By Chanda Temple | birminghamal.gov
Since 2019, the City of Birmingham has marked March—Women’s History Month—by spotlighting local women making a meaningful impact through its #StrongHer campaign.
Through the years, the initiative has showcased the achievements and contributions of teachers, students, neighborhood leaders, health care professionals, entrepreneurs and more – all to reflect the strength of women in Birmingham.
This year, the city is turning its focus to a special “Golden Girls” edition, celebrating women over 60 whose contributions continue to shape and strengthen the community.
Here are the stories of nine of the women featured this year. For a full listing of this year’s and past honorees, visit www.birminghamal.gov/strongher.
She taught Ruben Studdard and hundreds of others. At 67, Jerrie Foster is Still Shaping Young Lives
Every morning, Jerrie Foster rises at 3 or 4 a.m. for her quiet time with the Lord.
It sets the perfect tone for the day as she sets out to tutor children three times a week at Hawkins Rec Center as part of Park and Rec’s Safe Haven program and work on her weekly morning prayer ministry with First Baptist Church of Ensley.
“The most important things are the children, my prayer ministry and just giving back,” Jerrie said. “I want to give back because the Lord has blessed me in so many ways.”
At 67, Jerrie has built a retirement life that looks nothing like slowing down. In fact, it’s so amped up that she calls it a “rewired” way of living.
She’s heavily involved at the Northeast YMCA, where she’s served on the board, tutors children about reading and attends the Y’s Silver Sneakers exercise program three times a week. Just last month, she joined others in working on some of the Habitat for Humanity homes on the Northeast YMCA property. She is also a member of the Birmingham Alumnae chapter of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc., through which she is currently registering 18-year-old voters for elections. And through the national education sorority of Phi Delta Kappa, Sorority, Inc., Nu Chapter, she visits Birmingham and Jefferson County schools to read to children.
Jerrie spent more than 30 years working for Birmingham City Schools, including 17 years at Smith Middle School, where she taught reading, language arts and drama. She was the kind of teacher students never forgot. Every morning, as students entered her classroom, she had them recite a class motto.
It went like this: “Do the very best you can. Never be a halfway man. Even though the task is light, work at it with all your might. Every hour throughout the day, do your best in every way. And when you have a task to do, never fail to see it through.”
Decades later, former students tell her they remember the motto and the impact she made on their lives. One of those students was 2003 American Idol winner Ruben Studdard, who has publicly praised Jerrie.
In an interview after American Idol, Ruben said he was thankful for Jerrie for encouraging him to take drama. The experience helped with his confidence on stage.
“I want all of our children in our city to be successful,” said Jerrie, a married mother and grandmother living in Birmingham’s Killough Springs community. “I just want to motivate them to know that they can excel and be anything that they want in life. All you have to do is pray, put your mind to it and do your best.”
She Cares for Her Mother with Dementia and Her Granddaughter. Birmingham’s Aakre Sims Calls It Purpose.
Aakre Sims always envisioned that one day she and her mother would travel together, like two old girlfriends, with all the time in the world to get there.
Dementia changed that timeline. But it did not change Aakre’s dream.
Aakre’s mother, now 83, was diagnosed with dementia in 2019. Aakre’s grandfather had it too, so when the signs appeared, Aakre recognized them and began preparing herself for what was ahead. In 2025, her mother moved in with her, and life as Aakre knew it shifted into something that required more patience, more prayer, and more grace than most people will ever be asked to give.
She also helps care for her seven-year-old granddaughter so that her daughter, a nurse, can work at night.
“So, I’ve got my hands pretty full,” Aakre said with a laugh that carries more love than exhaustion in it.
A typical morning for Aakre, 62, starts early. She gets her granddaughter ready for school, gets her mother together, drops her granddaughter off at school, drops her mother off at a center, and then heads to her job with the City of Birmingham, where she works as a zoning planner in the Department of Planning, Engineering and Permits. She remains ready to greet every person who walks through the door with warmth and a willingness to help. She has a particular soft spot for older residents who come to the counter a little confused or overwhelmed concerning zoning issues.
“I always want to help people, especially the elderly citizens,” Aakre said. “I want to make it a smooth transition.”
It is not lost on her that when she goes home every evening, she does the same thing in helping her mother.
Her mother is a retired U.S. Army veteran who was a strong, independent woman working to support the family. But last year, when her mother showed signs she could no longer stay by herself, Aakre became her full-time caretaker.
