Armen Oumedian, right, accepts the prestigious Liberty Bell Award from Grand Rapids Bar Association President Kristin Vanden Berg as Professor Chris Hastings of Cooley Law School, president of the Legal Assistance Center board, looks on.
LEGAL NEWS PHOTO BY CYNTHIA PRICE
To hear Armen Oumedian tell it, the basic reason he got engaged in giving back to the community is that he had the funds to do so.
“I retired at 65,” he explains, “and then with four other gentlemen we started a new company in St. Louis Missouri, and then 12 years later we sold the company. That was in 2001 – I was 77 years old, and I had this money.”
It appears not to have occurred to Oumedian that he could spend it on himself, so he started checking into funding scholarships.
“When I started investing, I looked at my alma mater, Kettering University, which has some cooperative engineering programs in Flint, and I?said, West Michigan needs those kind of students. I started doing some scholarships with Kettering. My objective was to keep the talent here so we’d have the benefit of these talented young people.”
Oumedian himself received his engineering degree from Kettering, which was called General Motors Institute at the time.
He worked for General Motors for about a decade after his graduation, and then moved on to Rapistan in Grand Rapids. That company, which is now Dematic, underwent a turnaround in the mid-2000s that allowed it to thrive in the challenged economy, but the original Rapistan, created in 1939, specialized in conveyor belts.
After 32 years there, Oumedian retired as Senior Vice President, but his career was not yet over.
He joined a group that started Pinnacle Automation. though it has since been purchased by another St. Louis firm, Pinnacle enjoyed an excellent reputation, so the sale was lucrative for Oumedian.
And that was the start of yet another career for the spry senior citizen, now 91 years young. The breadth of his community contributions eventually spread out to include supporting the Legal Assistance Center ?(LAC) of Kent County.
The LAC exists to assist people with legal information without representing them or giving them advice. The group’s website says, “If you are trying to solve basic legal problems without an attorney, the Legal Assistance Center can help you help yourself. Our goal is to help you be informed, be prepared and be heard.”
The LAC, founded in 2002 through “the visionary leadership of a coalition of lawyers and community partners,” had 17,818 requests for help in 2013, which is an average of 88 per day. The requests increased by 1,000 over the two previous years. And the staff of people assisting, one full-time and two part-time employees, is greatly enhanced by students from the Thomas M. Cooley Law School.
That, among other programs, has been Oumedian’s contribution to LAC. “My friend Val Ambrose was the director, and she said you ought to see what we’re doing. When I saw it, I thought it was great, so I asked how I could help. And she said, well, if we could find a way to get some young students in here, that would be great. So I said, how about setting up a co-op program to support the students from Cooley Law School?”
Deborah Hughes, current Executive Director of the LAC, nominated Oumedian for the Liberty Bell Award, which is given out yearly to a non-lawyer who has given of his or her time and energy to strengthen the legal system. (The Grand Rapids Bar Association has at times given the award to an organization rather than a single individual.)
Comments Oumedian in his quiet way, “It was quite an honor. Well, when you look at the names of the people in the past since 1962, it’s really humbling.”
Those people include Frederik G. Meijer (1971); Dr. Duncan Littlefair, former pastor and leader at Fountain Street Church (1972); community activist Lee Nelson Weber (1997), who is still at Dyer Ives Foundation; Susan W. Heartwell (2001), currently Executive Director of the Grand Rapids Student Advancement Foundation; and the Dispute Resolution Center (2003), among many others.
Not only is Oumedian generous with his money, he also participates heavily in shaping and moving forward the programs he has envisioned.
Deborah Hughes comments, “Armen is both generous and wise. He invests his resources and shares his skills as a leader and a manager. The many people who get help at the LAC have benefited from his wisdom and support.”
And Oumedian himself says, “I find I don’t like to just give money, I like to give money and create programs that I can be a part of. I want to see my money working now while I’m alive and when I can support something by being a part of it, I really enjoy it.”
So the generous philanthropist has suggested and developed a wide variety of programs, in every case contributing his time and expertise as well. In addition to Kettering University, he started a series of scholarship funds at Grand Rapids Community College, which he also attended. He sponsors a program to recognize innovation called the Armen Awards, a team competition which rewards service learning projects that display innovation and result in community impact.
Oumedian has also become involved in the Challenge Scholars at Harrison Park Elementary (see Grand Rapids Legal News 1/22/2014) which offers gap funding so that all Harrison Park students may attend college if they want, as well as support services to help them succeed in getting there.
“I saw that it was the same path I’d taken,” Oumedian says. “My parents came from the old country and we settled on the west side, so I went from Harrison Park to Union High School to the junior college to the General Motors Institute. So I was very happy to support it.”
His involvement extends to many other areas as well, such as Metro Hospital healing camps and the Armen and Pat Oumedian Pipeline Scholarship, co-named for his late wife.
And he is nowhere near done. As Oumedian puts it, “I always tell people, I know I’m going to die but I don’t believe it — and so far I’m right.”
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