club of Peoria is located at 4700 N. Grandview Drive, Peoria Heights, Illinois.