Later this year, Aakre plans to keep that personal promise of travel with her mom. She and her family are planning a Disney cruise. Her mother may not remember every detail of the trip, but Aakre wants her there so she can say she went.
“It’s not the end of our story,” she said.
She Watched Friends Die and Decided to Fight Back. Meet Birmingham’s Kathie Hiers of AIDS Alabama.
When Kathie Hiers believes something needs to change, she stays on it until it does.
For more than 30 years, the Alabama native has been a persistent and passionate HIV advocate. Twenty-four of those years have been spent leading AIDS Alabama in Birmingham, which serves more than 16,000 clients across all 67 Alabama counties.
She did not plan any of this.
Growing up, Kathie thought she would be an attorney or politician. She was studying at the University of South Alabama in the mid-1980s when people started getting sick and disappearing. “I literally saw people one day, and then you wouldn’t see them again,’’ she said. “You’d ask where they were, and they had died. It was just an awful, awful time.’’
Then she lost her best friend from high school.
He was a talented musician who came home for Christmas in late 1995. Kathie went to pick him up at the airport and did not recognize him. He was thin and in a wheelchair. It was clear he was dying. He passed in February 1996, just two months before life-saving HIV medications became available.
In 1995, she went full-time as an HIV advocate, starting a nonprofit in Mobile to help people with AIDS. When the top HIV job at AIDS Alabama in Birmingham opened, she applied and got it. She moved to Birmingham and started on Jan. 2, 2002, walking in with fire that has never gone out.
While working, Kathie learned that Alabama was getting cheated out of federal dollars meant to help people living with HIV. The way the Ryan White CARE Act was written at the time, large cities with high numbers of deceased HIV cases received twice as much funding per person as states like Alabama, even as the epidemic moved to the South. Over 1,000 Alabamians sat on a waiting list for life-saving medications. Ninety percent of them were minorities.
Kathie helped found the Southern AIDS Coalition in 2003, bringing 16 states together to fight for a fairer formula. Their efforts made national television. They wrote manifestos and editorials. They went to Washington over and over again. In 2006, after years of fighting, the Ryan White law was changed. Alabama’s waiting list was cleared and $4 million in new funding came into the state that first year.
On July 1, 2026, Kathie will retire as CEO of AIDS Alabama. She will be 72 in October. She would like to spend more time with her mother, who is 93. She’d also like to travel. But do not mistake retirement for retreat.
“I love this work,’’ she said. “I feel like I’ve made a difference, and I will continue to make a difference. Like I said, I won’t give up completely.’’
She Lost Her Job to AI at 63. What Birmingham’s Wilhelmina Thomas Did Next Changed Everything
Wilhelmina Thomas lost her data entry banking job to artificial intelligence in November 2023. She was 63 years old and not ready to retire. So, she spent the next nine months applying for other jobs. Not a single call came back.
What came instead was more time. And Wilhelmina knew exactly what to do with it.
She had already been volunteering at Bib & Tucker Sew-Op, a non-profit Birmingham organization that teaches middle and high school students how to upcycle clothing and compete in the annual Recycled Runway fashion show. After the layoff, she simply showed up more. More hours. More ideas. More of herself poured into young people, helping them use their hands to turn their dreams into realities.
Wilhelmina knows how to make things happen because she has been sewing since the second or third grade. She grew up in the Riley-Travellick neighborhood of Birmingham, where her mother, who did men’s alterations for Parisian, taught her everything about sewing. That early education never left her.
Bib & Tucker is just one thread in a much larger tapestry for Wilhelmina.
Every first Thursday at 1 p.m. at the East Ensley Library, Wilhelmina teaches senior citizens embroidery stitches and how to put together quilt squares. Since 2004, she has volunteered as a docent at Sloss Furnaces, and since 2007, she has given tours at Oak Hill Cemetery, the city’s first cemetery. In 2020, she started working with the Birmingham Historical Touring Company to give the civil rights movement walking tours in downtown Birmingham.
She also gives walking tours of Enon Ridge, where there’s an African American cemetery dating back to 1890, located at Third Avenue and 12th Street North. In 2025, Wilhelmina founded the non-profit Masonton to establish perpetual care for the cemetery, where R.A. Blount, the grand chancellor of the Knights of Pythias of Alabama, and printer John Tuggle, husband of Tuggle Elementary School namesake Carrie A. Tuggle, are buried.
“This is where the African American founding fathers of Birmingham are buried,” she said. “We need to preserve that history.”
