SHAWNEE, Ohio — Athens County resident Sarah Adkins was among seven Appalachian Ohioans honored as 2026 Jenco Award recipients during an Oct. 8 ceremony at the Tecumseh Theater in Shawnee, hosted by the Jenco Foundation and the Foundation for Appalachian Ohio.
The Jenco Awards recognize people across Appalachian Ohio’s 32 counties who perform noteworthy community service outside their paid positions. Recipients are nominated by fellow community members, and organizers say the honorees show the difference everyday people can make when they give their time, talent and passion to serve their neighbors.
Adkins, a Southeast Ohio native and pharmacist, was honored as the founder and driving force behind Rising Suns Non-Profit Pharmacy. She opened the pharmacy in 2021 to provide free, life-sustaining medications to uninsured and underinsured residents across Athens, Hocking, Meigs, Morgan, Perry, Vinton and Washington counties.
Over five years of operation, Rising Suns served more than 1,000 patients and provided more than $8 million in medication savings. The pharmacy operated almost entirely on grants, donations and volunteers, removing cost as a barrier to essential care and helping patients get the medications they needed when they needed them.
The 2026 ceremony carried extra weight for the program, marking 15 years of partnership between the Jenco Foundation and the Foundation for Appalachian Ohio and pushing the total number of honorees past 100. “This is a significant moment in our partnership and dedication to carrying forward the legacy of Father Lawrence Martin Jenco,” said Michelle Shively MacIver, a Jenco Foundation committee member. “Behind these more than 100 Jenco Award recipients are thousands of acts of kindness, courage and selflessness by people who saw a need in their communities and decided they could make a difference.”
Adkins shared the honor with Lisa Carroll of Gallia County, founder of God’s Hands At Work; Perry County Judge Luann Cooperrider; Stephanie Laube of Guernsey County, co-founder of the Samaritan Center; and Sandra Landis, Skip Ricketts and John Winnenberg, the visionaries behind the 50-year restoration of the Tecumseh Theater itself, which celebrated its grand reopening in June 2026 before hosting this year’s ceremony.
The awards uphold the legacy of Father Lawrence Martin Jenco, a Roman Catholic priest who continued serving others even during 19 months of captivity in Lebanon in the 1980s. His friend, journalist Terry Anderson, founded the Jenco Foundation in 2001, and the foundation joined FAO as an endowment in 2011. More information about the Jenco Awards and the Foundation for Appalachian Ohio is available at AppalachianOhio.org.
Photo: Keith DeBard, CC BY-SA 4.0