Postcards in the Time of Pandemic

Postcard by Azul Tellez

Along with just about everything in all of our lives, Covid-19 put a major crimp in the member-to-member engagement that makes our organization special. With summer socials and World Cafes off the table, the membership team at ninety-nine girlfriends wanted to find a way for members to feel connected that didn’t involve screens. The Postcard Project was the result, where team members hand-illustrated blank postcards to send to one another. Take a look .

There were drawings, such as Heidi’s Yewman’s poignant sketch of two faceless humans in an embrace. The caption read, “I miss hugging.” Lan Fenders sent three pictures of the smiliest dog you have ever seen. In “Things I’ve Learned To Do or Started Doing During Quarantine,” Amy Vargas revealed that she now cuts the hair of everyone in her family, grooms the dog, colors her own hair and is taking an online meditation class. My own postcard depicted the Eiffel Tower, along with a plaintive note (en francais) about how much I miss traveling. Nancy Johnson designed the postcards and assembled a slideshow of the whole project. Vaune Kemp donated the printing. For anyone who wishes she could have been part of this, girlfriend Kaye Gardner O’Kearny (klokearny@gmail.com) has volunteered to coordinate an expanded postcard project.

— Grayson Dempsey

Postcard by Nancy Johnson

Postcard by Grayson Dempsey

Spotlights Ready to Shine

The last time I had an in-person meeting on Girlfriend business was a lovely breakfast upstairs at Café Du Berry in late February. Five of us met to begin planning our Spotlight Study Series -- four teams to research and present out on topics that members had identified as priorities. The coffee was strong, the conversation was stirring and I left energized and excited to begin the work.

Three weeks later, our world completely changed and we wondered if we could go ahead at all and if so, how would we do it. With a pandemic coursing through our nation and the planet, would enough girlfriends be interested? Was this the right time to launch the project? After much discussion, and with some trepidation, we decided to move forward.

The spotlight is now shining on the 28 team members who researched, wrote reports and are planning virtual presentations. You can access their written reports here and sign up to attend the virtual presentations (formerly called Discovery Forum) here.

I very much look forward to the next time I can have breakfast out with a group of Girlfriends and plan another project together in person. And the experience is a wonderful reminder of what we can accomplish, even when we are only coming together in the virtual world.

— Barbara Hilyer

Congratulations to our 2020 Award Winners!

When I saw the email from ninety-nine girlfriends announcing our 2020 Awardees, I smiled and for a few moments basked in positive emotions.

Gratitude: For all the members who worked so hard to redesign and shorten our grant-giving process, who reviewed all the applications, who designed and managed the voting process, who made the Meet the Finalists videos (below) and hosted the event, and everyone else who made this happen.

Hope & Awe: Every year, every month I find out more about the work so many amazing nonprofits do in our communities. They help people, help families, advocate for changes to increase equity and justice. And they do it day in and day out, in some cases 24 hours a day, every day.  

Agency: At a time when I often feel the challenges facing the world are so big that I don’t know if I can do anything to have real impact, our grantee partners and ninety-nine girlfriends offer me agency to help make real change possible.

Community: I have never met most of the ninety-nine girlfriends. And yet, I know there are 500 women standing beside me, who care deeply about our world and who stand with one another both in times of difficulty and celebration.

I would like to extend a deeply felt thank you to everyone. If you need a smile you can see the list of 2020 Awardees here.

— Kaye Gardner-O’Kearny

Breathe

I love quotes. I end nearly all of my emails with a quote that I think somehow connects to the content of the email. Quotes can be both inspiring and fun. They start conversations. They provoke thought.

One of my all-time favorites is Terri Guillemets’ “The wisest one-word sentence? Breathe.” 

This quote is even more thought-provoking now, in the face of the deaths of George Floyd and Eric Garner and the others who had their breath stolen from them by people who didn’t value their lives.

Then there’s COVID-19, which has ended many lives by attacking the lungs of grandmas and grandpas and parents and siblings, making breathing impossible.

