Horner embodies a champion for Sterling community
What’s a Community Champion? It’s a person who serves as an ambassador for their community, someone who promotes the features that make their community great and who actively works to improve the quality of life for the members of that community. And often, someone who eschews recognition for those efforts, instead seeing it as their responsibility, even their privilege, to give back as part of the community.
In short, a person like Cindy Horner.
Horner was there when the Sterling Community Fund, an endowment fund through the Eastern Colorado Community Fund, was in its infancy. She made presentations to the Sterling City Council and Logan County Commissioners imploring them to support the establishment of the fund, the dividends of which will be used for years to come to fund projects that make Sterling and Logan County a better place to live. The fruits of that fund have already become visible, with the creation of Heritage Park at the corner of Main and Fourth Streets in downtown Sterling. The park also hosts the Sterling Community Fund Founders Wall, which recognizes significant donors who assisted in the establishment of the fund.
In 2018 Horner and her husband, Jim, held a celebration at their then-home, the former Carnegie Library, which featured a tour of the historic building and presentation on its history, as a fundraiser for the community fund. Since then, she has remained active with fundraising efforts, helping organize the annual galas that were held to raise enough revenue to begin generating usable dividends and continuing to be engaged in planning for future events, including a “Game On” casino night at the Logan County Fairgrounds Oct. 5.
In addition to her work with the Sterling Community Fund, Horner has found plenty of other ways to give back. She previously served as the executive director for the Northeastern Junior College Foundation and is a former member of the RE-1 Valley Board of Education. She also led efforts by the Sterling Reviewers Club and Sterling Rotary Club to place the sculptures of the Hadfields and a Plains Indian located along Front Street at Main.
Horner was recognized by the Community Foundation of Northern Colorado with the 2023 Celebration of Philanthropy Founders Award. In a video produced by the foundation, Horner said the word community, to her, “means a shared responsibility for the life that we enjoy, working together with other people to build organizations that give back to the town, and people stepping up to make things happen.”
“Cindy is so committed to this community. She so believes in Northeast Colorado, in hard agriculture and in hard work, and really stands for those people that live in these communities that have given so much to the area and want to leave some behind,” Pam
Werner, Sterling Community Fund co-chair, said in the video.
Co-chair Steve Meier noted Horner doesn’t want to be in the limelight, but is someone who wants to work behind the scenes getting things done.
“Sterling Community Fund would not have started, and would not still be going, without Cindy,” Werner said. “She’s really been the driving force and she’s recruited all of us.”
Horner pointed to the rewards of giving back: “It brings a richness, a depth, a dimension of life that you simply cannot achieve any other way,” she said in the video.
“I am truly grateful to have been given the opportunity to play a small part in this.”