Prize honors integrity, positive change in leaders

SALISBURY — Hancock Shaker Village has announced  the creation of the Robert G. Wilmers Integrity Prize, an annual award to recognize individuals who have exhibited exemplary integrity in leadership in social justice, art and architecture, design, conservation, community, music, agriculture, commerce, and other fields of endeavor.  

A $25,000 cash prize, to be awarded annually, is established in honor of the late Robert G. “Bob” Wilmers to recognize and celebrate the ideals of integrity as represented by him as a philanthropist and as an advocate for positive change for the greater good. 

Wilmers, who died in 2017, was the longtime CEO and chairman of M&T Bank. 

He believed corporate success is achievable only when that success is shared across communities—and that leadership carries with it a responsibility to see that success is shared. Bob and his wife, Elisabeth, gave to charities in many communities, their impact extending far and wide. 

The new prize has been endowed with more than $2 million in gifts, including those from M&T Bank, René Jones, H. Rodgin Cohen, Kelly King and BB&T, Eugene and Carol Ludwig’s Ludwig Family Foundation, Steve Steinour and Huntington Bank, and J.P. Morgan, with more than 75 donors in all.

The goal of the Robert G. Wilmers Integrity Prize is to create awareness and motivate integrity, especially with society’s evolving challenges.

Maureen Jerome of Salisbury, a close friend of Bob and Elisabeth—and, at Bob’s urging, a new trustee at Hancock Shaker Village—said, “It hit me like a thunderbolt. To create an Integrity Prize to honor Bob and to perpetuate his approach to life and business would be a way to keep his memory alive. His name, over the decades, would become synonymous with integrity.” 

Jerome set up meetings with René Jones, Wilmers’ successor at M&T Bank, and H. Rodgin Cohen of Sullivan & Cromwell to explore the idea of naming the prize after Wilmers, whose 83 years seemed too short, who had a profound impact in business, and who acted on his values with modesty and piercing intelligence.  

The prize will be administered by Hancock Shaker Village, a living history museum with 20 buildings on 750 acres in western Massachusetts. A national selection committee will choose prizewinners who are working to push boundaries in efforts to make the world a better place.