Nonprofit leader to receive Humanitarian Award

Andrea Bishop has become the 37th person to be chosen for the annual Humanitarian Award.

Bishop, executive director of the Betty and Bobby Allison Ozarks Counseling Center, is scheduled to be recognized with the award on Nov. 15 during the Association of Fundraising Professionals–Ozark Region Chapter’s National Philanthropy Day celebration at White River Conference Center, according to a news release. The Humanitarian Award is a partnership between Community Foundation of the Ozarks Inc. and the Springfield Area Chamber of Commerce.

The Humanitarian Award honors people in the community for excelling at serving others. The chamber organizes a committee to review nominations and select the annual recipient, and the winner receives a $5,000 cash award that typically is donated to charity.

The OCC's director since 2011, Bishop leads an organization that provides mental health counseling services to people regardless of their ability to pay. Those who nominated her for the award cited Bishop's fiscal stewardship and working for a lower salary than she would receive in the private sector in order to help clients, according to the release.

Bishop, who was part of Springfield Business Journal's 2020 Most Influential Women class, has an MBA, and prior to earning her clinical psychology degree, she taught business and economics classes at Drury University.

“A first-time nonprofit director, I adopted a ‘yes’ attitude to our staff and board members," she said in her Most Influential Woman profile. "It turns out, if you encourage the people you work with to share their ideas and try as hard as you can to make those ideas work, success for the whole organization follows. By both getting out of everyone’s way and supporting their initiatives, we pulled together as a team and had the financial condition of the organization completely turned around within two and a half years.”