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A Note From The Foundation

On Sunday April 17, 2005, Sara Landess, Director of The Turner Foundation, passed away at her home in Springfield, Ohio from a year long battle with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) or Lou Gehrig’s disease. On that day, The Landess family, our community and The Turner Foundation lost not only a dedicated wife and mother, advocate and director but a mentor and dear friend. Her gentle spirit and genuine compassion helped to build the Foundation and realize the mission and vision that her father, Harry M. Turner, had set into place upon his passing in 2000, and established the tone for the principles she believed should be manifest in the initiatives of The Turner Foundation.

There are certain gifted people whose character allows them to touch lives in ways that no one else can. Sara was one of those people. Her response to those in need was always the same. Sara constantly sought to help others, to advocate for those who could not do so for themselves, and to genuinely assume the very best in each and every person in her life. Her faith and sincerity of heart made it easy for her to do. She believed in being a good steward of the financial resources which her father had left to the foundation, and, with prayerful consideration, made her granting decisions.

We all miss her. We will continue to miss her encouraging words, her gentle guiding way, the good that she recognized in all things, and her beautiful example of so clearly seeing that which is greater than ourselves. It is in her memory that we at the Foundation continue to seek to keep alive those ideals in which Sara and her father and mother, Harry and Violet Turner, so strongly believed.