Hannah Wallace

Politics Not As Usual

I wrote a profile of two powerhouse Mount Holyoke alumnae: Tami Gouveia ('96) and Kristen Elechko ('97) for the Mount Holyoke Alumnae Quarterly.  

Kristen Elechko, left, and Tami Gouveia, right. 

In early 2021, Kristen Elechko ‘97, who had recently wrapped working for U.S. Senator Ed Markey’s reelection campaign in Massachusetts, finally had time to read her Mount Holyoke Alumnae Quarterly. She was skimming through the Class Notes when one name jumped out at her: Tami Gouveia ‘96.

Though she had not known Gouveia at Mount Holyoke, she had recently read the statement that Gouveia, a Massachusetts state representative from the 14th Middlesex District, had released on why she hadn’t voted for Ron Mariano for speaker of the Massachusetts House. "I believe that the residents of my district and across the state deserve, and are demanding, an open process and new leadership that represents the values, identities and priorities of voters across our state," Gouveia’s statement read in part. She felt that Mariano stood for politics as usual — he was so sure he’d win that he didn’t even give a speech until after he was elected — and that the climate crisis, the housing emergency and staggering economic inequality in Massachusetts demanded bolder leadership than he would offer. None of her House colleagues could give her a compelling reason to vote for Mariano, a Democrat, she wrote, except that she could be punished for not endorsing the status quo. "None could describe the great things that Speaker Mariano might do to help ensure a just recovery through the coronavirus pandemic," she wrote.

Elechko was impressed that Gouveia had the guts to not vote for Mariano. "I’d had conversations within my channels around how much I appreciated her standing in her leadership and in her values, and doing something that’s very hard publicly," Elechko says. She was also inspired by how Gouveia regularly spoke up about the need for climate justice and simultaneously raised up young leaders of the Sunrise Movement. When she discovered that Gouveia was an MHC alum, she says, "I lost my mind! I reached out to her on every channel possible and thanked her, and also noted that we were at Mount Holyoke at the same time. We had a wonderful exchange," Elechko says. And then that was that.

A few months later, in March, when Lowell, Massachusetts, native Gouveia decided to run for lieutenant governor of Massachusetts, she started asking people in her networks for suggestions for a whip-smart campaign manager. Elechko’s name came up several times. Gouveia soon arranged to talk with Elechko over Zoom.

"It wasn’t like a traditional interview. It was more like, ‘Here are my values and here’s how I approach the world, and here’s how I think about campaigns, and here’s how I think about leadership,’" Gouveia says. "And then there was a lot of laughing, head nods and ‘Yes. Yes! Yes!’"

They had two or three multi-hour-long conversations.

Elechko, who had been the deputy relational organizing director for Ed Markey’s campaign, had instant chemistry with Gouveia. Gouveia felt the same and hired Elechko, who began her new job as campaign manager in mid-June.

GOUVEIA: POLITICS NOT AS USUAL

When I interviewed Gouveia in 2018 for my “She’s Running” feature for the Quarterly it was the first time she had run for office, after a 25-year career as a social worker protecting children from environmental toxins and preventing substance abuse. She ran against two men in the primary—winning with 64.3% of the vote, the widest margin of a first time candidate in the state’s history—and then went on to win against a Green-Rainbow Party candidate in the general, garnering 90% of the vote.

"Representing the people of the 14th District has been the joy of a lifetime," Gouveia says. "They are just very civically engaged. They show up for meetings, they reach out to me all the time about different policy issues they care about." But despite getting some progressive legislation passed, her time in the state legislature has shown her that her skills as a public health social worker might be better suited to the role of lieutenant governor. "What I’ve been observing is that the corner office has been occupied by people who prefer to maintain the status quo. They don’t have the express commitment to addressing the structural issues that drive inequities in our state — whether you’re talking about inequities around race or ethnicity or immigration status or class or gender and gender identity. We’re standing still," Gouveia says. "So there’s so much opportunity — especially with the infusion of federal dollars as a result of COVID-19 — to really chart a different path forward. And I’m not seeing that from Charlie Baker."

Continue reading here.     Or download the PDF here. Download MHQ_Sum21_Tami-Kristen FEAT_Spreads

How These Founders Are Detoxifying the Denim Industry—and Saving the Planet

This story appeared in Inc.'s October, 2021 issue, as part of the Female Founders 100.

Most jeans manufacturers rely on petroleum-based dyes and pollutants. Tammy Hsu and Michelle Zhu are on a mission to revolutionize the industry with planet-friendly, microbe-based dyes.

Michelle Zhu (left) and Tammy Hsu run Huue, a startup developing sustainable textile dyes to replace the ecologically destructive colorants the fashion industry uses.

About 20 percent of the world's industrial water pollution comes from textile dyeing. And the denim industry is the worst offender: Most mass-market denim brands rely on petroleum-based dyes and chemicals like formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide. In 2019, that reality inspired Tammy Hsu and Michelle Zhu to start Huue, which they spun out of Hsu's grad school work at the University of California at Berkeley, where she developed dyes made from microbial secretions. Huue is working on the launch of its first dye, a natural-but-synthetic indigo. The company's eight scientists are also developing sustainable dyes and colorants to disrupt other parts of the fashion industry. --As told to Hannah Wallace

 

ZHU: My parents were entrepreneurs in the apparel industry. Their brand focused on urban streetwear in the late '90s and early 2000s, which was why denim was such a large focus. As a child, I would visit garment manufacturing facilities on summer trips to China and witness the pollution firsthand: particles in the air that workers had to guard against with facemasks, and foul-looking waterways around the factories. It made a lasting impression on me.

