Three Alumni Honored with Alpha Sigma Nu Magis Medals

This week, Jesuit honor society Alpha Sigma Nu is celebrating its centennial by welcoming more than 100 current members and advisors to Milwaukee for the organization’s Centennial Triennial Conference.

But throughout the year, Alpha Sigma Nu has been recognizing the outstanding contributions of its more than 74,000 members by selecting, each day, 100 ASN alumni who will receive Magis Medals. Among the recipients are three Rockhurst University alumni honored for their work as men and women for and with others: John Hornbeck, ’69, Mary Pimmel-Freeman, ’07, and Sister Rosemary Flanigan, C.S.J., ’82.

Hornbeck is the founder and chief storyteller at Nonprofits Helpdesk, consulting nonprofit organizations on how to best market their services and get their message out. He previously served as CEO of Episcopal Community Services, a network of hunger relief ministries serving more than a million meals annually, according to ASN, and has been a volunteer working to help the homeless and to relieve hunger for more than a quarter of a century.

Currently, Hornbeck serves as a board member for the Greater Kansas City Homeless Services Coalition, a steering member of the Greater Kansas City Food Policy Coalition and a founder of the new Hunger2Health Coalition, among other organizations.

Following graduation, Pimmel-Freeman followed her passion for social justice and her faith by serving with the Jesuit Volunteer Corps. Following the end of her assignment, Pimmel-Freeman founded an intentional community in Milwaukee and a community garden project for her local parish. Currently, she serves as the Urban Plunge and volunteer coordinator at Casa Romero, a community building organization that works primarily with Latino families in Milwaukee.

While at Rockhurst, Pimmel-Freeman completed a series of portraits for her honors thesis of the six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and their housekeeper’s daughter murdered in 1989 in El Salvador. Her images of the martyrs were shared widely during the 25th anniversary of the massacre. She has since also honored James Foley, the American journalist killed in August 2014 by terrorist group ISIS, with a similar portrait.

Sr. Flanigan graduated from Rockhurst in 1982, but her legacy of service for and with others extends much further back — she was among the Catholic clergy and sisters who marched with Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights advocates in Selma, Alabama, in 1965. For much of her career, Sr. Flanigan served in the classroom, teaching at nearly every level from elementary to college. Retiring after 17 years as a philosophy instructor at Rockhurst, Flanigan became a well-known expert in the field of ethics.

Flanigan has also been honored by the Kansas City Business Journal as a “Hero in Healthcare” for her work as a board member for the CSJ-sponsored Carondelet Health system and the Center for Practical Bioethics, focusing her advocacy on the issues of patients’ rights and providing health care for the poor.

To find out more about the Magis Medal winners, visit alphasigmanu.org.