Janice Butler wins League of Women Voters community service award

Janice Butler’s service now carries an official Union County stamp: the League of Women Voters of the Lewisburg Area gave her its 2025 Judy Anderson Community Service Award at its annual meeting on May 12 at Brasserie Louis. The recognition puts a local spotlight on the institutions Butler helped shape, from Bucknell University to public safety oversight and immigrant support.

The League said the Judy Anderson Community Service Award goes to a Union County individual or organization whose years of noteworthy contribution have made life better for the community. Butler fits that description across several fronts. Bucknell University identifies her as a former director of Civic Engagement and Service-Learning and a former director of the Women’s Resource Center, where she worked for 16 years in civic engagement and 14 years at the Women’s Resource Center before retiring. Bucknell’s Women’s Resource Center describes the office as a place of advocacy, support and safety for members of the campus community.

Her reach went beyond campus. Bucknell’s Engaged Bucknell Civic Action Plan lists Butler as a co-chair, and the university has an endowed Janice Butler Fund for Service-Learning that supports student service-learning opportunities. That kind of institutional footprint matters in Lewisburg, where college-community ties often shape volunteer pipelines, leadership development and how students connect to local needs.

Butler also served on the Buffalo Valley Regional Police Commission, adding a civilian voice to a public-safety structure that was created when Lewisburg and East Buffalo Township merged their police departments in 2011 or 2012, according to the Buffalo Valley Regional Police Department. The commission meets monthly in public and provides civilian supervision of the police chief, making it one of the county’s more direct avenues for public oversight.

Her community work extended to immigrant support as well. The League’s educational forum listing identified Butler as a volunteer with the Bucknell Institute for Lifelong Learning and as involved with Snyder Union Northumberland Immigrant Support. That places her in the overlap between education, civic engagement and local response to immigrant families, a space where much of Union County’s grassroots problem-solving takes place.

The League’s 2021 Judy Anderson Award went to Transitions of PA, showing the honor has long been reserved for sustained service rather than a single project. Butler’s award highlights the same pattern: in Lewisburg and across Union County, durable civic leadership still depends on a small circle of people willing to keep showing up, year after year.