Royce earned the Brookhaven Town honor for transforming lives through her work at Thee Island INN Soup Kitchen in Middle Island. She began volunteering at the soup kitchen in 1997 after the Lab’s annual United Way fundraiser posted a community service call to action. She spent years serving dinners and cleaning up at the soup kitchen, as well as expanded the soup kitchen services to help meet more of her guests’ needs by holding donation drives for clothing, coats, and even children’s school supplies. In 2004, her fellow volunteers urged her to assume the president position. In this role, Royce began overseeing the soup kitchen’s operations, fundraising efforts and grant writing/administration.

 

More recently, Royce strategically avoided the permanent closure of the soup kitchen after the building was unexpectedly sold. She secured a new facility and, with the help of her colleagues at Brookhaven Lab, the Middle Island Rotary Club, and her fellow soup kitchen volunteers, renovated an old building and was able to reopen in the new location after being closed for just one week.

 

Last year, the Middle Island Rotary Club named Royce the 2009 Paul Harris Fellow for her “Service Above Self” to the community.

 

In addition to being a community leader, Royce holds two degrees from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, a B.S. in Civil Engineering and a M.S. in Environmental Engineering. She is a licensed professional engineer in the State of New York. Royce joined Brookhaven Lab in 1980 year as a systems engineer III in Brookhaven Lab’s former Department of Applied Science and has since moved up through the ranks to her current position as the program manager for the Facility Management/Building Manager Program and Special Assistant to the Assistant Laboratory Director for Facilities and Operations.

 

Source: Brookhaven National Laboratory