The Park City Community Foundation surprised Sydney Reed during its annual community grants celebration Tuesday night at Deer Valley’s Snow Park Lodge.

Reed was named the recipient of the 2023 Trisha J. Worthington Community Service Award, which is given to a member of the community who has donated time and talent to “charitable and community endeavors,” according to the award’s criteria.

“I’m overwhelmed,” said Reed, a former board member of the Park City Community Foundation. “I think this award came to me because I’m old and was involved in a lot of things. And all of those things put me in line to be a candidate. But there are a lot of people in town who have done as much as I have.”

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The award has special meaning for Reed, because she was on the committee that established it.

“I was instrumental in creating the criteria,” she said. “So, I’m very flattered, because I never thought I would qualify for such a honor.”

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The award was named after Park City Community Foundation’s founder and former executive, Trisha J. Worthington.

“Trisha had the job of creating the Park City Community Foundation at the time, and she put together the structure with which it is governed right now,” Reed said. 

Worthington set up the forums that the Park City Community Foundation uses to work with nonprofits, executive directors and board members, and she also taught them all how to fundraise. She also helped donors match their passions to these nonprofits, according to Reed.

“We wanted to honor that, so when Trisha left the Community Foundation, we established this award in her honor,” she said. 

Past award winners include Beano Solomon, for her contributions of time and talent to charitable and community endeavors; Richard and Jill Sheinberg, for their service as advocates, board members and volunteers to many organizations in greater Park City; and Ellen Silver, former executive director of Jewish Family Service, for her work to ensure residents who lost their jobs and were significantly impacted by COVID-19 continued to have the resources to remain in their homes and feed their families.

Reed said working with nonprofits is “fun.”

“I like it because if there was a need in town, usually people would try to fulfill those needs and they would form a group, and the next thing you know they would start a nonprofit,” she said. “The nonprofit would then gain momentum, and become an integral part of the community.”

A case point is the Park City Museum, which was established in 1984, although its umbrella organization, the Park City Historical Society, was formed in the 1970s, Reed said.

“My friend Marianne Cone became the director after it was started with Tina Lewis, Pat Smith and lots of people, including the Park City Rugby Club,” she said. “Everybody jumped on, and Marianne asked me to do some education for the museum.”

Reed took the offer.

“I used to be a teacher, but retired to raise a family,” she said. “So I was anxious to get out of the house.”

Reed created a curriculum for the museum’s new exhibits that would be put together every year, and created an education component which would be presented to local students in the second, fourth and eighth grades. 

“We did a lot of tours, and I trained docents on the educational stuff,” she said. “We also went to conferences, and people were amazed at what we did. We then realized we were doing the same thing big museums were doing.”

When the Olympics came to Park City in 2002, the Park City Historical Society noticed it wasn’t reaching as many people as it could in the community, according to Reed.

“So we all got together and raised $9 million to extend the museum,” she said.

In addition to the Park City Museum, Reed has worked with the Kimball Art Center, KPCW radio station, where she also hosted a cooking show, and the Egyptian Theater.

“I’m now involved with the Park City Senior Center,” she said. “When we thought it was going to be shuffled off to the PC MARC (Park City Municipal Athletic & Recreation Center) or the Christian Center, people in town got their feathers up a little. We worked to keep it, because we remembered what it was like to first get the Senior Center in 1976.”

The award also included a $1,000 grant that Reed will donate to the Park City Senior Center.

“As I was leaving, someone said a thousand dollars came with the award, and I wondered how I would go about doing that,” she said with a laugh. “I guess I better call the center to let them know it’s coming.”

In addition to naming Reed as the Trisha J. Worthington Community Service Award, the Park City Community Foundation announced its Community Fund grants totaling $425,000 to support 53 nonprofits during the ceremony. Of that amount, $100,000 was contributed by Deer Valley Resort, according to a press release.

This year, the Park City Community Foundation has given out a total of $2.1 million in grants, and this most recent round of grants from its Community Fund is the largest.

For a list of grant recipients, visit tinyurl.com/48wby789.