Since losing that job in 2023, Wilhelmina, now 66, has not looked back. What is ahead of her is all that matters.
“I feel grace,” she said. “I hold myself to a standard of grace and not perfection. You do what you can to the best you can.”
Birmingham’s Antoinette Hill Jenkins Survived Breast Cancer Twice. Her Message Could Save Your Life
In the summer of 1995, Antoinette Jenkins Hitt turned 40, and she decided to do a lot of “firsts.’’
She took her first trip to Houston, went on her first cruise, and had her first mammogram. After having the mammogram in late October of that year, her doctor saw something unusual and ordered a biopsy.
When the results came back, Antoinette was told she had Stage 0 breast cancer. She opted for a radical mastectomy and had her right breast removed. Then, in 2008, a mammogram showed Antoinette had breast cancer in her left breast. Again, it was Stage 0, and again she had a radical mastectomy.
Her breast cancer journey prompted her to volunteer with the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure when it existed in Birmingham and encourage women to get mammograms. In 2012, she began participating in Breast Cancer Awareness Sunday, held on the fourth Sunday in October, at Woodland Park Church of Christ in Birmingham, where she worships.
“It was the church’s way of embracing [survivors], and we were able to tell our story and encourage others,’’ she said, adding that she distributes breast cancer awareness pamphlets to women, stressing that early detection is key in battling breast cancer.
Today, at the age of 70, Antoinnette said she feels pretty good, but she is fighting a battle of a different kind – chronic kidney disease. At one time, she weighed 308 pounds and had uncontrollable high blood pressure. She had weight loss surgery in 2001, but doctors did not discover the kidney issue until a follow-up appointment. In November 2025, she was placed on dialysis, which she does three days a week. She is now undergoing testing in Birmingham to see if she qualifies to become a kidney transplant candidate.
She said she does not let her situation keep her down because her faith in God and the support of her family keep her lifted.
‘‘I maintain my positivity because the dirt is not on me yet. I’m not lying in a coffin yet,’’ said Antoinette, who is a wife, mother, grandmother and great-grandmother. “Though it may be limited, I’m going to live my life to the fullest.’’
From Her Hospital Bed, Birmingham Caterer Kathy G. Mezrano Was Already Planning Her Next Chapter
Kathy G. Mezrano is always on a mission.
Whether she’s catering for hundreds, leading a project to raise money for a worthy cause or keeping fit, she works until the job is done. On Dec. 13, 2025, she was on her way to the YMCA. She was stopped at a traffic light when a big truck collided with her. The impact was so severe that Kathy suffered two crushed legs, nine broken ribs and stitches to her right forearm. At least four surgeries followed.
For many, all of that would have been enough to pull back and be still. But not Kathy, 82. She had other plans.
From her recovery bed, Kathy remained in contact with several people, including her son and trained chef, Jason, to finalize things for a new cafe they had planned to open at the Birmingham Museum of Art with a French-inspired menu. The last time Kathy G. & Company had operated a cafe there was in 2013, so returning was a big thing for Kathy and Jason.
Another person Kathy contacted was Chantal Drake, the museum’s deputy director. Via email or phone, Kathy discussed the new cafe logo, ordering aprons and T-shirts for the staff, and making sure fresh flowers would be in glass cut-bud vases on tables topped with white tablecloths.
“She did not sound like someone who was in the hospital with broken bones. She was just as energetic as she was prior to the accident and so motivated and determined to be back up and herself again,” said Chantal. “I think it has a lot to do with the passion for her work. She’s just a firecracker of a lady.”
Chantal added that the café, which opened in February 2026, has been extremely successful.
Kathy, who has been in the food industry for more than 40 years, said that pleasing people with food is in her blood. She’s big on presentation, wanting people to have an experience through taste and sight. Such attention to detail carries over into her fundraising efforts for organizations such as the Birmingham chapter of Les Dames d’Escoffier and the Community Food Bank of Alabama. She has also been involved in women-led efforts that give female entrepreneurs a bigger seat at the table.
Today, Kathy remains at a recovery center, full of hope as she takes each day one step at a time.
Birmingham Neighborhood Leader Dorothy Scott Has One Rule at 81. Keep Going
Catch Dorothy Scott if you can. Most mornings, she’s already gone.
Earlier this month, she was finalizing her plans to attend a three-day women’s retreat, thinking of her next neighborhood association meeting for Woodland Park, and working out an idea to do a new meal delivery route for homebound seniors in her community.
