Jean G. McMurray , executive director of the Worcester County Food Bank, is a Visions award winner. (T&G Staff/DAN GOULD)

From her community service work as a young Girl Scout to working with poor farmers in Costa Rica after college, Jean G. McMurray has always gotten tremendous personal satisfaction from helping others.

It's the work that Ms. McMurray has done as executive director of the Worcester County Food Bank to help tens of thousands of people in Central Massachusetts that has led to her selection as winner of this year's Telegram & Gazette Visions Public Service Award.

The award, which includes a $2,500 honorarium, is given to an elected or appointed official or employee of a service agency who has excelled in providing services. Ms. McMurray, and the winners of four other Visions Awards, will be honored at a public ceremony at 4 p.m. Feb. 9 in Mechanics Hall, 321 Main St., Worcester.

"I love what I do," Ms. McMurray, 49, said during an interview at her office last week. "I couldn't do this if I didn't believe in it and have a passion for it."

Public service has always been a part of Ms. McMurray's life. While growing up in a middle-class family in Northbridge and Uxbridge, Ms. McMurray's role models were her parents, Thomas and Genevieve McMurray. Both were educators, and they taught her and her three siblings to be responsible and accountable and also to count their blessings and use what they had to help others.

Ms. McMurray often helped her mother deliver meals to a Milford shelter and also helped less fortunate families through programs at St. Mary's Church in Uxbridge. She got the same "help others" message from her late grandparents, Eugene and Margaret Gibbons, and the nuns at Mount Saint Charles Academy in Woonsocket, R.I., where she attended school.

Ms. McMurray graduated magna cum laude with a degree in international relations from Eisenhower College of the Rochester Institute of Technology in Seneca Falls, N.Y., in 1982, and was a recipient of the college's Norstad Award for Outstanding Achievement.

After college, she planned to combine her love of travel and different cultures with a job as a diplomat or ambassador. She worked first as a media analyst for the Jordanian Embassy in Washington, D.C., and then as a communications research assistant at the White House during Ronald Reagan's presidency.

It was after she spent a year in Costa Rica working with small-scale family farmers on a sustainable agricultural development project with the U.S. Agency for International Development that she realized what she should be doing with her life. The farmers told her they appreciated what she was doing for them, but wondered why she was not helping people in her own country. That inspired her to become a VISTA volunteer, then later a housing counselor at Catholic Charities' Youville House Family Shelter in Worcester. That job led her to the Worcester County Food Bank, where she began work in 1995 as the agency's outreach coordinator. She has been the executive director since 1998.

Catholic Charities of Central Massachusetts started the food bank in 1982 with two employees in one room on Millbrook Street in Worcester. The agency moved to a rented building on Route 20 in Shrewsbury in 1989 and then to its current 37,000-square-foot building in 1997. The $1 million mortgage was paid off last year.

The food bank now has 17 employees, 10,000 financial donors, 361 food donors and 300 volunteers. Last year, the agency distributed 5.3 million pounds of food to 93,000 people through the network of 178 partner agencies, including community food pantries, homeless shelters, residential programs, community meals programs and after-school programs. The food bank, in collaboration with other agencies, also helps with community and school vegetable gardens.

"It's her employment, but she actually lives the mission of the food bank. She's a 24-7 advocate for people in need of food in the community," said Joseph P. Gardner, chairman of the food bank's board of directors. He described her as a very humble, high-energy person who puts in a lot of hours and doesn't seem to get exhausted. He said Ms. McMurray is "always in an upbeat, positive mood."

"She has a very engaging personality. She can meet you for the first time and you feel like you've known her for a long time," he said.

Besides her position with the Food Bank, Ms. McMurray serves on the board of Project Bread, the state's leading anti-hunger organization, and is co-director, along with Dennis Irish of St. Vincent Hospital, of the Worcester Advisory Food Policy Council and its Hunger-Free and Healthy Project, funded by the Health Foundation of Central Massachusetts.

Ms. McMurray enjoys traveling, dancing, tennis, swimming, music and reading. She said her goal over the next five to 10 years is to work with others in the community to lessen or end hunger. She also hopes that a stigma will no longer be attached to programs that help people when they are in need. And, she hopes to be a mentor to up-and-coming leaders.

"I feel I have been so lucky and so blessed to do what I am doing," she said. "Central Massachusetts is a great place to live, but if I can leave a mark that makes it just a little bit better, that's wonderful."