And there are environmental quality issues stealthily impacting the air we breathe.

As a student and advocate of meditation I believe that, at this time of great stress and upheaval, one of the smartest things we can do is breathe. Breathe slowly and deeply and then do it again and again and again and while you’re breathing remember what a privilege it is to draw another breath.

“If you want to conquer the anxiety of life, live in the moment, live in the breath.” ― Amit Ray, Om Chanting and Meditation

— Tammy Wilhoite

PDX Bridge helps foster youth achieve the dream of a college education

Back in 2016,  ninety-nine girlfriends’ first-ever grant recipient was PDX Bridge. It’s an innovative nonprofit that “bridges” young people coming out of foster care, homelessness and the juvenile justice system – and sometimes all three – from high school through the first year of community college. As of this year, PDX Bridge has guided almost 300 students into Portland Community College and Mt. Hood Community College – impressive, since 50 percent of this group typically does not even graduate high school.

“That first grant was really important,” says Emily Froimson, executive vice-president of the national organization Achieving the Dream, now the umbrella for PDX Bridge. Emily, impressed by the group’s scrupulous grant-giving process, became a ninety-nine girlfriends member herself in 2017.  “The grant helped us set up a citywide initiative that brought together over three dozen partners – such as social service agencies, alternative schools, community colleges, New Avenues for Youth – to build communication, get everybody in the same room, and keep these students from falling through the cracks,” she explains.

The Covid-19 pandemic has heightened students’ unmet needs, for example offering remote services, providing refurbished laptops and funds for food and housing as jobs continue to be lost. “Our students have a real risk of disengagement, of not feeling like they belong in college,” says Emily. “They typically have not done well in traditional schools, and they require more assertive outreach. They are fragile, and over the last decade the support systems have become increasingly fragile. We are expecting more need.”

As part of Achieving the Dream, PDX Bridge works with individual students and community colleges themselves. Recognizing that community colleges are America’s most accessible gateway to better economic opportunity, Achieving the Dream is a network of more than 277 institutions of higher education and other non-profit and foundation partners that champions “evidence-based institutional improvement.” The agency, founded in 2004, describes itself as “the most comprehensive non-governmental reform movement for student success in higher education history, dedicated to helping more than 4 million community college students in 44 states and the District of Columbia have a better chance of achieving their dreams.”

Statistics never tell the whole story, though, so let’s look at one Portland student. She used a $500 student support gift from Achieving the Dream to help with move-in costs so she, her partner and their 18-month-old son were able to leave the shelter where they were living and rent their own apartment. She hopes to work in the medical field and will continue her education at PCC with the support of the agency’s Future Connect scholarship.

That’s a dream on the way to being achieved, and a bridge to a different life. Seeded four years ago by ninety-nine girlfriends.

— Heidi Yorkshire

The Balm of Bees

There may be as many ways to cope with these challenging and uncertain times as there are people. After I started collecting bees last spring, I read a line in Lulu Miller’s new book Why Fish Don’t Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life that may partly explain my new passion:  “Psychologists have studied … the sweet salve that collecting can offer in times of anguish.” This quote seemed perfectly suited to our current times and my new pastime. 

Our family owns forest land in the coast range west of Portland. Over the years, we’ve monitored a variety of things in our forests, from birds to amphibians and creek bugs to water temperatures. We’ve often talked about what else to add. Last summer  I was introduced to the Oregon Bee Atlas (OBA), and began collecting bees in our forests.

Native bee populations are declining throughout the world, including in Oregon. In order to understand how and why this is happening, the Oregon Bee Atlas is developing an inventory of the state’s native bees and their associated plant-hosts (where the bees collect pollen and nectar). The organization also  is conducting ongoing  surveys of bee populations to assess their health. Through OBA, native bees, collected by citizen volunteers throughout the spring and summer flowering season, are identified and become part of a publicly accessible database.

