She has continued to make marks: Founding Director of the National Rural Fellows program from 1977 to 1983; Founding President of the Rural Development Leadership Network since 1983; Board member of the Rural Coalition; consultant to organizations such as the Ford Foundation; Evaluator for the New York Community Development Administration; volunteer organizer for the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee in Stockton, California—the list continues. She is also the author of The Whole Works: The Autobiography of a Young American Couple, the life story of a farm worker couple living in a migrant camp in California. And she organized a delegation of rural women to the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing.

Clearly, there is a powerful theme here: support for rural community development. The Rural Development Leadership Network trains community leaders and offers networking opportunities. Projects it supports include minority land acquisition, housing, farmworker empowerment, minority business development, and craft cooperatives. Graduates of the program have been awarded MacArthur and Kellogg Fellowships, given appointments at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, and held state and local government office.

In the 1955 Shipley yearbook, the quotation next to Starry’s photo was, “All good things of the heart and of the head has she. She will go far, this little girl.” She has, indeed, gone far, and has taken many others with her. For this, we give her Shipley’s 2005 Distinguished Alumna Award.