HSU: I came at it from studying science and biology. The lab I was in was very entrepreneurial—we were all thinking about how we could apply these solutions to real-world problems. I'm interested in fashion, clothes, and textiles. The more I read about it, the more I realized that this is a huge problem in the industry.

ZHU: Until the turn of the 20th century, indigo was made from plants. Natural indigo is not very cost effective or scalable, and its performance and color consistency doesn't fit industrial needs. Today, it is generally created via petrochemicals. Fossil fuels are used at the source of creation, but the industry also relies on toxic chemicals such as formaldehyde and benzene— which not only pollute the planet but are carcinogenic as well. That's the main challenge we're tackling.

HSU: We look at how the indigo plant makes the indigo dye molecule. Then we take that genetic information and instruct our microbes to make indigo the same way. We're growing these microbes, and they're programmed to secrete the indigo.

ZHU: Microbes are truly amazing—they multiply rapidly. We call them nature's most powerful manufacturers.

 

HSU: Six years ago, my professor at Berkeley had a grant, and a story was written about our project. When people learned we were working on sustainable indigo, brands started inquiring.

ZHU: We'd just hired our team of scientists and everyone was so excited to get to work last year. And then it was all shut down. Our milestones are lab-based, so not being able to go into the facility for three months created all sorts of uncertainty. Then there was the issue of when we could run productions and supply products. We were fortunate to win a female founders competition hosted by Microsoft's M12 fund, Mayfield, and Melinda Gates's Pivotal Ventures. That gave us an extra million dollars, which was a big help in the midst of Covid. Finally in July 2021, we brought the whole (vaccinated) team back into the lab full time.

HSU: We've made a lot of progress to scale up our production with a couple of facilities around the U.S. and to make our microbes more efficient. In August, we were producing 80 times more dye than at the end of last year. Our partners want huge amounts of dye.

ZHU: The fashion industry is aware of its challenges—its troubled supply chain and the toxic nature of the dyeing process. It hasn't been difficult to get people really excited about the technology and potential.

From a Prison Garden Sprouts Real Growth

I wrote this story for Reasons to be Cheerful.

 

Amid rows of snap peas and summer squash, incarcerated gardeners cultivate job skills, inner peace and fresh produce for the cafeteria.

On her most recent stay at Coffee Creek Correctional Facility in Wilsonville, Oregon, 45-year-old Adria White knew that she needed more than a drug treatment program. She was up for release soon, and while that program, which she’d participated in twice before, included useful tools like mindfulness training and behavioral therapy, it did little to prepare her for getting a job on the outside.  

“You learn coping skills,” says White, who became dependent on methamphetamines at around age 30. “But when you get out and you’re poor and struggling, that doesn’t solve your life problems.”

So when her cellmate told her about Lettuce Grow, a sustainable gardening program that takes place at 16 Oregon prisons and juvenile detention centers, she signed up, hoping the skills she’d gain would help her land a job at a nursery or start a community garden in her hometown. 

Though she had zero prior gardening experience, White, it turns out, has a green thumb. Soon she was digging her hands into the small garden plot on the medium security side of the prison, planting mainly flowers and herbs. “I spent a lot of hours out there — as many as I was allowed. I fell in love with my plants. There’s a bond,” she says. Dahlias became her favorite flower. “They are fast and they are so eye-catching!” She also loved the aroma of the herbs — particularly lavender and sage — and shared them with others. “Women started rubbing lavender on their Covid masks,” she laughs. 

One of the privileges of the gardening program is that participants are permitted to go outside when the yard isn’t officially open.

“I was like, ‘This is cool. I can go outside and no one is out there!’” she says. Over time, her gardening work became more than just a chance for some limited freedom from confinement. It grew into a full-fledged passion. 

White was scheduled to take the next sustainable gardening class in September, right after she’d moved to minimum security, but the entire prison was evacuated due to wildfires. When prisoners and staff returned to the facility, a Covid outbreak resulted in a lockdown that barred all visitors including the Lettuce Grow staff and volunteers. “As a precaution we had provided the class with the text books and class materials, just in case we got shut out,” says Lettuce Grow director Rima Green. White, undeterred, worked her way through the class materials on her own. “That’s no mean feat,” emphasizes Green. The curriculum, from Oregon State University’s Extension Service, is a college-level class.

Green and staff were finally allowed back into Coffee Creek in March, and got to know White as they gardened with her, side by side. Green was so impressed by White’s skills and determination that she hired White, who was released in May, to be a part-time employee at Lettuce Grow, which is a program of the Portland-based nonprofit Growing Gardens. In her new job, White is doing office work such as correspondence, surveys and coordination with volunteers. Other graduates of the Lettuce Grow program have gone on to find jobs at Portland Nursery, a family-run garden center with two locations, and other horticultural-related businesses in Oregon. 

Adria White in the garden she planted at her sister’s house after being released from prison. Photo courtesy Adria White

Lettuce Grow was founded by attorney and master gardener Sarah Van Roo in 2009 with 15 incarcerated people in two Oregon prisons. Van Roo’s original intent was to improve the nutritional quality of the meals served to residents, some of whom she’d befriended while teaching yoga at Coffee Creek. 

