Trustee Mitzi Perdue is NHM’s Newest Founding Supporter

A recent gift by NHM Trustee Mitzi Perdue has earned her recognition as NHM’s newest Founding Supporter.  Perdue, Chairman of the Development Committee of the NHM Board of Trustees, has contributed a cumulative $100,000 that has been used to support NHM’s educational programming, planning and development activities.

“Mitzi Perdue’s generous support for the National Health Museum manifests itself in a number of ways,” said NHM Chairman Louis W. Sullivan, MD.  “Her appreciation for the important synergies between museums and libraries has been very valuable to the project’s development.  She is a health advocate, first and foremost, who has made enormous contributions to helping improve the health and wellbeing of her fellow citizens.”

Perdue, who joined the NHM Board of Trustees in 2005, has undertaken multiple careers while pursuing an abundance of non-professional personal interests. Along with her late husband, Frank Perdue, she has been an active philanthropist. An artist and designer, she has also worked in software development, as a broadcast and print journalist, and as a national health advocate. A long-time supporter to the Library of Congress, she is also a Commissioner on the National Commission on Libraries and Information Science.

In 2002, working in conjunction with the State of Maryland's Health Department, Perdue created a program to serve that state's Eastern Shore. The program was in response to departmental studies showing that residents of three Lower Shore counties were at heightened risk for health problems. These residents smoke more, exercise less, eat fattier diets and are more obese than typical Americans. So far, 6,000 people in Somerset, Wicomico and Worcester counties have signed up for the program. Participants who can verify three trips a week to the gym or regularly participate in a "walking club" can apply for lottery drawings, which total about $1,200 a month in prizes.

The former owner of a rice farm and vineyard in California, she is a past President of the 35,000 member American Agri-women organization.  Perdue graduated cum laude from Harvard University and received a Masters in Public Administration from George Washington University. She was a US Delegate to the United Nations Conference on Women in Nairobi. She's also the author of The I Want to EggScapeTM Book, A Quick Guide To Successful Media Appearances, a biography of her late husband and six cookbooks, including The Farmers' Cookbook series and the Perdue Chicken Cookbook.

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