A Sacred Interruption: Robin Scott Receives UW–Green Bay Chancellor’s Community Service Award

This week, our Founder and Executive Director, Robin Scott, received the Chancellor’s Community Service Award from UW–Green Bay—an honor that recognizes visionary leaders whose service has created deep and lasting impact across the region.

The award was presented by Chancellor Michael Alexander, but it quickly became clear that the spotlight didn’t belong to Robin alone. As she took the stage, she carried with her the weight of generations—daughters and sisters, teen mothers and survivors, elders and children who had been overlooked, unprotected, and unheard. Her voice didn’t waver as she wove together personal story and collective memory, offering the kind of truth that lands in your chest and doesn’t leave.

Robin spoke of family bus rides to treatment centers, a sibling with cancer, and how addiction ran through the bloodline. She spoke of silence where protection should have been, and how Black girls are too often labeled “fast” instead of recognized as neglected and in need of care. She named the legacy of systems that abandon and punish—foster care, incarceration, criminalization—and how love for her people never stopped, even when the world tried to strip it away.

From that place of grief and clarity, she made a choice: to build what didn’t yet exist. To birth a community-rooted institution that would not simply offer services, but deliver healing. Deliver justice. Deliver a place where survival is loved, not judged.

“We are not a service provider—we are a sacred interruption.”

Under Robin’s leadership, We All Rise has become exactly that: a sacred interruption in a world that too often moves on without us. Today, our organization serves over 3,000 individuals annually—people navigating homelessness, domestic violence, incarceration, family separation, and systemic neglect. And yet, Robin was clear: those numbers don’t tell the full story. These are not data points—they are people. Families. Elders. Survivors.

This work, she said, is not theoretical. It is urgent. It is hers. And while she was raised in Chicago, she called Green Bay home—naming UW–Green Bay as part of her roots, her legacy, and her becoming.

She ended the evening with deep gratitude—for the educators, administrators, and neighbors who dared to believe in what was possible. And for the staff and supporters who walk beside her every day as she builds the world our people have always deserved.

📽️ Watch the award presentation here: https://youtu.be/VgOurMa2XWM

📸 Swipe through to see moments from this powerful evening.