Eight Outstanding Women Selected as 2006 'Stand On A Better World Award' Recipients.

SALEM, N.J. -- From an 81-year-old retired lawyer saving destitute children in Nepal to a 20-year-old college student fighting to eliminate second-hand smoke in her community, the recipients of the 2006 "Stand On A Better World" Awards are a true inspiration to women everywhere who strive to make a difference in peopleeIUs lives.

Established in 2005 by Mannington Mills, and now in its second year, the Stand On A Better World Awards (www.StandOnABetterWorld.com) recognize women who have enriched the lives of others and made a significant impact in their communities and the world at large. The awards are given in three categories: Social, Economic and Environmental.

This yeareIUs recipients include:

Social Category

* Olga Murray eI Sausalito, Calif.

* Founded the Nepalese Youth Opportunity Foundation (www.nyof.org) which benefits the lives of impoverished Nepalese children by providing lifeeIUs basic necessities

Economic Category

* Dana Dakin eI Wilmot, N.H.

* Founded WomensTrust (www.womenstrust.org), a grassroots non-profit that helps poor women and their families in Ghana, West Africa

Environmental Category

* Ritu Primlani eI Berkeley, Calif.

* Launched Thimmakka Certified Green Restaurants (www.thimmakka.org) helping first-generation ethnic business entrepreneurs to provide a "green-certified" way for restaurants to do business.

Finalists

* Jenny Bowen eI Berkeley, Calif.

* Jill Sheffield eI New York, N.Y.

* Amy Jaffe Barzach eI West Hartford, Conn.

* Debora Sponsel-Jolley eI Albuquerque, N.M.

* Meghan Pasricha eI Hockessin, Del.

The recipient of the grand prize will be announced at the Stand On A Better World Awards ceremony in Philadelphia on Nov. 16 at the National Liberty Museum. All three top category winners will be honored at the ceremony.

Winners were chosen by a judging panel that included:

* Leeza Gibbons eI Television news journalist and host, radio personality, producer and businesswoman. Gibbons is founder of the Leeza Gibbons Memory Foundation, a non-profit that supports those affected by AlzheimereIUs disease and the search to find a cure.

* Dorothy Hamill eI Figure-skating legend and Gold Medalist in the 1976 Winter Olympic Games. Hamill, who recently appeared on FOX-TVeIUs "Skating with Celebrities," supports a number of charitable organizations, including the International Special Olympics and March of Dimes.

* Christine Todd Whitman eI The first female governor of New Jersey. Served in the cabinet of President George W. Bush as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency from January 2001 until June 2003.

* Deborah Bell eI Grand-prize winner of the 2005 Stand On A Better World Awards; founder of Refuge International (www.refugeinternational.com), dedicated to improving the lives of people in Guatemala.

Guests of honor will include three of the judges for this yeareIUs awards -- Dorothy Hamill, Christine Todd Whitman and Deborah Bell -- who will present awards that evening. Also attending will be Keith Campbell, chairman of Mannington Mills, and Tom Davis, president and CEO.

The 2006 winners receive:

* $25,000 grand prize, donated to the grand-prize winnereIUs chosen charity

* $10,000 to each of the two other winners, also to be donated to their selected charities

* $1,000 for each of the five finalists, awarded to their favorite charities

In announcing this yeareIUs awards, Davis says he hopes the awards program will continue to grow, recognizing and rewarding women making a difference and also inspiring others to do more.

"We received over 500 nominations for the 2006 Stand On A Better World Awards, stories of women across the country who are helping to improve the lives of others in so many inspirational ways," Davis said. "We congratulate this yeareIUs winners not only for their awards but, more importantly, for their accomplishments and the impact theyeIUre making."

Nomination forms and rules for the 2007 Stand On A Better World Awards will be available beginning March 2007 exclusively at www.StandOnABetterWorld.com. Any U.S. or Canadian female citizen is eligible to be nominated.

Based in Salem, N.J., Mannington is a leading manufacturer of fine flooring. For additional information, visit www.Mannington.com

2006 AWARD RECIPIENTS

CATEGORY WINNER: Social
NAME: Olga Murray
AGE: 81
HOMETOWN: Sausalito, Calif.

Olga Murray has always been a champion for the underprivileged, and eager to fight discrimination. For 37 years, she served as a law clerk to the Chief Justices of the California Supreme Court. Upon retirement, Murray took a trip to Nepal that would change her life forever.

While visiting the Himalayan Mountains, she discovered a world of overwhelming poverty and injustice. The children she encountered were poor beyond anything she had ever experienced and she was determined to find a way to help them. She started by aiding disabled children who had no way of getting to school in their villages and could only attend boarding schools in Kathmandu. The number of scholarships that Murray provided grew, and she decided to start a foundation that would help these children in an organized manner.

