HSV resident to address HS Branch of NAACP
The Hot Springs Branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People will hold its monthly meeting at 2 p.m. Saturday at the Webb Community Center, 127 Pleasant St.
The guest speaker will be Rose Wise, a Hot Springs Village resident who has had a varied career and “worked for social justice and the environment all her life,” according to a news release from the NAACP.
According to excerpts from her biography from the NAACP, Wise grew up in western North Carolina and completed community college as a single mother. She won scholarships to complete a bachelor’s degree in business administration with an economics major from the University of Evansville, Indiana, and an MBA from Murray State University, Kentucky.
Her varied career included two years of teaching at Stephens College, Missouri, four years as co-owner of a small restaurant, eight years as executive director of Central Missouri Food Bank, and “two unsuccessful city council runs” in Columbia, Missouri. She also returned to school for a degree in practical nursing after the birth of her daughter, it said.
She held subsequent positions as dementia unit administrator, nursing home administrator and agency nurse in industrial settings. “She retired early after a traumatic accident and traveled the United States, especially the Gulf Coast, before meeting husband Noel Schoenfeld, and moving with him from New Orleans to Hot Springs Village,” the biography said.
“She is a lifelong Democrat, beginning with co-chairing an appreciation dinner for Senator Sam Irvin, her neighbor in Morganton, North Carolina, for his work on the Watergate Hearings that brought down Nixon. She also served as the chair of the Statewide Hunger Task Force in Missouri during the Reagan years and worked with Farm Aid in food distributions. She protested nuclear power and weapons and has worked for social justice and the environment all her life, as well as in candidate and initiative campaigns,” it said.
Her current focus is getting the ForARKids onto the ballot.