L. Carole Wharton has been named as SCUP’s 2012 Distinguished Service Award recipient. Her commitment to SCUP and its members is remarkable for both its breadth and its quality.

The breadth is illustrated by listing her roles over the years including President, Planning Institute faculty, the Planning Advisory Board, the Campus Heritage Initiative, and ‘Washington liaison’.

The quality of her service is reflected in several characteristics: leadership, integration, content and leverage. Leadership is exemplified by her ability to identify member needs and then build fresh initiatives to address them and, importantly, to effectively form and guide teams that fulfill them.

Integrated planning is evidenced in both her own career and her service to SCUP members, addressing strategic planning, resource planning, and facility planning with equal and interrelated ease. Her matter-of-fact integration of institutional and corporate members in collegial pursuit of SCUP goals is outstanding.

The content of her efforts is strong and well targeted. She possesses unusual insight into a members’ need and is able to collaboratively shape and edit content to be effective and beneficial rather than exhaustive. In doing so, she often leverages outside resources to the benefit of SCUP. An example is the Campus Heritage Initiative in which she advanced the results of the Getty Campus Heritage project and did so with a grant from the Getty Foundation itself.

Her selection for this award presents a great illustration of what “distinguished service” means to SCUP.