In 2015, Lettuce Grow merged with Growing Gardens, which promotes food security by building gardens at schools and in residents’ backyards. Today, 11 years later, Lettuce Grow serves 200 incarcerated people in Oregon each year, providing them with valuable job skills and a respite from the drudgery of prison life. Those enrolled in the program are able to take classes like the Oregon Food Bank’s Seed to Supper class, Oregon State University’s Sustainable Gardening class and an advanced Greenhouse Management class.

Because participants cultivate a vegetable garden on site, Lettuce Grow also gives prisoners access to healthy, delicious food, like fresh-from-the-garden tomatoes, spinach, snap peas, kale, lettuce, summer squash and broccoli. In 2020, even amid the pandemic, the State Corrections system grew 365,536 pounds of food. Some 97 percent of that went into the institutions’ kitchens. (The rest was delivered to food banks across the state.) This total does not include the produce grown in federal prisons in Oregon like the one in Sheridan, where residents harvested 100,000 pounds of food in 2020, all of which was consumed at the prison cafeteria. But the program’s most impressive data may be that which shows participants have just a four percent recidivism rate — the national average at state correctional systems, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, is 68 percent within three years.

White was hired as a prison gardener when she moved to the minimum security facility within Coffee Creek. When she got there in September, the garden had seen better days due to staffing shortages and one uncooperative correction officer. “It had been neglected, with the quarantine and the fires,” she says. “And the voles!” Despite being a menace to the garden, the voles became popular with the gardeners, who gave them names and treated them like pets. Meanwhile, White spent so much time weeding that at night she dreamt she was pulling weeds. She was paid $50 per month for four 40-hour weeks — a very small sum, but one that is fairly typical for what incarcerated folks earn.

There’s a lot of creativity at Coffee Creek’s minimum security garden. One woman has designed a “Three Sisters” garden of corn, beans and squash. Another used flowers to recreate the album cover of Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon. White grew flowers and herbs, and with other gardeners harvested vegetables and fruits for Coffee Creek’s cafeteria. That was probably the most rewarding part of the job, White says.

Adria White’s grandson sampling the garden’s berries. Photo courtesy Adria White

“When we got the fruits and vegetables on the trays, every single woman was grateful. You could hear every woman talk about it. They would tell us thank you,” she says. “I also had people come up to me throughout the day while I was working and say how much the garden means to them — how seeing the flowers, having a place to sit down and see something natural instead of cement and barbed wire were good for the soul.”

Coffee Creek currently has about 800 residents, all of whom are women. At the cafeteria, the lines were always longer in summer, when the women knew that the garden’s abundance would show up on their trays. The tomatoes were the most popular item.

“In prison, they don’t ever serve tomatoes,” says White. “Some people — especially if they were lifers — when they got fresh organic tomatoes on their tray, it was an overwhelming sensory experience. There is a lot of emotion in eating a fresh tomato when you haven’t in ten years.” 

For White, the garden had the added bonus of soothing her anxiety.

“I’m kind of reclusive. Being social is challenging for me,” she says. “I thought, ‘I’ll never be able to get a job, I’m so weird in public.’”

But gardening, of course, is a solitary pursuit, and White says getting better at it gave her confidence and made her realize that she can do something to make money. The first thing she did after being released this May, she says, was plant a garden at her daughter’s house.

“Every time I get anxious, I go into the garden,” she says. “The transition from prison life can be really tough. For me, to have something positive — something new to keep my mind busy until I have my perspective back — that has been huge.”

Unsurprisingly, the pandemic had a big impact on the program. None of Lettuce Grow’s 32 volunteers statewide were able to visit the facilities for months, and a number of the sustainable gardening and greenhouse management classes were cancelled. At some sites, classes were conducted by members of the prison staff or even by incarcerated tutors themselves. At facilities like Coffee Creek — which had a number of lockdowns — there were no classes. Everything White learned while in minimum security was from getting her hands dirty and from gleaning tips from fellow gardeners, or from Green and Mirabai Collins from Lettuce Grow, who were finally allowed in in March

But with vaccination rates increasing in Oregon prisons — at press time the prison vaccination rate was 71 percent, higher than the statewide rate — some facilities are starting to pilot face-to-face visitations, and Green is hopeful that volunteers will soon be allowed back in. 

For White, learning how to garden has been nothing short of transformational. She’s already found another gardening project to sink her hands into — she recently stumbled upon a community garden near her daughter’s house that was overgrown and neglected. When she called the number for the volunteer organizer, the fellow who answered said he’d moved to California. Would she like to take it over? White accepted the task, and is now eager to get in there and start weeding. She envisions a zen garden with lots of flowers. “I want it to be a healing space,” she says. “It creates a healing energy instead of stress.” 

Black Grandmothers Feed their Communities and Pass on Food Traditions

 

 

I wrote about Grandma's Hands, a new program in Portland where grandmothers are reviving cultural connections and reducing food insecurity for Civil Eats.  

Laurie Palmer and Vanessa Chambers, two of the grandmothers in Grandma's Hands 

 

On a recent Saturday night in September, Mildred Braxton did something she never thought she’d do: she taught 20 or so others how to make succotash and steamed collard greens over Zoom.

