Faith Patterson, the recipient of one of this 2008's two Ohio Heritage Fellowships for Community Leadership, is a longtime community leader and arts activist in Yellow Springs and the driving force behind the annual blues and jazz festival held each fall at the Antioch College Amphitheater and in the college's Kelly Hall. Patterson was one of the founding members of African American Cross Cultural Works (AACW), a non-profit volunteer organization formed in 1991 to sustain the efforts of the African-American Cultural Week, a community initiative to improve cross-cultural understanding that began as an Antioch Student's senior project. The goal of AACW is simple and straightforward: "We want to live in communities which value and celebrate diversity based on the assertion 'Everybody Counts.' "The Blues Fest, the AACW's main vehicle for its work, was first staged in 1997 and has presented dozens of local and regional acts as well as such well-known national performers as Erykah Badu, Deborah Coleman, Mulgrew Miller, Eric Bibb, Guy Davis and comedian Dave Chappelle, whose father, the late Bill Chappelle, was a co-founder with Patterson of the Blues Fest. (The younger Chappelle, incidentally, was the emcee for several AACW youth talent shows in the early 1990s.)