Citation for the Edward C. Pulling Community Service Award Presented to Cummings Zuill '58

On behalf of the Millbrook School Alumni Association, it is my distinct privilege to present the Edward Pulling Community Service Award this year to Cummings Zuill of the Class of 1958. This award was established on the occasion of the School’s 50th Anniversary in 1981. It is awarded from time to time to a Millbrook graduate who, in a distinctive way, has extended the principles and the spirit of Community Service in his or her life beyond Millbrook.  Cummings’s yearbook page listed his life ambition was “to get away from it all” and while he may have accomplished that geographically on his idyllic island of Bermuda, he has hardly shied away from making a real difference in his and other people’s lives.
We should have suspected as much since his community service responsibilities when he was a student here included the following: Student Council, Refreshment Committee, A.A. receptionists, Photo Service, Dance Committee, Prefect, Study Hall manager, Athletic Council, and yes, Cummings was president of the Smoke House his sixth form year!
 
After graduating from Trinity, he moved back to Bermuda where he began his distinguished career with the Bank of Bermuda. Cummings continued his service to his community devoting his spare time to non-profit work and community projects. He has embodied our school motto “Non Sibi Sed Cunctis” (“Not for oneself, but for all”) in his commitment to focus attention on others. Cummings chose to become involved in The Atlantic Philanthropies and has used his time and skills to try to improve race relations in Bermuda. Cummings grew up in a segregated Bermuda and he has been quietly working on healing racial divisions for more than two decades. Twenty years ago Cummings attended the first diversity workshop at the Bermuda College. He then was a co-facilitator for the Bank’s diversity training programs. He went on to help found the Diversity Institute at the college. Cummings also founded and guided the Centre on Philanthropy in order to promote and tap into the island’s innate spirit of generosity and to create an organized structure for philanthropy to help assist citizens and charities.  
       
Cummings became a trustee and director of the US-based Atlantic Philanthropies, and in 2008 he was honored with a $2 million education endowment named for him for people in the non-profit sector in Bermuda.  The Cummings V. Zuill Scholarship was established in recognition of Cummings’ pioneering contribution to philanthropy and the development of the not for profit organizations in Bermuda.  The program’s goal is to nurture, sustain, and grow this vital area by supporting educational and training opportunities and to increase the skill level of individuals in this sector. That very same year Cummings was made a member of the Order of the British Empire. It is gratifying to witness others pay tribute to Cummings’ lifetime of good works, but no one is prouder of  what you have accomplished, Cummings, than your friends and admirers at Millbrook.  So it is with the greatest pleasure that we present you with the 2015 Edward Pulling Community Service Award.   
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