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Mary Coyne Receives American Cancer Society
Lifetime Achievement Award

AUSTIN, TX – Volunteers touch the lives of everyone, and Mary Coyne of Amarillo has touched many through her 27 years of volunteer service with the American Cancer Society. In recognition of her longstanding leadership and commitment to the organization, Coyne received the Society’s Lifetime Achievement Award at the organization’s volunteer appreciation event on Monday.

Presented annually, recipients of the award are volunteers of long tenure who have served as an inspirational and motivational force to other volunteers, as well as serving as an exemplar representative of the American Cancer Society.

In 1980, while working as a reporter at the Amarillo Globe-News, Mary was recruited to serve as the communications chair for the Amarillo Unit. A few years later, she accepted the Texas Division communications committee chair position to address awareness efforts throughout the state. She became a Texas division board member in 1992, and then served as a Texas delegate to the Society’s national assembly. Mary has continued her communications work since the 1980s working on many lifesaving awareness efforts such as the Texas Breast Screening Project, Great American Smokeout and Tobacco Free Amarillo.  In 1994-95, Coyne served her second term as the Amarillo Unit president. She is currently serving as the Society’s volunteer communications committee chair for the High Plains Division, serving a multi-state area that includes Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Hawaii and Missouri.

For the past two years, Mary has worked to raise colon cancer awareness among African Americans and Hispanic populations in Texas. The two groups share a higher than average incidence and mortality burden from the disease. As Senior Vice President for McCormick Company in Amarillo, Mary provided media buying guidance and demographic data to assist the Society in reaching millions of Texas men and women with the colon cancer screening messages. 

Mary’s passion to reduce smoking rates among youth in the Amarillo area has produced outstanding results. At the time the comprehensive campaign, Tobacco Free Amarillo, began in 2001, 48 percent of all Amarillo high school students had smoked at least one cigarette in the previous 30 days. Today, Amarillo’s teen smoking rate has fallen to 17 percent, well below the national average of 24.3 percent.

“Mary is one of those rare leaders who possess a broad range of skills required to help facilitate improvements in public health and motivate others to join in the cause,” said James Gray, Society government relations director for Texas. “Our organization is blessed to have her talents directed toward the fight against cancer. “

The American Cancer Society is the nationwide, community-based, voluntary health organization dedicated to eliminating cancer as a major health problem by preventing cancer, saving lives and diminishing suffering from cancer, through research, education, advocacy and service.

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