Michel Coconis is Free Press 2026 "Libby" Award winner

Elizabeth "Libby" Gregory, 1970s and 80s Free Press Editor, is the inspiration for our annual award for Lifetime Achievement in Community Activism. Libby was foremost a feminist, but also an entrepreneur owning three businesses on OSU campus -- Tradewinds, King Avenue Coffee House, and Byzantium. As a journalist she primarily covered women's rights including a sexual assault column. Libby was a Columbus community activist who sadly left us in 1991 as a result of a plane crash.

Each year since 1998, the Free Press chooses a local activist to honor with the "Libby" award. This year, it is Michel Coconis. 

Our awards event is Saturday, November 14 from 12:30-3:30pm at the Goodale Park Shelterhouse. Free and open to all, we will provide light refreshments.

Michel Coconis is a retired social work educator and consultant on death penalty cases as a mitigation investigator and jury selection expert. Born in Zanesville, Ohio into a family business selling home furnishings, she was on live TV performing advertising for several local shows from an early age. 

Her first protest was a solo protest at her junior high school when the school refused to do anything about littering and recycling, activism she learned about from the Archie comic book series! She held a sign while students arrived and was detained by the vice principal until her father arrived. He taught her to stand for the national anthem only if she genuinely believed or felt it and to think for herself, and he shared that with the principal, setting up a lifetime, as it happens, of speaking out.

She has worked in mental health and started work with the Women Against Rape (WAR) (part of Women's Action Collective) near the OSU campus as a senior psychology major from Ohio Dominican College. Much of her work has involved violence against women, from family violence to community violence. Later in life, though, some of her attention has turned toward food sovereignty, justice, and other human rights.

A cheerleader who never needed a microphone, Michel carried that spirit into the world of activism, attending her first national protest in Indianapolis for the Equal Rights Amendment, where there were 8 people fasting, so many musicians, amazing and powerful women, and, as times do for all of us, that day changed her life direction entirely. She was active in the National Organization for Women (NOW) as her earliest organized activism not yet engaged in the deeper history of NOW. NOW tackled many issues so from being a chapter leader to mobilizer to D.C. events to march security in D.C. to meeting Lily Tomlin after a performance on Broadway - NOW opened many doors for her to step through and some windows to merely look through (Robert's Rules, for example).

As a social work graduate student at OSU, she initially learned about inequities in housing and Reagan's cuts to the HUD budget! She drove - data in hand in her Monte Carlo to the White House. She tried to get in legitimately (before all of the security we know today), and when that didn't work, she got arrested climbing a low part of the fence while the car was running, door open at the front door! It was the start of many arrests over around 30 years, several states, and many causes - just like many of you who are reading this! This was the start of her understanding that social work is about doing WITH people, rather than doing FOR or, worse, TO, people!

She became increasingly concerned, as an educator and an activist, about the role of media, the importance of community, and media literacy and critical thinking, especially regarding political decision-making, so she found herself engaged in public access TV in Grand Rapids and, when she returned to Columbus, found my way back to the Columbus Free Press and, eventually, to WGRN - two of the most important voices and places for the multitudes we have in Ohio. After hearing Amy Goodman speak in Grand Rapids, Memphis, and Columbus, she said she was driven to journalism because she could "go to where the silence is." Hearing that, Michel adopted the phrase for her own journey through social work and social justice. Nearly every choice she has made in activism has involved clearing the way and encouraging people to speak their truth to power.

Other awardees at this year's Free Press Salon and Awards event will be Steve Molk as a Free Press founder, Mahmoud El Yousseph as the Free Press reporter of the year, and the Outstanding Community Organization will be the Ohio Immigrant Alliance.