adding a description to view accordion
Following up on Volker's comment, I created a new person with the name "award_name description" and assigned the proper award to the person just created.

In Views Accordion settings I checked the box "Add views row classes
Add the default row classes like views-row-1 to the output."  

Style the views-row-1 class to make the description pretty.  

I have the setting "Add striping (odd/even), first/last row classes", so i had to edit the CSS to swap even and odd so the description has a white background.  

Hope this helps someone with a similar problem!