Uncrowned Community Builders

Born and raised in Anniston, Alabama, the young Trudy Louise Moses had no inkling where life would lead her when she left home for Florida A& M University. In the process of transforming from Trudy, the girl, to Trudy, the woman, she found herself even more keenly aware of injustice and inequality and became active in the Civil Rights Movement.

Her involvement in demonstrations and protests led to arrest and the terror of interrogation. But the liberated mind is unlikely to be silenced, and after graduation Trudy began to teach in the South. After marriage, Trudy Moses Munford found herself in Buffalo, New York (Up-South), armed with her diploma and a burning desire to continue reaching out to people and to make the world fairer and better.

She taught for the Buffalo Public Schools, then the Erie Community College Urban Center. She was part of the University of Buffalo's Educational Opportunity Center from the beginning. For several years she taught in the General Education Department, patiently leading her under-serviced adult students on an odyssey of self-discovery and self worth, through teaching and more. But her restless mind continued to spin in its search for ways to make a difference. She returned to school, earning a Master's degree in counseling from Canisius College.

She has been a staunch advocate for the rights of women and children, an innovator who nurtured programs in substance abuse counseling and peer tutoring, and a sensitive resource for human suffering from spousal or sexual abuse, economic deprivation, and unemployment or under-employment. Her sensitivity to all types of people and her willingness to know more have led her to travel extensively through Europe and Africa. But there is no place like home. She has discovered that America has everything she craves in peoples and cultures, right here. To date, she has visited thirty-seven states and plans to visit the remaining thirteen.

Civil rights activist, teacher, counselor, advocate, international and national traveler - Trudy Munford has squeezed two or three lifetimes into one, and she's only just begun.