Jean Annette Fox Burkholder, lifelong volunteer, longtime member of the Urbana School Board, and first chair of the Urbana Human Relations Commission, died peacefully on the morning of Monday, June 12, in Urbana. She was 87.

Jean was born July 23, 1929, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the only child of Theodore Harold and Edith (Barnes) Fox. Her father, a British citizen, came to Philadelphia in 1906 and served for decades in the British Consulate there, rising to Vice Consul. Her mother was a community organizer and volunteer. Both spent their lives helping others, and Jean followed their example. Jean's mother was actively involved in school and housing integration issues in Philadelphia, serving as vice president of the local equivalent of the PTA and leading a neighborhood association to promote integration and combat discriminatory mortgage lending practices. Jean later wrote that what she learned from observing and talking with her mother "saved me ten years of learning patience and taking the long view. She was my mentor and model."

In 1947, Jean graduated from the Philadelphia High School for Girls (Girls' High), a public high school with a diverse student body where she made several lifelong friends. That year she enrolled in Earlham College, a predominantly Quaker college in Richmond, Indiana. There she met her husband-to-be, Donald Lyman Burkholder, and began to study and research areas that became lifelong concerns: segregation and discrimination, educational psychology and family dynamics, and community organization.

After their wedding in June 1950, Jean and Don attended the University of Wisconsin in Madison as graduate students in sociology, where their first child, Kathy, was born in 1953. That same year they went to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where Don completed a PhD in statistics. Their second child, Peter, was born in 1954. In 1955, the family moved to Urbana, where Don taught in the Mathematics Department at the University of Illinois for his entire career. Their third child, Bill, was born in Urbana in 1963.

In Urbana, Jean worked as a volunteer in human relations and community action. From 1956 to 1968, she was a member and chair of the Champaign County League of Women Voters Committee on Housing, which sought to study and address unfair housing practices and shameful housing conditions in predominantly minority neighborhoods, working in partnership with local community leaders.

Jean also focused on housing issues as a member of the Council for Community Integration and the Neighborhood Services Committee, which sought to bring community leaders together with directors of public and private agencies to find common ground on community issues and develop multi-agency programs for delivering social services. She helped to create a similar partnership of social service agency professionals and community members to improve social and mental health services for the community as a member of the Champaign County Committee for the White House Conference on Children and Youth, an endeavor that again became a lifelong focus.

In 1968, Jean became the first Chair of the Urbana Human Relations Commission, whose focus was to address community issues by building, in her words, "a community feeling of understanding and response to need." She became increasingly interested in the approach to social psychology developed by Alfred Adler, inspired by its focus on constructive approaches for problem solving and conflict resolution within families and communities.

Jean believed that a well-educated citizenry is fundamental for democracy, and therefore there is nothing more important than good public education for all. Her interests in education led her to become involved in the Urbana Parent-Teacher-Student Association, serving for a time as Chair of the Council of the Urbana PTSA and on committees that assisted in recruiting and hiring superintendents for the district. In 1975, Jean ran for and was elected to the Urbana School Board, where she served for twenty-two years until she stepped down in 1997. Her concern for fundamental issues of equality that motivated her early work on fairness in housing also informed all of her work on public education, and converged with her educational philosophy.

Jean believed deeply that schools must be committed to help every child learn, to take each child where they were, with their individual life experiences and styles of learning, and provide them with the resources they needed to learn and grow from there. She believed that public schools shoulda