In 1990, at the age of 65, Murray founded the Nepalese Youth Opportunity Foundation (www.nyof.org) to give these children what should be every childeIUs birthright eI education, housing, food, medical care and loving support. The organization currently sustains muliple orphanages that provide poor, blind and handicapped children with education and a loving and healthy environment; an Indentured Daughters Program that rescues girls as young as six from bonded servitude; six Nutrititional Rehabilitation Homes that treat severely malnourished children and mothers; scholarships for more than 2,700 children from kindergarten through medical school; a Counseling and Vocational School for children who have suffered traumatic hardships; and an Educational Program that builds schools and trains teachers in rural areas.

MurrayeIUs compassionate and inspirational leadership has directly benefited the lives of more than 225,000 destitute Nepalese children over the course of her commitment to the people of Nepal. The indirect benefits of her programs for other children, families and entire communities are immeasurable. She knows what it means to "Stand On A Better World" and Mannington is honored to recognize her as the winner in the Social Category.

CATEGORY WINNER: Economic
NAME: Dana Dakin
AGE: 63
HOMETOWN: Wilmot, N.H.

Inspired by the adage, "life comes in thirds: the first third you learn, the second you earn and the final third you return," Dana Dakin, to commemorate her 60th birthday, traveled to Ghana to adopt a village and "return" by aiding women and girls with a microlending program. As a result of that trip, in 2003 she founded WomensTrust (www.womenstrust.org), a non-profit organization created on the belief that sustainable micro-enterprise, education and health programs focusing on women and girls are the key to lasting change.

Dakin engaged her community of Wilmot, N.H., in a grassroots, bottom-up approach to sharing their resources with the women and girls of Pokuase, Ghana, West Africa. She developed a new approach to address womeneIUs poverty and illiteracy and connected two communities from different worlds, educating the members of those communities and stimulating a spirit of generosity and cultural exchange between the two.

Today, the WomensTrust loan program provides small, four-month loans of $55-$222 to groups of four female entrepreneurs who are held accountable by each other and their commitment to the Trust for repayment. Repayment rates are nearly 90 percent with women eager to repay their loans in anticipation of the next -- bolstering their small businesses and immediately using the profits to feed, clothe and educate their children. In its three years, WomensTrust has built a replicable model with micro-enterprise for women and scholarships for girls at its core that supports entrepreneurship, effectively and measurably impacts poverty, and builds relationships. The program began with 72 in 2003, and now serves nearly 500 women. It is expected to double by August 2007.

Dakin has proven that any community has a chance to make a difference, one village at a time. As winner in the Economic Category, she embodies the spirit of Stand On A Better World.

CATEGORY WINNER: Environmental
NAME: Ritu Primlani
AGE: 33
HOMETOWN: Berkeley, Calif.

Ritu Primlani recognized that environmental awareness and compliance programs often fail to reach ethnic restaurants because their owners lack the time, financial resources and language skills to implement programs of their own. In 1998, she launched the Thimmakka Certified Green Restaurants (TCGR) program (www.thimmakka.org), a "green-certified" way for restaurants to do business that targets first-generation ethnic business entrepreneurs.

With TCGR, Primlani brings together major environmental stakeholders -- community leaders, restaurant owners and employees, as well as government, private and non-profit agencies -- and provides a way for non-English speaking business owners to understand civic policies, comply with complex regulations, and become environmental leaders in their communities. Primlani and her staff achieve this through a volunteer corps of trained, multi-lingual environmental specialists who provide restaurants with customized, one-on-one training in local languages covering four key environmental areas: Solid Waste Reduction, Water Conservation, Energy Conservation and Pollution Prevention.

When Primlani launched her program in the San Francisco Bay Area, there were two certified green restaurants; her organization has since certified 44 restaurants, both ethnic, and non-ethnic. Currently, more than 100 restaurants participate in the program and she plans to grow the program to 200 restaurants and expand to other large cities throughout the United States and Canada.

Because of Primlani, TCGR has become the sole organization cities approach to reach out to ethnic business owners in an attempt to protect the environment. Exemplifying the essence of Stand On A Better World, Primlani is the winner of the Environmental Category.

2006 FINALISTS

Finalist - Social Category
NAME: Jenny Bowen
AGE: 59
HOMETOWN: Berkeley, Calif.

