The Feminist Majority presented a Community Activism Award to Maya Miller of Nevada for her life-long efforts for peace and justice in the world. "Maya has been a leader for justice and equality for women and the poor for forty years," said Eleanor Smeal, President of the Feminist Majority Foundation. "She is always willing to step forward, offer her hand, and stand strong for women's equality."

Miller has advocated for poor women and children since the 1960s, working with the National Welfare Rights Organization, the Women's Lobby and locally for Nevada Empowered Women. In the late 1960s she was a leader in lobbying the Nevada legislature and the governor for food stamps in Nevada. In the early seventies, when the Nevada welfare department, without warning, stopped sending checks to poor women, Miller paid for busloads of welfare mothers to testify at the Nevada legislature, and arranged for their housing while there.

"I live in northern Nevada, surrounded by rich white people, so being involved with the struggle of black women over welfare rights helped me to understand and connect with the civil rights movement," said Miller. Later, the group of women she had helped asked her to become the chair of their community development organization, Operation Life, which brought businesses, housing and a public health clinic to west Las Vegas.

"Maya has been the catalyst for women in every walk of life who wish to commit their energies to helping women," said Harriet Trudell, Feminist Majority senior staff and a long-time Nevada activist with Miller. "She has had the vision and the financial generosity to accomplish both for individual women and for women in general, a more meaningful and positive way of life. She is for the women of Nevada and for myself personally without peer û she is truly goodness on two feet!"

In 1974 Miller broke ground by running for Nevada's United States Senate seat at a time when there were no women in the Senate. Her involvement with national women's organizations includes work with and contributions to the League of Women Voters, the Ms. Foundation and the Feminist Majority.

In 1990 Miller provided the encouragement, vision, and funding for an initiative to keep abortion legal in the state of Nevada. It passed with a huge majority. "This initiative would never have happened if it weren't for Maya," said Trudell.

At home in Nevada, Miller works on issues of domestic violence and welfare. She has been active on the American Friends Service Committee's Community Resource Division for 20 years, and is currently helping the AFSC with maquiladora worker organizing along the U.S.-Mexico border.

Miller was educated at Cornell University and Stanford University, and she taught English at the University of Nevada and at Stanford.