Modern Widows Club will hold its seventh annual Legacy and Leadership Awards Gala on Tuesday, October 20th at Liberty House in Jersey City, bringing together supporters of the national nonprofit for an evening built around two honorees whose work, in very different fields, has reshaped how grief and widowhood are understood and supported. The formal fundraising dinner directly funds the organization’s national widow care programming, and this year’s honorees reflect the two halves of that mission, the science of grief itself and the advocacy required to build real institutional support around it.

The Scientist Behind The Grieving Brain

This year’s Legacy Award goes to Dr. Mary-Frances O’Connor, a psychology professor at the University of Arizona who directs the university’s Grief, Loss, and Social Stress Lab and has spent her career studying grief through the lens of neuroscience rather than treating it purely as an emotional or psychological experience. O’Connor conducted some of the field’s earliest functional MRI research into what happens inside the brain during acute grief, work that helped establish complicated grief, a clinical condition in which a person’s grief does not ease over time and instead intensifies through persistent yearning, avoidance, and rumination, as a legitimate area of medical study rather than something to be dismissed as an ordinary, self resolving part of loss.

That research became the foundation for her bestselling books The Grieving Brain and The Grieving Body, which translated years of clinical and neurological findings into an accessible account of how the brain and body physically process, and eventually adapt to, the loss of someone deeply attached to a person’s sense of daily life. Her work has given both clinicians and grieving individuals themselves a scientific vocabulary for an experience that had historically been discussed almost entirely in emotional or spiritual terms, reframing grief as a genuine neurological adjustment process rather than simply a feeling to be endured.

A New Jersey Philanthropist Who Helped Make History

This year’s Leadership Award goes to Angelica Berrie, a New Jersey based philanthropist and president of the Russell Berrie Foundation, recognized specifically for her role in advocacy work that helped make New Jersey the first state in the country to formally recognize International Widows Day. That recognition, secured through direct engagement with state legislators, gave widowhood a level of official civic acknowledgment that few other states have matched, and reflects the kind of institutional groundwork Modern Widows Club has said is essential to shifting widow support from private charity into recognized public policy.

Berrie’s foundation has maintained a longstanding relationship with Modern Widows Club, including recurring grant support recognizing the organization’s work in interfaith bridge building and innovative leadership within the widow care space. That sustained partnership, paired with her direct legislative advocacy, made her a natural choice for an award specifically built around leadership rather than research, honoring the work of translating awareness into structural, lasting change.

What the Evening Actually Funds

Founded in 2011 by Carolyn Moor, Modern Widows Club has grown into a national nonprofit and advocacy network sometimes described as the Movement for Widow Care, built around structured, stage based programming that guides widowed women through financial, emotional, and legal support as they move from initial isolation toward renewed community engagement and leadership. The organization refers to that structured progression as its Healthy Widowhood Pathway, and the Legacy and Leadership Awards Gala functions as one of its primary annual fundraising vehicles, with ticket sales, sponsorships, and a live auction directly supporting free mentorship programs, educational webinars, and local support chapters operating across the country.

Moor has been direct about why that funding model matters, describing widow support as an area that institutional philanthropy has historically overlooked relative to its actual scale and need. By pairing a fundraising gala with genuine public recognition of researchers and advocates who have moved the field forward, Modern Widows Club has built an event that functions as both an awareness campaign and a direct funding mechanism, giving supporters a concrete way to back an underfunded cause while publicly honoring the people whose work has helped define what meaningful, structured widow support can actually look like.