Jenny Bowen, founder and director of Half The Sky Foundation (www.halfthesky.org), was struck by the number of children living in Chinese orphanages because of the "one child" policy and the conditions under which they are raised. After adopting two daughters from China and watching them blossom and develop into healthy, normal children with the support of a loving family, Bowen decided to move to Beijing to create Half The Sky. The organization operates key programs inside the Chinese government orphanages designed to give individual assistance for children 0 to 21 years of age. Half The Sky is the sole foreign partner in the government's new initiative to establish national guidelines for orphan care, and Bowen's work helped officials recognize that individual attention and nurture are just as important to orphan welfare as food, medical care and shelter. Already, Half The Sky has reached more than 10,000 children directly in its centers, including more than 3,500 who are active in the programs today in 28 cities in 11 provinces and municipalities throughout China.

Finalist - Social Category
NAME: Jill Sheffield
AGE: 65
HOMETOWN: New York, N.Y.

Jill Sheffield founded Family Care International (FIC), www.familycareintl.org, after moving to Kenya with her husband and witnessing the desperate need for proper healthcare services for pregnant women. Although her primary purpose was to save womeneIUs lives during pregnancy and childbirth, FIC has grown to ensure that women and adolescents have access to life-saving services and information to improve their health, experience safe pregnancy and child-birth, and avoid unwanted pregnancy and HIV. Over the past 20 years, Sheffield and FCI have been a guiding force behind the safe motherhood movement, bringing the neglected issue of maternal health to the international fore, pushing for increased investment in maternal health globally, and leading the way toward identifying and creating new practices for reducing maternal deaths worldwide. They have trained more than 300 maternity care providers in essential obstetric care, installed solar panels in close to 50 facilities that had previously lacked a source of electricity, and addressed critical infrastructure and equipment gaps in nearly 100 health facilities, with an approximate 200-250 percent increase in skilled care utilization overall in Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean.

Finalist - Social Category
NAME: Amy Jaffe Barzach
AGE: 45
HOMETOWN: West Hartford, Conn.

Amy Jaffe Barzach has inspired a movement, rallying tens of thousands of people around the idea that all children, with and without disabilities, deserve and need a place to play because play is an essential component of healthy development for everyone. Her message is simple: children with disabilities have the same passion to play as other children, but traditional playgrounds exclude children with disabilities. After losing her 9-month-old son to spinal dystrophy, Barzach marshaled an army of volunteers to create one of the first universally accessible playgrounds in the country -- a 25,000-square-foot playground in memory of her son, Jonathan. Along with a team of passionate professionals and parents, Barzach co-founded Boundless Playgrounds (www.boundlessplaygrounds.org), the first national non-profit organization dedicated to helping communities create inclusive playgrounds where all children, with and without disabilities, can develop essential skills for life as they learn together through play. There are now more than 100 completed Boundless Playgrounds in 21 states and Canada. These playgrounds are barrier-free, sensory-rich places where children of all abilities enjoy both the fun and the developmental advantages of playtime.

Finalist - Economic Category
NAME: Debora Sponsel-Jolley
AGE: 48
HOMETOWN: Albuquerque, N.M.

After being diagnosed with non-HodgkineIUs lymphoma and recovering with the help of generous strangers, Debora Sponsel-Jolley realized there are few affordable accommodations for patients who have to travel when facing a medical crisis, especially those receiving treatment for cancer. To help serve her community in Albuquerque, N.M., she established HollandeIUs Rose Cancer Hospitality House where around-the-clock services are provided for guests undergoing cancer treatment. She has also created the Bob Enlow Fund and Project HOPE (Helping Oncology Patients Economically) to defray the costs of residence during treatment and to help patients when they return back home in rural communities. Since its inception in 2001, HollandeIUs Rose continues to grow annually, with current occupancy rates at 100 percent and plans to build a second house in 2007.

Finalist - Environmental Category
NAME: Meghan Pasricha
AGE: 20
HOMETOWN: Hockessin, Del.

Meghan PasrichaeIUs personal health challenges with asthma and her trouble breathing in smoke-filled public places motivated her to become a passionate youth advocate for tobacco control and work hard to protect health and the environment. When she read in a newspaper that DelawareeIUs legislators were debating an indoor smoking ban, she decided to do something about it, speaking at public hearings in the state for a bill to ban indoor smoking and eventually earning a grant from the American Lung Association. She founded the Anti-Tobacco Action Club (ATAC), which seeks to reduce the problem of youth tobacco use and indoor air pollution caused by second-hand smoke. As founder and president of Global Youth H.E.L.P. (Health Education Leadership Program), Pasricha has given dozens of presentations to youth both domestically and abroad outlining the hazards of the environmental toxins created by tobacco use. She has spoken to thousands of young people across the world to deliver this message. Currently, Pasricha is an undergraduate student at Harvard, but she returns frequently to Delaware and devotes a tremendous amount of effort and energy to conduct training programs for youth.