Moving Forward Archive

In selecting Patricia Mason-Guillory for its 2017 Leaders in Philanthropy award, the Community Foundation of Acadiana is honoring a woman who has been active in St. Landry Parish civic affairs for more than three decades.

Her regular job is coordinator of Title I parent and family programs for the St. Landry Parish School Board, but her other passion has been to ensure that veterans and their families are recognized and properly cared for.

During Operation Desert Storm she organized a support group for mothers, such as herself, whose sons and daughters were deployed in Iraq, and redoubled her efforts after the Acadiana based 256th Combat Engineer Battalion was sent overseas. She played a substantial role in organizing the effort by the Mothers Against Saddam Hussein (MASH) in Opelousas to send some 500 care packages each week to local troops.

After Staff Sgt. Craig Davis of Opelousas was killed in a helicopter crash near Fallujah, Iraq, on January 8, 2004, Mason-Guillory asked the St. Landry Parish government to establish a memorial to the 24-year veteran who was the first casualty from the parish in the Iraq war.

Instead, the parish council urged her to take the lead in establishing a memorial to all parish veterans who had fallen in the line of duty. They asked the right woman.

It took ten years of appearances before any group that would listen to her, hundreds of hours of volunteer work, blood drives, brick sales, meetings with government and veterans’ officials, and plain perseverance, but on September 10, 2014, she and the committee she headed dedicated the St. Landry Parish 

Veterans Memorial on land donated by businessman and philanthropist Bobby Dupre.

The centerpiece is a bronze statue donated by the family of St. Landry entrepreneur Keith Myers; the plaza around it was funded through hundreds of small donations largely generated through Mason-Guillory’s persistence.

Since then she and the memorial committee have continued to work to maintain and beautify the 2.5-acre site and to host gatherings of veterans and their families. She also prevailed upon the Louisiana legislature to name a three-mile stretch of La. Hwy. 182 in front of the memorial the St. Landry Parish Veterans Memorial Highway.

She envisions a museum on the memorial grounds that will become a repository for the memorabilia of veterans and their families.

In 2015, Mason-Guillory was the regional winner of the Jefferson Award created by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and others to recognize “unsung heroes” across the United States.

In accepting that award she said she was grateful that the work of the many people who helped her “did not go unnoticed.”

“I’m accepting this award on behalf of all the people who have been there for me all these years,” she said then. “I’m nothing without the people who supported me.”

That may be so, but when Mason-Guillory’s volunteer work was recognized by the Women’s Leadership Council of the St. Landry-Evangeline United Way, it was pointed out that she is “a woman who does not have ‘no’ in her vocabulary.”