Pathways Conference

2025 Pathways Conference Honors Top Volunteers

As a volunteer-powered organization, the Arthritis Foundation is guided by our strong community of patients and volunteers. Each of them is critical in driving the organization’s mission, priorities and research. This year’s award winners were recently honored at our annual Pathways Conference, held in the Chicago area.

On March 28, 2025, the Arthritis Foundation named the recipients of the 2024 Charles B. Harding Award for Distinguished Service and the 2024-2025 Champion Awards, which honor excellence in volunteer leadership. Other key milestones achieved throughout last year were also recognized.

Each year, these awards are presented to volunteers who demonstrate their unwavering commitment to the organization’s mission to conquer arthritis. The selection process is made at the national level.

“We believe in the power of individuals to make a difference, and our national awards recognize those exceptional individuals who consistently demonstrate outstanding leadership and dedication to our mission in their own way,” says Arthritis Foundation President and CEO Steven Taylor.

Charles B. Harding Award for Distinguished Service to Helen Emery, MD

The Charles B. Harding Award for Distinguished Service is the highest level of national volunteer recognition from the Arthritis Foundation. The award was established in 1976 in honor of one of the Foundation’s most well-known chairs, a nationally regarded philanthropist.

Helen Emery, MD, was the deserving Harding Award honoree at this year’s conference. A native of Australia, Dr. Emery has been a fixture at the Arthritis Foundation since 1980 — back when she was establishing herself as one of the world’s very first specially-trained pediatric rheumatologists.

For five decades, Helen has poured her heart and soul into navigating the world of juvenile arthritis (JA) and other childhood rheumatic diseases. Starting at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), then going to Seattle Children’s Hospital, Helen touched lives everywhere she went. She has trained at least 20 newer-generation pedia rheums — multiplying her own power by twenty!

Helen was key to launching the Arthritis Foundation’s popular JA camp: KAT-FISH Camp in Washington State. She has helped shape our JA Family Summit every year since it began in 1984. Representing the Foundation, Helen’s long involvement with CARRA — the Childhood Arthritis Rheumatology and Research Alliance — has been remarkable. She has served on the Foundation’s local leadership board in Seattle and on our national board of directors.

Helen is an amazing role model, a staunch advocate for children with arthritis and someone who is a blessing to so many families. On top of everything else, she has been a major supporter of the Arthritis Foundation’s Great West Bone Bash since it first started; Helen’s “Shrimp on the Barbie” donation, a feast that’s auctioned off as a fundraiser at that gala, is legendary.

It’s no wonder Dr. Helen Emery was our choice to receive the 2024 Harding Award for Distinguished Service. Congratulations, Dr. Emery!

Champion Awards

The Arthritis Foundation’s Champion Awards are given to individual volunteers or volunteer groups. These volunteers lead fundraising efforts, build partnerships and champion arthritis-related activities within their community. This year, there were four deserving winners of the Champion Awards.  

Dr. Tonya Horton, a career educator and nonprofit executive, is a dedicated Arthritis Foundation volunteer and passionate advocate, balancing leadership roles locally in her home state of New Jersey and nationally. Dr. Horton shares her experience living with osteoarthritis and uses her platform to advocate for addressing health disparities, particularly the inequities she has observed as a Black woman during her own health journey. Deeply involved in the Foundation for many years, Dr. Horton is the incoming chair of the New Jersey Local Leadership Board. On the national stage, Dr. Horton serves as the national Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Chair, a member of the national Patient Perspectives Panel and a Board of Directors member.

 

Phil Angelo, of Illinois, has been involved with the Kankakee Jingle Bell Run since its earliest days in 1990, and has chaired the event for more than 15 years. Despite personal challenges, including his wife’s joint replacement and another surgery, Angelo’s dedication to the Arthritis Foundation and the Kankakee Jingle Bell Run remains unwavering, making a lasting impact on the event and the community. As a former journalist and editor, Angelo uses his local connections to promote the event in the press and across the community.


 

Cristina Schaefer, of Houston, has been an integral part of the Arthritis Foundation for over 15 years, serving as a leader, fundraiser, advocate and volunteer at both local and national levels. As Chair of the Houston Local Leadership Board Chair, she mentors staff, volunteers, fundraisers and team captains while leading her Walk to Cure Arthritis and Jingle Bell Run team, No Rheum for Pain. Through her efforts, including contributions to the local Bone Bash event, Schaefer has raised over $50,000 for the Foundation’s mission.


 

Tim Clepper, of California, has been a dedicated leader and top fundraiser for the California Coast Classic Bike Tour since 2001. Each year, he devotes hundreds of hours preparing, co-chairing the leadership committee and personally training for the 525-mile ride with Team San Diego. As a Navy veteran and a psoriatic arthritis patient, Clepper is persistent in crushing a high fundraising goal each year, raising over $15,000 annually and surpassing $20,000 in 2024.


 

Pamela Massey Patient Partners Award

The Pamela Massey Patient Partners Award honors a health care provider and/or allied health professional who has demonstrated a deep commitment to improving patient lives in their clinical practice and in the mission delivery work of the Arthritis Foundation.

At Pathways 2025, this award was presented to Karena Wu, PT, DPT, OCS, COMT, CSCS, CKTP, CPI, FAAOMPT. As an individual with osteoarthritis and as a health care provider who works with clients with arthritis, Dr. Wu’s understanding of the condition makes her a strong patient advocate. She volunteers her time in fundraising and advocacy for this important cause. Dr. Wu is now Chairman of the New York City Arthritis Foundation Local Leadership Board.

Lee C. Howley Senior & Junior Prizes for Arthritis Research

Honoring physician-scientists is a longstanding Arthritis Foundation tradition. At our 2025 Pathways Conference, the Arthritis Foundation presented the Lee C. Howley Senior Prize for Arthritis Scientific Research ($10,000) to Kurt P. Spindler, MD, and the Lee C. Howley Junior Prize for Early Career Investigators in Arthritis Research ($5,000) to Candace Feldman, MD, MPH, ScD. Both were honored not only for their significant arthritis-related research but also their exceptional commitment to volunteer work.
 

Dr. Kurt P. Spindler is the Associate Chief, Clinical Research, Cleveland Clinic Enterprise and Professor of Orthopaedics, Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine at Case Western. He is the founder of the Multi-center Orthopaedic Outcomes Network (MOON), an evidence-based medicine effort supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Through his work with MOON to identify the risk factors for posttraumatic osteoarthritis (PTOA) after knee ACL injury, Dr. Spindler has engaged with the Arthritis Foundation in think tanks, research strategy committees and in clinical studies networks. He also serves on the executive committees for the Foundation’s PIKASO Trial and the ongoing Osteoarthritis Prevention (TOPS) Trial.

Dr. Candace Feldman is Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Associate Physician, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Division of Rheumatology, Inflammation and Immunity. She is dedicated to conducting health equity research, improving care delivery for patients with complex, chronic diseases and social risk factors, and growing the rheumatology workforce to serve disparate patient communities. Dr. Feldman currently leads a multisite grant from the Arthritis Foundation to build a national academy to advance and enrich workforce diversity in rheumatology, and she serves on the Arthritis Foundation DEI Task Force.