With the confidence of a Food Network chef, Braxton, a parent of five and grandmother of three, put a skillet on the burner, poured some oil into the pan, and let it heat up before throwing in some chopped onion, frozen corn, frozen lima beans (called butter beans in the South), and black-eyed peas, narrating all the while. After covering the pan and letting it all heat up, she added stewed tomatoes, okra, and seasonings.

“Okra is the last vegetable I put in because it’s easy for it to fall apart,” said Braxton, who hails from Mississippi. “Okra has a bad rap. I’m standing up for okra!”

This virtual dinner party is part of a Portland, Oregon-based program called Grandma’s Hands, a platform for Black grandmothers to share family recipes and food traditions with future generations. So far, the 12 grandmothers involved have prepared four monthly meals for 30 to 40 participants at a time. In addition to delivering the food they make along with a bag of fresh produce grown by farmers of color to the participants throughout the community, the program brings everyone together virtually to partake of the food while sharing recipes and tips.

Though the focus of Grandma’s Hands is to facilitate community engagement and reconnect community members with culturally grounded natural foods and agricultural practices, the program may also help reduce food insecurity by teaching the younger generation the economic benefits of cooking at home for their families.

“Our [modern] life is not conducive to being healthy,” says Chuck Smith, co-founder of the Black Food Sovereignty Coalition (BFSC), which helps run the program. “Cooking as a regular family activity has been squeezed out of people’s schedules.” And yet, he stressed the fact that connection with food is a pathway to stronger identity in the Black community.  “When your [diet] is consciously connected to your cultural identity, then you can be more intentional in selecting what you eat and how you prepare it,” adds Smith.  

The idea for the series grew out of freewheeling conversations about sustainable food and food access that Willie Chambers and Lynn Ketch from the Rockwood Community Development Corporation (CDC) had with Lisa Cline and Katrina Ratzlaff, the CEO and advancement director at Wallace, a community health clinic.

Continue reading here.  

Women in Weed

It seems to me that many of the most creative cannabis ventures in my home town of Portland are run by women. I was pleased, then, to be asked by an editor at Conde Nast Traveler, UK to write this story on the female entrepreneurs who are rebranding cannabis businesses. (Think chic lifestyle boutiques rather than the bro culture that's so often been associated with this intoxicating plant.)  

 

This article was first published in the June 2019 issue of Traveller magazine

 

Walk into Ladies of Paradise on Portland’s Division Street, and you’ll first be struck by the vintage fashion, the mid-century-modern, gold-chrome shelving and all the pink – from the walls to the cat-eye sunglasses. It might take you a few beats to realise that the hanging black sweatshirt is emblazoned with ‘Keep Blazing, Stay Amazing’; that the green, ceramic objets d’art are actually smoking pipes; that the facial serum is made with CBD oil; or that the gold triangle necklace doubles as a roach clip. As it turns out, this expression of fierce, retro femininity is cannabis-themed. 

Ladies of Paradise is a creative agency and shop, founded by stylist Jade Daniels and photographer Harlee Case (both pictured above) around the tenets of ‘women, weed, fashion’. Its Instagram – all candy colours and punky thrift-store glamour – has more than 40,000 followers, and its party-hard events, with themes such as Moroccan Nights or Cowboys vs Aliens, are big draws, taking place in Portland, Denver and Los Angeles. As well as helping to market mostly female-made cannabis products for other brands, the company has now launched its own, including Lady Jays, a line of strain-specific pre-rolled joints that come in Miami Vice-style pink-and-green boxes.

 ‘We wanted to bring some fun and creativity to the smoking lifestyle,’ says Case, who right now has purple-streaked blonde hair. ‘Everything we do is very extra; we want people to dress up and be themselves, and to mix cannabis with art, fashion and pop culture.’

She and Daniels met in Southern Oregon, when Case was running an online vintage shop and shot Daniels’s jewellery for its website. They bonded over their love of weed and eclectic, era-bending fashion, and soon found themselves photographing female cannabis growers in ball gowns. Things have developed quickly since they moved to Portland a few years ago, with Ladies of Paradise hiring a graphic designer, social-media editor and project manager. In 2018 the female-focused, smoker-themed store opened, and many of the items for sale are made by locals. ‘Our aim is to uplift people who are doing awesome things, and to get rid of stigmas,’ says Case.

Ladies of Paradise isn’t alone in what Case calls ‘this wild weed culture that’s driven by women who all really support each other’. As Portland becomes the USA's progressive cannabis-lifestyle capital, a diverse set of ladies have created everything from Aesop-like dispensaries to a Kinfolk-style magazine and a business course for female CEOs. They meet up in loft spaces and yoga classes, as high on get-up-and-go as they are on locavore marionberry gummies.

One of the scene’s pioneers is Cambria Benson Noecker, brand director at cannabis company Groundworks Industries. Noecker, who has a pomeranian-chihuahua mix called Gucci, was the driving force behind two of the state’s coolest dispensaries, Serra and Electric Lettuce. When designing Serra in 2014, she was adamant that she ‘didn’t want that tie-dyed Bob Marley vibe.’

Instead, her team created two airy, apothecary-inspired concept stores, one of which has a plant wall and a neon-blue sign that reads ‘Quality Drugs’. Little buds from high-grade Oregon growers such as East Fork Cultivars are presented worshipfully in glass cabinets, which also house an obsessively curated selection of paraphernalia, including Stonedware’s geometric porcelain pipes, designed by local artist Ariel Zimman, and Leif Goods organic CBD chocolate bars. The next outpost will open in LA.