Dorothy is 81 years old. And she will be the first one to tell you she is just getting warmed up.
“I’m rocking and rolling, sugar,” she said, laughing. “The Bible doesn’t have retirement, does it, baby?”
Dorothy spent years working on sheet metal for airplanes at the former Hayes Aircraft in Birmingham before retiring. But sitting still was simply not for her. She served as a caregiver for a Birmingham family for 10 years and later remained active in the community.
Today, Dorothy serves as neighborhood president for Woodland Park, leads the senior group at New Pilgrim Baptist Church in Titusville, attends a Bible study on the Southside, visits the Titusville Library, serves on her church’s prayer team and waters the 60 plants at her church. She and a fellow church member are about to begin delivering meals to homebound seniors once a month.
“I want to do this to show people that I care. Most churches don’t reach out to our older people. They reach out to our younger people,” she said. “But our older people are the backbone… We need to be sharing our stories with (the younger generation) so we can have that connection there.”
Birmingham’s Gloria Vail Lost Her Only Child and Let Love Lead Her Back to Serving Others
In 2003, Gloria Vail retired from Birmingham City Schools after 30 years of service as a special education teacher and transition teacher coordinator.
Two years later, Gloria got back to working with young people by volunteering with the West End Optimist Club, which is dedicated to empowering youth and promoting education. She served in various leadership roles at the local and state levels. Impressed at what Gloria was doing, Gloria’s only child, Janee Vail, decided to join the West End Optimist Club, too.
The two attended their first district meeting together in August 2025 in Montgomery, where Janee saw how her mother impacted others on an even larger scale. Janee excitedly suggested that they both attend the Optimist International Convention in the summer of 2026. Gloria agreed.
But on Sept. 1, 2025, Janee, 56, passed unexpectedly.
Gloria grieved deeply over Janee’s passing, pulling back from several things, including volunteering three times a week at the A.G. Gaston Boys and Girls Club to mentor and tutor children and working with the West End Optimist Club. She also skipped organizations’ meetings she’d been attending for years.
But just this month, Gloria walked through the doors of the A.G. Gaston Boys and Girls Club with a renewed desire to continue to help.
“I missed the children,’’ Gloria, 74, admitted. “This is my opportunity to pay it forward, so I had to go back. I’ve got to do what I can do while I can still do it.’’
Gloria has also started returning to her book club meetings and attending her retired teachers’ meeting. “I had to feel my way back,’’ Gloria said.
“With my relatives here and in other cities, the help of my sisters from my Sunday School class, and with my going to free counseling, they have all allowed me to put things in their proper perspective,’’ Gloria said.
She still plans to attend the convention this summer, carrying the will to help others and Janee in her heart.
Birmingham’s Jerri Haslem Didn’t Choose Fitness. Fitness Chose Her. And Her Community Is Better for It
On a January morning in 2026, Jerri Haslem showed up to the MLK Day 5K Drum Run in Birmingham ready to do what she usually does. Work behind the scenes. Keep things moving. Make sure everybody else has their moment.
But this time, the moment found her.
Before the race started, organizers surprised Jerri with the MLK Day 5K Drum Run Fitness Award. She was stunned.
“It blew my mind,” she said. “They said, ‘You know what? You’ve been at it since Day One, and we thank you. You tell us about health, and you show up.”
Jerri is 62, a Birmingham native, a health educator, a certified fitness trainer, and the visionary behind Black People Run, Bike and Swim, which began in February 2011 in Birmingham. She has spent years motivating people to take their health seriously, especially in the Black community, where diabetes and high blood pressure hit hard.
She’s led free fitness classes in the past to help attendees address chronic health issues, and that will continue in April 2026 when she joins local partners to host a free outdoor cardio class in downtown Birmingham. The location will be announced soon.
Since 2020, she has led mindful movement classes with AARP Alabama, bringing chair-friendly workouts into people’s homes. And through the Run, Bike and Swim Foundation, she has helped turn races into community support. From 2011 to 2022, Black People Run, Bike, Swim hosted its “5K at The Junction” in Ensley. In 2022, she added a Thanksgiving run called “The Turkey Trot at the Junction.” In 2025, she moved “The Turkey Trot at the Junction” to the Birmingham CrossPlex.
Jerri has been running since she was 38. She has completed 62 half-marathons and wants to keep the number matched to her age as long as she can. Her goal is to do her 63rd half-marathon when she turns 63 this September.
“I work out seven days a week,” she said. “You have to keep your body and your mind moving.”
