When U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D - Massachusetts, ran for President in 2019, the podium she toured with had wood from Frances Perkins Homestead in Newcastle. “I love Frances Perkins,” Warren declared in a virtual garden party at francesperkinscenter.org Sunday night. Perkins summered at her ancestral homestead and became the first woman cabinet member, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s labor secretary.

Frances Perkins Center was honoring Warren with its Intelligence and Courage Award. Executive Director Michael Chaney called Warren a lifelong advocate for the American consumer. And in a February 2019 speech, Warren described Perkins as one very persistent woman, who pushed for minimum wage, unemployment insurance, the right to join a union, and abolition of child labor, Chaney said.

Warren told Sunday’s garden party, Perkins broke barriers. “(She) was a trailblazer (who) believed ... it was the responsibility of government to give everyone a fighting chance to build a life that they could be proud of.” This should inform “the ongoing fight for social justice,” she said.

Amid the pandemic, climate change and “a racial reckoning that has only just begun,” people can make paths for working families and tackle injustice, Warren continued. She said she was accepting the center’s award with honor and with a commitment to fighting “for the America Frances Perkins dreamed of ... where no matter who you are, where you come from, who you love or how you worship, you are safe, and opportunities look pretty much like everyone else’s.”

During the web event, the same award also went to author, columnist, Boston College professor and Mainer Heather Cox Richardson. She said Perkins, “the driving force behind so much of the New Deal,” translated her Midcoast upbringing – with a community of people helping one another survive – into her work “softening those sharp edges of urban America ... by finding pressure points and making the men who ran cities, for example, do what needed to be done to preserve the lives of people in those cities.”

Perkins’ significance is resurfacing as the idea of universal equality does, Richardson said. “I think Frances Perkins’ moment has come, and ... we get to write her story anew.”

The Open Door Award went to migrant child and now Mano en Mano interim executive director Juana Rodriguez Vazquez. She said language and discrimination can be challenges for people entering another culture. Mano en Mano holds events to share culture with the community migrants have entered, Vazquez said. It feels good for her to give back “the same way people gave to me when I was in need,” she said. 

Frances Perkins Center’s development director, Laura Chaney, told Wiscasset Newspaper 547 people from Europe and all around the U.S. registered for the free event, making it “a great outreach.” She noted the usual in-person, annual garden party has a 125-person limit.

According to the event and the website, the center bought the homestead, a National Historic Landmark, last year and is restoring it as an education center addressing social and economic issues. Donations from the event were to benefit the project. The center has received a $500,000 grant from National Park Service and $100,000 from the state. Learn more at francesperkinscenter.org