Ermyn King, project associate in the Office of the Dean of the College of Agricultural Sciences, will receive the Barash Award for Human Service.

The award, created in 1975 by the family of the late Sy Barash, recognizes a full-time member of the Penn State faculty, staff or student body at University Park who has contributed most, apart from assigned duties, to human causes or public service activities in the Centre Region or the University Park campus.  Barash, a Penn State graduate, was a State College, Pa., businessman who was committed to humanitarian causes on and off campus.

King is honored for her leadership in the creation and delivery of innovative arts education outreach programs for diverse audiences in a variety of university and community settings. The first notable project is "View Via Headphones," an audio description service offering live verbal description of the visual elements of university and local cultural events free-of-charge to all area residents with sight loss.  King wears many hats as co-founder, co-director, grant writer, audio describer and art tour leader, working in collaboration with The Sight-Loss Support Group of Central Pennsylvania  and other University and community partners. In its inaugural year, the service offered audio description to 346 users for 45 cultural events.

The "View Via Headphones" service has been honored through the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts' "Keystones of Accessibility" program. Named Volunteer of the Year in 2000 by The Sight-Loss Support Group, King has made presentations on accessible arts for museums, schools, arts educators, and national arts organizations

A second major project is The CARESS (“Creative Arts Rejuvenating and Empowering Survivors and Soul Friends") arts and healing program. King designed and served as an arts facilitator and artistic director for the program, which brought together breast cancer patients/survivors and caregivers in an arts immersion weekend supported through the Northern Appalachia Leadership Initiative on Cancer (NALIC) and Penn State Outreach And Cooperative Extension.

Herself a recent breast cancer patient, King helped to coordinate a six-month reunion of CARESS participants, and has presented the CARESS model of arts in healing at Hershey Medical Center and to national organizations.

"In each of her endeavors, Ermyn commits nearly full-time efforts outside of her own full-time position at Penn State," said her colleagues. "Her commitment to sharing the arts with the sight-impaired, with cancer survivors, and with anyone who might benefit from such an experience is exceptional."

King, who joined the University in 1995, graduated as College Of Education Marshal with a B.S. in elementary and kindergarten education from Penn State and earned an M.A. in speech and dramatic arts-drama for the young from Eastern Michigan University.