WARP Community Leadership Award
In the early days of WARP, long before the age of websites, social media, even email, and certainly before Zoom entered our lives, the WARP quarterly newsletter was our primary means of sharing ideas and stories about member projects around the world. From the beginning, the newsletter was everyone’s connecting link, and their favorite part of WARP unless they were fortunate enough to be able to attend the Annual Meeting. Now, more than 30 years later, it is still ranked in every survey we have ever done as by far the most utilized and loved offering of the organization. And so the fact that Linda Temple has been serving as the Editor for the past 25 years of the newsletter’s existence is no small thing. More than anything else, Linda has been the face behind the face of WARP, promoting our message through stories from all over the world.
WARP Members at the 1993 Annual Meeting at Elizabeth Harvat’s cabin high in the Rockies near Kremmling, Colorado.
Linda is in the center wearing glasses, a shirt with rainbows on the front, and a big smile.
That alone would earn Linda the Community Leadership Award, as she has reached out to and on behalf of artisans world-wide for a quarter of a century. But that is just one of so many things Linda has done for the textile artisan community.
As co-founder of WARP more than 30 years ago, it is easy to recognize that without Linda’s efforts from the beginning, WARP would never have gotten off the ground. Day 1 of exciting ideas is the easy part. That Linda has stayed the course for all this time shows her multi-faceted support throughout the years. She served on the original board, finalized our 501 (c) 3 non-profit status, maintained our mailing list and membership directory for many years, was instrumental in the development of so many WARP programs, small and large, short and long-term. Quietly, often in the background, there has never been a time when Linda’s presence and contributions were not making a difference.
But Linda’s community involvement goes so much deeper. In their 20s, she and her husband Tom left Peabody, Kansas, where they had been living in a Catholic Worker Community, for New York City, where they worked for Dorothy Day’s Catholic Workers Movement. Linda also worked in the vocational rehabilitation unit at Harlem Hospital. A lifetime of various kinds of socially-oriented work followed, both hands-on and administrative, always accompanied by her extensive volunteer work both at home and on behalf of artisans around the world. In the early 1980s, the most dangerous era of the 36-year “Time of the Violence” in Guatemala that left tens of thousands of war-widows and orphans, Linda began her life in fair trade, selling the textiles of widowed weavers to everyone she knew in Oklahoma. Those private sales grew into Market Day, a pop-up market selling the work of artisans from more of the world, with some of the proceeds always going back to Guatemala. By then (2000) Linda was working for World Neighbors, who sponsored major annual fundraisers called World Neighbors Fests. Linda oversaw three of those, in which thousands of dollars of fair trade products were sold. That led to starting PAMBE Ghana’s Global Market, a seasonal, volunteer-staffed brick and mortar store benefitting the PAMBE Ghana Montessori School in Lambussie, Ghana. What Linda has shown us all along is that working in a group can accomplish far more than working alone, an important lesson. Her remarkable dedication and stamina have given her two parallel lives: one, her paid work life that included health care, international development work, and finally as a dispenser of knowledge by being a librarian, and two, ongoing volunteer work to support artisans world-wide through providing them with a market. (And third, by the way, raising a family.)
To learn more about Linda and her work, you can read about her on the Pambe Ghana website under Blog/Our Volunteers and /global-market/ (which includes a video), on the WARP website under A History of WARP, and, of course, by reading through the past 100 issues of the newsletter. As part of WARP’s celebration of Linda when she retired from producing the newsletter in 2024, we created a special issue just for Linda, all about Linda. You can read it here: 12 pages filled with letters from members who have known her over the decades. Highly recommended, it is an inspiring read.
“By their fruits you shall know them.” Linda’s life has borne a cornucopia of good fruit by which we know her, and WARP is thrilled to be able to give her its highest honor, the Community Leadership Award for a lifetime of service to a wide community. Thank you, Linda.
Linda Temple & Judi Jetson at WARP’s 2018 Annual Meeting
Linda Temple, Tom Temple, and Debbie Durham in 2022
We thank Deborah Chandler, Linda’s friend of more than 40 years and a fellow founding member of WARP, for writing this tribute.