A RARE and PPPM alumna and Ford Family Foundation leader, a pioneer in education, and a spatial strategist and design researcher are the 2026 winners of three public service awards presented by the UO School of Planning, Public Policy and Management and the PPPM Advisory Council. The awards ceremony will take place May 28 at the Ford Alumni Center on the University of Oregon campus.
Robert (Bob) Parker, a longtime educator, researcher, and pioneer, will be presented with the Outstanding Service to Oregon award. Keavy Cook, Vice President of Programs for the Ford Family Foundation, RARE program alumna, and PPPM master's graduate in Community and Regional Planning, will be awarded the Outstanding Alumni, and Kelsey Zlevor, a spatial strategist, design researcher, and the founder of Mental Landscapes, is being recognized as the year's Outstanding Recent Alumni.
The annual event will begin at 3 pm with an Open House and a one-of-a-kind showcase of student work. The awards ceremony starts promptly at 4 pm with a reception to follow.
Outstanding Service to Oregon Award Winner
Robert Parker educated and mentored generations of Oregon planners including nearly 600 graduate students. As an academic, Parker brings cutting-edge knowledge to practice, and as a practitioner he brings decades of experience to the classroom. He helped pioneer a unique practitioner-based approach to planning education – the Community Planning Workshop (CPW) – where students work on applied projects for paying clients, simultaneously acquiring planning theory and professional experience. With Parker’s guidance, CPW students have won four national APA/ACIP awards and numerous state awards. Bob has also worked on hundreds of consulting projects ranging from housing to growth management to economic development. For twenty years, Bob assisted and improved communities across the state through his direction of the Institute for Policy Research & Engagement. Bob had maintained a fundamentally practical approach to these various roles through his position as a Senior Policy Analyst and Project Director for ECONorthwest since 1998. While Bob specializes in growth management, housing, and economic development, he has experience in many other areas, all of which have benefited his students with up-to-the-minute guidance. For three decades, Bob has sought ways to use technology to provide deeper analysis to complex challenges such as housing and land needs. He conducted his first housing needs analysis in 1992 for Jackson County, Oregon and conducted dozens of housing studies in the decades that followed.
He developed new models and novel ways of using data provided through the Internet. These methods provided elected officials with details to support planning decisions that would otherwise be unavailable to them. In 2019, Parker was awarded the Distinguished Leadership – Lifetime Achievement Award from the Oregon Chapter of the American Planning Association.
Outstanding Alumni Award Winner
Keavy Cook serves as Vice President of Programs for the Ford Family Foundation, a Roseburg-based organization focused on supporting rural communities in Oregon and Siskiyou County, California. The foundation is the largest private foundation in the state of Oregon and among the largest in the nation that focuses exclusively on rural communities. As a member of the leadership team, she drives the development and implementation of program strategy, leads the organization’s grantmaking, and works to ensure cross-program alignment in pursuit of the foundation’s mission.
Keavy joined the Foundation in 2008 as one of the first program officers. Prior to her role as vice president, she served as a Program Officer, Director of Grants, and Director of the Children, Youth and Families department, advancing the Foundation’s two-generation approach to parenting education, child abuse prevention, early childhood education, and more.
Keavy came to Oregon through the RARE (Resource Assistance for Rural Environment) program, which builds the human capacity in rural communities. Years with RARE eventually led to her dream job working for The Ford Family Foundation. She holds a master’s degree from the University of Oregon in community and regional planning with a focus in nonprofit management.
Outstanding Recent Alumni Award Winner
With a background in creative writing, environmental science, and urban planning, Kelsey is a spatial strategist, design researcher, and the founder of Mental Landscapes, an emergent emotion-meets-design lab informed by her 8+ years of experience as a parks planning consultant to public sector clients. Her culture-shifting work weaves understanding around depression with recognition of the oppressive forces that exacerbate its symptoms to create and reimagine spaces that comfort, support, and accompany people through mental health experiences over the course of their lives. Through Mental Landscapes, she was named the Fall 2023 Artist-In-Residence at Allerton Park and Retreat Center, a speaker at SXSW 2024, and published her first book, Mental Landscapes: Depression as a Design Lens for Belonging in Public Space, in 2025. Kelsey practices at Epstein as a Senior Planner leading bike and pedestrian projects, and is a member of Women in Planning and Development in Chicago. She holds a master’s of Community and Regional Planning from the University of Oregon and a B.A. in Environmental Science from the University of Iowa.
Previous Award Winners
For a list of previous award winners, visit /events/pppm-awards.