 

Another figure who has defined Portland’s new feminine-cannabis aesthetic is Anja Charbonneau, the former Kinfolk creative director who launched female-staffed, visually lush Broccoli magazine in 2017 (broccoli is slang for weed). ‘Most of the existing publications were male and news-oriented,’ says Charbonneau. ‘We wanted something deeper that stimulates the senses.’ The first issue’s beautifully spare cover story was on Japanese ikebana flower arranging, but with cannabis plants; stories since have touched on everything from smoking etiquette to reproductive health for users. Next, it will hold a three-day festival called In Bloom at Portland’s sceney Jupiter Next Hotel.

 

 

 

Meanwhile, in the city’s Chinatown, The Commune is a brick-walled, Brooklyn-ish office and gathering space devoted to weed culture. Founder Amy Margolis, a high-flying lawyer, is also behind The Initiative, a business boot camp for women who want to launch cannabis-related businesses. Graduates include Yvonne Perez Emerson of Make & Mary, which produces CBD skincare and aromatherapy inhalers, and Meryl Montgomery and Valarie Sakota, founders of chic Barbari, a lifestyle brand and shop (Montgomery is also the partnerships manager at Broccoli).

Events are a big part of the scene. Everyone goes to bars such as Rontoms, with its fire pit and stage, and the Escape Bar and Grill, a queer, female-owned joint with karaoke and games. But the real fun is DIY, largely because pre-legalisation smokers got good at putting on house parties. Take Make & Mary’s Emerson, who hosts yoga sessions and workshops in her hangar-like Tillamook Station studio. There is a BYOW (bring-your-own-weed) policy, and meet-ups have included hemp-flower arranging, pipe decorating and abstract-art classes. Tokeativity is even more ambitious: the global ladies’ cannabis club, which started in Portland, now has chapters in Seattle and South Africa. Founders Lisa Snyder, a women’s rights activist, and artist Samantha Montanaro, also came through The Initiative, and facilitate regular functions, from Alice in Wonderland-themed parties to meetings for mothers. The early get-togethers often took place at Montanaro’s home: for the Witchy Woman social in 2017, rooms hosted tarot readings, mala-bracelet crafts and a spooky photobooth, where Case took the photographs.

What none of them are doing is lying on the sofa watching Cheech and Chong videos. ‘People used to say to me: how do you get anything done?’ says Case. ‘But that’s changing. No one would look at this bunch of women doing amazing things in Portland and call us lazy. 

Ani Difranco Unplugged

 

Since college, I've been a devoted Ani Difranco fan. If a CD were as delicate as a record, I would've worn away the grooves on Out of Range (1994) long ago. Some of her lyrics—so wise, so feminist, and so sexy—floor me to this day. I even introduced my great aunt Holly to her music. In the late '90s my sister and I took her to see Ani perform at the Beacon Theater on the Upper West Side.  I'm not sure what she thought, exactly, when she heard this small, fierce woman sing the lyrics to "Untouchable Face," but she looked momentarily shocked and then, a little giddy. (Holly was a song-writer and playwright, so I like to think a tiny part of her appreciated Ani, even though her use of the F-bomb to address a lover might have shocked Holly's refined sensibility.) 

So...I was thrilled when I was asked to review Ani's memoir for the Women's Review of Books. Here's the review, for your reading pleasure:  Download DifrancoReview PDF

The Facts of Life

Three Portland high school students are reinventing sex ed   

{A shorter version of this story appeared in the September issue of Portland Monthly.}

When 18-year-old twins Milena and Sofia Ben-Zaken and their friend Tess Waxman, also 18, were at Sunnyside Environmental School, their sex ed instruction was laughably brief. "We had one day on puberty in the 5th grade," Milena recalls. “We didn’t really have sex ed in 8th grade, either, except for on the 8th grade retreat,” Sofia says. It wasn’t until their first year at Northeast's Grant High that they finally had a thorough sex ed class. By then, they said, a lot of their classmates had already been sexually assaulted.

This absence of meaningful sex ed is not uncommon in Portland Public Schools. Though Oregon has long had sexual health education requirements—with new, more progressive standards passing in 2015—many teachers cop out because they feel unqualified or uncomfortable teaching it. When Jenny Withycombe, PhD., joined PPS as “teacher on special assignments” for health and physical education just two years ago, sex ed at the middle school level was hit or miss. “It was sometimes happening, sometimes not,” she says. “More often not.” 

Tess (second from left, 2nd row), Sofia (second from left, front), and Milena (far right) founded Let's Talk last year as a way to teach their younger peers about sex (in all its forms), birth control, body issues, STIs, and consent.  

In the fall of 2016, the Ben-Zaken twins and Waxman set out to change that. With the guidance of their English teacher, Susan Bartley, the young women met every Monday, interviewing a cross-section of their peers about what they wished they’d learned in middle school. The resulting curriculum—they dubbed it “Let’s Talk”—is inclusive and robust. In addition to covering the basics of birth control, STIs, and sex (in all its varied forms), their lesson plans cover LGTBQ+ issues, body positivity, and consent. Over the past two years, they and a handful of their Grant High classmates have taught the lessons to 7th and 8th graders at Sunnyside, Laurelhurst, and Mt. Tabor.

