LYSA Salsbury (nee Haskell), a former resident of Farringdon and pupil at The Butts Primary School and St Swithun’s School in Winchester, has been awarded the Rosa Parks Human Rights Achievement Award in her home community of Moscow, in the Pacific north-western state of Idaho in the United States.
The award recipient was born in Portsmouth in August 1969 and is the daughter of the late Keith Haskell, former British Ambassador to Peru and Brasil, and Luisa Tito de Morais Haskell. The family moved to Alton in 1975 and then to Farringdon in 1979.
After taking her A-Levels, Lysa took a gap year and travelled throughout southern Asia, where she met Tom Salsbury, an American citizen also travelling in the area. After earning her degree in modern languages at the University of Leeds in 1993, she and Tom were married at Chawton Parish Church.
Lysa emigrated to the United States shortly after the wedding, has lived in Moscow since 2005, and works at the University of Idaho as the director of the institution’s women’s centre. In her work, she leads campus initiatives and educational outreach efforts around gender equity, anti-bias, structural oppression, identity-based discrimination, and power-based personal violence.
She is also active with the Moscow Women’s Giving Circle and Dining for Women, two philanthropy groups for women – one local, one national, and volunteers extensively with a number of university and community organisations that pursue social justice advocacy.
The Rosa Parks Human Rights Achievement Award is the highest community honour bestowed in the region and is awarded by the Latah County Human Rights Task Force to recognise individuals with a history of commitment and achievement in the field of human rights.
The award is named for Rosa Parks, an African-American activist whose courageous action in refusing to give up her seat on a bus in segregated Alabama in the mid-1950s is widely credited with launching the American civil rights movement.
Lysa and Tom have two teenage children, Maya and Luke. Lysa was naturalised last year, and now has dual American and UK citizenship.