Plastpro founder and CEO Shirley Wang is among the outstanding Americans selected to be honored for her contribution to the nation on Saturday, May 7, 2011. The Ellis Island Medal of Honor is among the nation’s most prestigious civilian awards, given by the National Ethnic Coalition of Organizations.
Wang is being recognized for her efforts at improving understanding and communication between the peoples of the United States and China. When she isn’t leading Plastpro, a fiberglass-door manufacturer with over $70 million in revenue, Wang devotes time to making China more accessible to Americans, much of it through her alma mater UCLA.
Wang has endowed teacher trips to China to help American educators achieve a more intimate understanding of Chinese culture. Along with her husband Walter Wang, the CEO of JM Eagle, Wang has funded the first endowed chair at UCLA’s Asian American Studies Center for a national program focused on U.S.-China relations. This program also includes the U.S.-China Media Brief, a unique online media tool developed for all those who are interested in obtaining a clearer and more balanced understanding of U.S.-China relations today.
Plastpro donates its doors to help build homes nationwide for Habitat for Humanity. Plastpro has also donated technology labs to the public schools of Ashtabula County, Ohio.
“Shirley Wang, with her extraordinary business acumen, has given life to the small town of Ashtabula, Ohio, by providing work that supports hundreds of families in and around the Plastpro plant and by her generous support of local schools,” says Brad Corbett, Sr., president of S&B Technical Products, who nominated her for the award. “She is also a generous philanthropist to a number of deserving groups including the Asian Pacific American Legal Center, which funds staff positions that provide legal services to immigrant domestic-violence survivors.”
To help build a better Los Angeles the Wangs are lead supporters of the Drug Enforcement Agency Foundation and helped bring the DEA Museum to the California Science Center in Los Angeles.
The Wangs have also established an endowed chair at the Los Angeles Cedar Sinai Medical Center for Pediatric Surgery to fund cutting edge research in pediatric surgery and to assist underprivileged children in need of surgery.
This year’s awards ceremony at the Ritz Carlton, Battery Park, in New York City will also honor, along with the Wangs, legendary entertainer Jerry Lewis and New York Fire Department Commissioner Salvatore Cassano.
“With our medalists, we will see America at its best,” said Nasser J. Kazeminy, chairman of NECO. “We will see every color, every race from so many walks of life together, celebrating the magic that is America. Our medalists’ influence and achievements truly inspire and touch the lives of people everywhere.”
The U.S. Senate and House of Representatives have officially recognized the Ellis Island Medals of Honor and each year the recipients are listed in the Congressional Record. Past recipients include six presidents of the United States, several Nobel Prize winners, athletes, leaders of industry, artists and others whose work has made a lasting impact on humanity.
Shirley and Walter Wang are only the eighth husband-and-wife duo to receive the Ellis Island Medal of Honor since it began 25 years ago. Previous couple recipients of the Ellis Island Medal of Honor include Bill and Hillary Clinton, as well as Emilio and Gloria Estefan.
After graduating from UCLA, Shirley Wang received an MBA from Columbia University. She founded Plastpro, Inc., in 1994 and built it into a leading manufacturer of maintenance-free products including fiberglass doors, polyfiber doorframes, snap-on doorlite frames and plastic wainscoting. In 2009 Builder News recognized Plastpro’s doors as the “Best Product,” and the company was noted as the “Most Innovative” and “Top 100 Manufacturer” in the Window and Door magazine. Plastpro distributes to national retailers including the Home Depot and Probuild, as well as to wholesale distributors such as American Building Supplies and Barnett Millwork. In 2005, Plastpro built a 200,000-square-foot state-of-the-art fully automated manufacturing facility in Ashtabula, Ohio. It is one of the world’s largest fiberglass door manufacturing plants.
Before starting Plastpro Wang held sales and management posts at Citicorp and at J. Walter Thompson Advertising. While in New York, she was on the board of Outward Bound and contributed toward building the Outward Bound Center for inner city kids in the city. Wang is a mentor for Columbia Business School students in the Non Profit Board Leadership Program, which encourages MBA students using their expertise to give back to society and introduce them to issues facing nonprofit boards and board governance.
Wang is also an active supporter of the China AIDS Initiative, an awareness and prevention program that provides public service announcements about the disease to 300 million people in Mainland China. Wang is on the board of Facing History and Ourselves, an international education organization that provides in-depth professional development services to 1.8 million students.
In Los Angeles, Wang sits on the Board of Trustees at Harvard-Westlake School and the board of the UCLA Foundation.
Other charitable foundations that Mrs. Wang supports are Doctors Without Borders and the Asian Pacific American Legal Center. Since 2008 the Wangs have funded staff positions at the APALC that are focused on providing legal services to immigrant domestic violence survivors by securing work permits and visas to help women gain freedom and independence from their abusers. The Wangs were honored on Oct. 14, 2010 by the APALC with its 2010 Public Service Award.
The Wangs also provided key support for a pair of short documentaries, “The Warriors of Quigang,” — nominated for the Academy Award for best short documentary in 2011 — and “The Blood Yingzhou District,” which won the Oscar in 2007. The Walter and Shirley Foundation sponsored the Emmy-nominated three-part PBS documentary on Chinese-American history and the Chinese contribution to America, “Becoming American: The Chinese Experience” by Bill Moyers.