Whitycombe was so impressed by a class they taught at Laurelhurst that she welcomed them on as “community partners.” She champions Let’s Talk to middle school teachers throughout the district. “They had clearly put so much time and effort into it,” says Whitycombe. She was also delighted to see the middle schoolers unusually at ease discussing sexual subjects with kids just a few years older than them. (Needless to say, that’s not the case when their math or science teachers cover the subject.) “We’re more their peers than their superiors,” says Sofia, who says they all served as counselors at Outdoor School, which served as an inspiration.

As any sex educator knows, props help break the ice. “Sometimes, if they’re really quiet, I make them pass around the herpes pillow,” says Milena. When she tosses it to a kid, they have to answer a question. The young women also use a plush “Sammy the Sperm” and 3-D replicas of the male and female reproductive systems. But Waxman’s favorite part is passing around the anonymous question box. The rule is that everyone must put something on a piece of paper—even if it’s just a drawing or a smiley face. That way, more students ask real questions. Even jokey questions, though, are an opportunity for education. “We get a lot of jokes about pulling out,” says Milena. “And we talk about how that’s not a sufficient method of birth control or a sufficient way to protect against STIs.” 

In the wake of the #MeToo movement, their lesson on consent—which they wrote two years ago, when they were juniors—seems especially crucial. Waxman will spice things up with a food metaphor. “I’ll say, ‘OK, Pretend you’re making someone a sandwich. You would want them to have what they want on the sandwich, right? Like, should I put mustard on it? Would you like this?’” If a group seems super uncomfortable, Milena says she reads directly from the lesson plan, which has examples of what is not consent. The list begins, “People CANNOT give consent when under the influences of drugs and alcohol. If someone sounds uneasy it does not count. If someone is pressuring someone into a yes, it does not count. If someone clearly states their limit or needs, do not try to bend them.” At the end of the unit, kids share something they’ve learned. “A lot of times it is about consent, which is cool to see,” Waxman says.

The trio are off to college this fall—Sofia is going to Occidental, Milena to Barnard, and Waxman to Mills College—but they’ve trained about 10 classmates to teach Let’s Talk during the 2018/2019 school year. Whithycombe—who says many PPS teachers, especially if they aren’t health teachers, are anxious about teaching sex ed—couldn’t be happier. “I think when the teachers see it [high school students teaching sex ed], it takes some of that fear away,” she says. “The word will keep spinning!”

 

She's Running

I wrote a feature on the amazing MHC alumnae who are running for political office for the summer issue of the Mount Holyoke Quarterly. Some are running for Congress, others are running for state representative or school board. 

Since Hillary Clinton’s defeat in the 2016 presidential election, record numbers of women have declared their candidacy for elected office. This season, Mount Holyoke alumnae are both on the ballot and behind the scenes.

Emily Martz ’94 left her job as deputy director at the Adirondack North Country Association to run for U.S. Congress in her conservative upstate New York district. The decision came, in part, out of a conviction that Democrats weren’t successfully communicating that they represent white, working-class people. “In my area in particular, which is 97 percent white and low-income, Democrats as a party did not articulate that they stand for their own constituents,” says Martz.

It also grieved her to see political discourse in America become so polarized. “One of the big reasons that we had the results we did in 2016 is because we just weren’t talking to each other,” says Martz, who majored in history and minored in politics at Mount Holyoke. She began having as many conversations as she could with people who had different political backgrounds than her own. By May, she had decided to run for the U.S. House seat in her district: New York’s 21st.

Martz was one of a record-busting 467 women running for seats in the U.S. House this year,* according to the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University’s Eagleton Institute of Politics. (The previous record had been 298, set during the 2012 election cycle.) Record numbers of women are running for other political offices as well: In mid-May, for example, 47 women were running for governor, including Stacey Abrams, who on May 22 won Georgia’s primary and could become the nation’s first black female governor if she wins in November. There’s also been a surge of women running at the local level, for state Senate and House, city council and school board. Most of these female candidates are left-leaning: 352 of those 467 women who ran for Congress are Democrats. And all of the alumnae we were able to identify for this article share this party affiliation. The 2016 presidential election of Donald Trump — a candidate with no political experience — over Hillary Clinton, who had many years of experience, including eight years as senator from New York, has for some been a motivating force.

Mount Holyoke women have long pursued careers in public service — some as elected politicians and others in appointed positions. The first to come to the minds of many alumnae is, of course, Frances Perkins, class of 1902, who was appointed secretary of labor by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1933. But Mount Holyoke has also produced a host of other well-known alumnae who have held political office, including Ella Tambussi Grasso ’40, who in 1974 was elected Connecticut’s first female governor, New York congresswoman Nita Melnikoff Lowey ’59, who is currently serving her 15th term, and Elaine Chao ’75, current U.S. secretary of transportation and secretary of labor under President George W. Bush. To identify alumnae who may join the ranks of these whose stories and legacies we already know, we engaged with clubs and Facebook groups, put out a greater call on social media, and searched the Alumnae Association’s directory. We found several women who are running for office — some for the first time — and others with careers in the political arena.

The story continues here.  And don't miss the sidebar on the women whose job is to remain behind the scenes—the recruiters, campaign managers, and policy advisors—from Mary Hughes ('74) to Kristen Elechko ('97). 

