Donor Spotlight: The Sonia Louden Walker and Walter L. Walker Legacy Fund

Retired pastor Sonia Walker created the Sonia & Walter Walker Legacy Fund, inviting others to support the FOREVER Funds for lasting impact.

Donor Profile

Published: October 16, 2023

Retired pastor Sonia Walker established the Sonia Louden Walker and Walter L. Walker Legacy Fund this year. She invited others to join her in collectively supporting the FOREVER Funds and making an impact for generations to come.

Anyone who knows Sonia Walker (pictured) knows that throughout her careers in television, counseling, education, and ministry, her energy and focus on social justice issues and making meaningful change are legendary.

So, as she was coming to the end of her time as Associate Pastor at First Congregational Church, her “wonderful congregation wanted to honor the body of work in which they saw me living. I like to say it’s not because I retired from being clergy, it’s because of what I live,” she said.

A smiling older woman with glasses, wearing a headscarf and a beaded necklace, stands in a room decorated with colorful hanging banners and wooden chairs, featured in our Donor Spotlight honoring the Walter L. Walker Legacy Fund.

When an initial conceived collaboration with the First Congo became unviable due to COVID, a new board of directors was tasked with creating a 501(c)(3) independent of the church to honor her work.

But then, one Sunday, “I reached down to pick up my paper and the words ‘The FOREVER Funds’ came to my mind, and I said: That’s it.”

Not long after that, she recommended to her board that they direct their energies not to the creation of a new nonprofit, but to supporting the FOREVER Funds: the Community Foundation’s community-voiced, community-centered investment in Greater Memphis.

She established the Sonia Louden Walker and Walter L. Walker Legacy Fund to support the FOREVER Funds at the Community Foundation of Greater Memphis in perpetuity.

The fund is named for both Sonia and her late husband, who moved his family to Memphis in 1974 to become president of LeMoyne-Owen College.

“The fund is named for both of us, intentionally. I really respected Walter’s work here. He wanted to be a leader in education, particularly in a historically Black college. Three years after we were here, he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and lived 30 years, struggling every step of the way. But that was our life.” she said. He died in 2008.

Sonia was in a unique position to see the opportunity that the FOREVER Funds present since she’d been a Community Foundation board member in the 1980s and remained involved for decades.

“The FOREVER Fund is a composite of gifts to one fund,” she said, “where lots of people put their resources together. It’s undesignated money that can be directed to the needs of this community as they arise. The [grantmaking committee members] of the FOREVER Funds are from all over the city and from different ZIP codes and career paths, so we’re getting lots of views of what are the greatest needs.”

At her retirement in late 2022, Walker invited her friends and family to give to her fund, as part of her commitment to the change that the FOREVER Funds will make. They responded generously.

“I provided the seed funding with my widow’s mite,” she said, in this case the required minimum distribution from a retirement account. “Anyone who wanted to honor my work, or Walter’s work, could contribute to it.”

What does she hope the fund will do? In addition to inspiring others to create similar funds, she shared, “That money will be available for something magnanimous or for the seed of an idea that just needs some financing,” she said.

“That’s kind of been my work, to try things that were not done much and get them started until they get handed off to turn into something larger than my vision.

“It’ll be a story that will unfold over time. Because we love this community, and we want it to be better than we found it.”

Watch the video below to learn more.