Neely Tal Snyder Community Impact Award

Mazel Tov to the 2026 Neely Tal Snyder Award Winner: Kathleen St. Villier Hill – Elijah Cummings Youth Program

This award honors the memory of Neely Tal Snyder by recognizing a professional with strong commitment and passion for Jewish community. The winner of this award demonstrates creativity, openness and inclusion and helps to build immersive and hands-on experiences/programs that have community impact.

Neely Snyder was a committed and passionate Jewish professional; she was able to connect, engage and inspire all who knew her and worked with her. Neely had a particular ability to create experiences, oftentimes immersive and hands-on, that helped build connections to self and to the larger community. She had a commitment to inclusion and openness that helped to define the community she wished to create. She was a risk-taker and launched new programs and ideas that bent the arc of the Jewish community toward justice, integrity and authenticity. Recipients of the Neely Tal Snyder Community Impact Award have been involved with programs/projects that speak to this advancement of the Jewish community and have demonstrated their ability to impact the community, either as an individual or through the specific program. Programs/projects that the nominee has worked on can demonstrate a new modality for the community in terms of service delivery, can serve an unmet need, can have a demonstrated level of impact or can continue to push the Jewish community toward openness and inclusion. Nominees should also share some of the attributes that Neely represented in her life and her profession.

Kathleen is a bridge – builder to the Jewish community in the deepest sense. She does the steady, ongoing work of bringing Black and Jewish leaders—adults and teens–into honest and sustained partnership, advancing the Jewish community through relationship, visibility, and shared civic responsibility.

As Executive Director of the Elijah Cummings Youth Program, a collaboration between the Baltimore Jewish Council and the late Congressman Elijah Cummings, Kathleen supports teens to become leaders who promote inter-ethnic, racial and religious understanding.

She travels to Israel, Eastern Europe and the American South with the ECYP teens as they explore their identity in connection and in partnership with the experience and history of the Jewish community. She helps young leaders ground their understanding in real encounters rather than assumptions.

Kathleen also co-facilitates Rekindle, a cohort that brings together Black, Jewish and Black Jewish leadership for sustained face to face dialogue. Kathleen leads this work with clarity and humility. She brings pride in her own identity into relationships and genuinely appreciates learning about the identities of others in service of building relationships and bettering humanity.

She shows up consistently for the Jewish community – in times of celebration and in moments of tension. Jewish leaders in Baltimore know her as a trusted partner and friend. Grounded in her belief that civil discourse and intercultural connection strengthen and empower all of us, Kathleen creates and sustains spaces where Jewish voices are included and heard in an increasingly complex and difficult landscape.

In honoring Kathleen, we honor a leader whose steady commitment is shaping a more connected future for both our communities.