Portland Visionary Rukaiyah Adams

Every so often an assignment comes along that takes you out of your typical beat, making you so honored to be a journalist because it allows you to meet wise and captivating people and learn about their work and their passions. This was one of those moments. I got to profile Rukaiyah Adams for Bon Appetit's Healthyish series on "Superpowered Women"—women who are redefining wellness in their communities. As I spoke to Rukaiyah over lunch at her southwest Portland home, I realized that we have a lot in common: she's a runner, she invests in startups run by women and people of color (I don't do that, but I write about them), she loves Oregon wines (particularly Antica Terra) and she longs for our city to be a place where everyone is included in its successes.  I learned a lot from interviewing her. 

 

When Rukaiyah Adams left a New York City–based hedge fund in 2010, a non-compete clause forced her to take an extended break from work. Missing her mom, who had just been in a car accident, she flew to her hometown of Portland, Oregon.

“I went for a run in Forest Park. It was raining lightly, and the sound of rain tapping against the leaves, the smell of soil...” and that’s when it came to me: I am not a New Yorker.”

Nine months later, she packed her bags and moved to Portland, a decision that had major ripple effects. Not only did living in Portland reignite her relationship with David Chen, a lawyer in the Bay Area, it helped her switch gears professionally.

“I could make ten times more in New York, but I was past the mastery part,” Adams tells me, as she putters around the kitchen of her 1920s English-cottage-style home, making us lunch. “I needed to develop a point-of-view.” In Portland, she landed a job as director of investment management at the Standard, a financial services group, and, in 2013, was appointed to the board of the Oregon Investment Council, the state pension fund.

Today, Adams, 44, is the chief investment officer at Meyer Memorial Trust, the third largest foundation in Oregon, with assets of $788.5 million. Started by Oregon grocery store magnate Fred G. Meyer, the trust gives away roughly $35 million a year to Oregon-based social justice and advocacy organizations, equitable education and affordable housing initiatives, and environmental programs. These grants are only possible due to the success of the Meyer investment portfolio, which Adams manages.

“Rukaiyah is tackling big, thorny, important, often fraught issues,” says Eve Callahan, an executive vice president at Portland-based Umpqua Bank and long-time admirer. “And she’s doing it with such grace and generosity.”

But when I ask her what she does at Meyer, Adam’s reply is pithy: “My job is to make the money.”

Long runs in nature—she loves jogging along the Willamette River as well as in 5,200-acre Forest Park—help keep Adams poised in her high-pressure position. “Believe it or not, being healthy and having outlets is pretty important to the technical requirements of the job,” she says as we sit at her marble kitchen table, eating iceberg lettuce with goat cheese, sliced cucumbers and radishes, and shaved carrots, along with avocado smeared on toasted sourdough. “If the person managing money is pulling out her hair and crying, it generates a lot of stress!”

In high school, she played basketball and soccer, and, at Carleton College in Minnesota, she was passionate about rugby. Running has even spurred radical investment changes that have been good for the Meyer portfolio.

“Once, in 2014, I was running in Forest Park and stopped and heard the trickle of water and decided that day to switch our investments from oil to clean water.” She has not regretted the decision—global water stocks continue to outperform oil stocks by a considerable margin.

More recently, Adams has shifted Meyer’s strategy from a more traditional one of investing in global markets to mission-related regional investing.

“Historically, Meyer has focused on venture capital and accelerators—which has done quite well,” says Adams. “But, looking back over who has benefitted from that investing, it’s the same people who normally benefit.” Over the past year, Adams has stepped up investments in businesses run by women and people of color. In 2016, she invested $2 million in Nitin Rai’s Elevate Capital, a fund that invests in Pacific Northwest startups led by women and minorities. (Elevate was a seed investor in feminist tomboy clothing company Wildfang as well as in Hue Noir, a makeup company geared to people of color.)

But sexy startups only comprise a small part of Oregon’s economy. “The reality is that most brown people and people of color are employed by small businesses. And we need to grow those businesses,” Adams says. At the moment, Adams has her eye on a few businesses around the state. She’s particularly keen to invest in firms that bridge the urban-rural divide. “They don’t know it, but I’m watching them closely,” Adams says, conspiratorially. “I’m watching how they respond to stress. How they manage their time. How steady they are over time. When you invest in someone, it’s like getting married to them.”

On that subject, on New Year’s Eve, Adams wed Chen in an elegant ceremony at the Parker Palm Springs. Adams paused as she sliced vegetables for our salad to show me some photos: One of her and Chen all dressed up in their wedding best, looking radiant and joyous; one of Adams hugging her mom in front of a decorative concrete screen wall.

Several times during our interview, she tells me with pride what a fabulous cook Chen is. The youngest of three boys (by about a decade), he spent a lot of time at home with his mom, who taught him to be confident in a kitchen. He has a habit of leaving a cookbook lying on the kitchen counter—Andy Ricker’s Pok Pok, for instance, or Yotam Ottolenghi’s Plenty—with a note: “Pick a recipe.” Adams grabs the Pok-Pok cookbook and flips to Ricker’s recipe for Vietnamese turmeric-marinated catfish with noodles and herbs, and I glimpse a note she scrawled beneath it commemorating that he made it for her on Valentine’s Day last year. Adams says their division of labor is simple: she takes care of the baking and roasting, and he does all the cooking. (She happily does the dishes.)

Adams also loves Oregon wines, particularly winemaker Maggie Harrison’s Antica Terra. (“All I do is hug the bottles when I get them,” Adams says.) But her weekday routine does not allow for leisurely meals—at least until dinner. Like many other West Coast investors, she’s up by 6:00 a.m. to check the markets. “So even if I’m not at work, I’m working.” If she runs in the morning before work, she’ll grab a yogurt or piece of fruit on her way out the door. “I love those shredded wheat things that have sugar on top, which I probably shouldn’t eat, but they’re delicious,” she says. Once at the Meyer Memorial Trust office in the Pearl District, she’s at her desk for a few hours, and then around 11:00 a.m. she goes for a 20-minute walk. “I usually have to miss lunch, then I have to gobble it standing up at the sink,” she says. In an effort to eat more mindfully, she’s started bringing leftovers. By around 3:00 p.m., she’s ready for a cup of coffee and a walk—without her phone. “I like to smell the city and see people,” says Adams.

Lately, though, she’s working on cutting back. “2018 is going to be the year of no. I have two talks to give this year, and that’s it,” Adams tells me, with what sounds like resolution. But you get a sense that this woman would never be satisfied sitting on the sidelines.

When Adams moved back to Portland in 2011, she found a city in flux. Always a majority-white city, Portland was gentrifying at a rapid clip, with black and brown families being pushed out to the suburbs. A fourth generation Portlander—her great grandmother moved to Portland from Louisiana in the late 1950s—she had already witnessed gentrification first hand. Walnut Park, the neighborhood she grew up in, is now known as the Alberta Arts district.

As we eat, she tells me the devastating history of Lower Albina, better known today as the Rose Quarter. A vibrant African American and immigrant neighborhood full of bungalows, jazz clubs, corner groceries, and churches, it was affordable and easily walkable to downtown and the neighborhood known as the garment district (now the Pearl). In the late 1950s, the city declared the area blighted and leveled it, making way for the Interstate, Memorial Coliseum, and a hospital that never materialized. Residents, including Adams’ great grandmother and the German family she rented a room from, were forced to move out. It was an act of racial injustice that many Portlanders are still smarting from.

Adams is now on the board of Albina Vision, a coalition of community leaders and developers that aims to redevelop the Rose Quarter with affordability, equity, and walkability in mind. If Adams and the rest of the Albina Vision board get their way, the Rose Quarter will have a public connection to the Willamette River (right now, the lovely bike-and-pedestrian Eastbank Esplanade ends abruptly at the Steel Bridge), a walkable street grid from the 1950s, and affordable housing as a form of reparations to the families who were displaced.

Adams pauses and her voice drops to a whisper, so that I need to lean in to hear her. “My grandmother wrote in her Bible, ‘Dear God, I hope I’ve made the right decision in bringing my family to this place. And someday, I hope that one of my children has love, meaningful work, and safety.’” says Adams. “And I am that child.”

Gretchen Carlson on Fighting Sexual Harassment

The news anchor encourages women in the wine and spirits industry to speak up and demand action

When Fox News anchor Gretchen Carlson came forward in 2016 with sexual harassment allegations against Fox News chairman and CEO Roger Ailes, there was no MeToo hashtag or Time’s Up movement. “It was an excruciating decision,” says Carlson. “I felt like I had jumped off a cliff by myself.” In an inspiring keynote address at the Women of the Vine and Spirits Global Symposium Napa, California, this week, Carlson encouraged women to have the courage to speak up about sexual harassment and sexual assault in their workplaces.

Speaking Out

Like many women, Carlson has endured sexual harassment and assault throughout her career. She was harassed by a stalker for four years early in her television days. Screenwriter William Goldman wrote a book in which he referred to her as Miss Piggy for being overweight when she was Miss America in 1989 (she was, in fact, 110 pounds). She was also sexually assaulted twice, in her 20s, while starting out in the television industry. The first time, she had cold-called a high-level TV executive. He spent the day showing her around the offices, making calls on her behalf, and then took her out for dinner. In the backseat of a cab, though, he attacked her. “All of a sudden he lunged [at] me and was on top of me and his tongue was down my throat. I screamed for the driver to stop and let me out of the car,” says Carlson. “At the old age of 22, I didn’t realize that breaking into the television business also meant letting him break into my pants.”

The second time, she was in Los Angeles, meeting with an agent. “Again, we were in a car—he grabbed my neck and he forced my head so hard into his crotch I couldn’t breathe,” says Carlson, adding that she managed to escape.

“Only recently did I realize that these cases weren’t actually harassment—they were assault,” says Carlson. “But like so many female survivors, I thought, ‘I’ve got this. I’m okay. Just move on, Gretchen.’ I bought into the myth that somehow I’d asked for it, and thought I wouldn’t be believed if I told people anyway.” It took Carlson 25 years to call these two instances assault out loud.

So while she encourages women to speak up about sexual harassment and assault—and also urges men to speak out when they see it happening in the workplace—she realizes how tough it can be. When Carlson’s complaints went public in 2016, she was most concerned about the impact her case would have on her children, who were 11 and 12 at the time. “They were of paramount concern to me,” she says. “My face was constantly on the news, and they were going to school.” But ultimately, she says, she underestimated her kids. Her daughter came home from school bewildered by all the gossip but said, “Mom, I felt so proud to tell them that you are my mom!” And when her daughter finally stood up to two kids at school who had been taunting her, she told Carlson, “Mommy, I found the bravery and the courage to do it because I saw you do it.”

Continue reading at SevenFifty Daily.