As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, the OBA training materials moved online and time spent in our forests, where social distancing is the norm, became even more appealing. I have been collecting bees on a weekly basis throughout this spring and summer. You can get an idea of my bee collecting with this video, which shows a yellow-faced bumblebee gathering  pollen on goldenrod, a bright yellow flower.

I was collecting bees off of this goldenrod when I spied what looked like a sleeping bumble bee. I captured it gently in my net and was surprised to find a bright yellow spider clinging to the bee’s back.Appropriately, it was called the goldenrod crab spider (Misumena vatia). The spider had its long legs wrapped around the bee with its fangs dug into the crease between the bee’s head and thorax. In the photo below, although the spider is no longer attached and therefore does not show the “venom” position where the spider injects a neurotoxin into the bee, you get a great view of the spider on the bee’s back. The time I’ve spent observing and collecting has provided a very welcome balm during these uncertain times.

— Pam Hayes

Put a Stamp On It: When an Envelope Makes a Statement

Thanks to girlfriend Heidi Yorkshire for reminding us, in an earlier blog, to watch this month’s PBS documentary in observance of the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage. I had my own memory-jog about this important occasion as I stood in line at the Savier Street post office in NW Portland. (Yes, I was masked, yes I was socially distanced and yes the guys at the counter were also masked, and working behind giant plastic shields. But that is not the point of this post.)

‘Fess up: Are you a creature of the Pleistocene, like me? Do you still, occasionally, write actual checks from an actual checking account at your bank? Do you put them in an envelope and mail them? Here is where I fall into whatever geological age came before the Pleistocene: I send birthday cards, graduation cards, congratulations-on-your-new-job/home/spouse cards. I have a wide array of cards designed to say thank-you. I have been through enough tragedy to know the meaning of a sincere, hand-written sympathy note. I would shoot myself before I would stoop to e-sympathy.

The glass case in the center of that small post office branch houses what used to be known as “special edition” stamps, more formally called commemoratives. My theory is, if you’re going to mail something, at least make it look interesting—colorful and possibly even artistic. I have a drawer full of cool stamps that I hoard for various missives. My collection of Wonder Woman stamps is especially impressive.

Kay, the nice guy who has been franking my packages since I moved to Portland, said he had never seen wrapping quite like the configuration I placed on his scale. “Trapezoidal,” I said, explaining the ziggurat of puzzles clad in brown Fred Meyer bags and headed for our granddaughters in California. Then I asked if I could please buy several sheets of the new forever stamps I had spied in the glass case, marking the 100th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, guaranteeing women the right to vote.

The stamp was designed by Postal Service art director Ethel Kessler, with original art by Nancy Stahl. Alas, said Kay, not yet. Although the glass case label said “available in August,” what it meant was sometime in August. Maybe that means Aug. 18, the actual ratification anniversary date.

The new imprint is the Postal Service’s latest acknowledgment of the fight women waged to prove that when our country’s founders crafted that phrase about all men being equal—oops, it simply slipped their mind to mention women as well. A 32-cent stamp in 1995, for example, took note with the words “Freedom/Equality/Progress” of the fact that for more than a century, women had been denied the right to vote. The same year, a 78-cent stamp honored suffragist Alice Paul, founder of the National Women’s Party. It was Paul who organized a march of 8,000 people down Pennsylvania Avenue, the day before Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration.

As a compulsive package-mailer, I will likely be back on Savier Street by mid-August. I will scoop up many sheets of the new suffrage stamps, just so Wonder Woman will have some company in my desk drawer. Meantime, Kay advised me to consider grabbing some of the new Bugs Bunny stamps. “They’ll go fast,” he counseled. So I sent off a sheet of Bugs and his pals to our 6-year-old granddaughter Annie, in hopes that she will become a letter-writer, too.

— Elizabeth Mehren

Giving Rise to R.I.S.E.

In December, 2018, ninety-nine girlfriends provided five organizations with “Core Mission” awards of $12,200. That’s a pittance compared to the $100,000 the groups originally applied for, but it was a boost nonetheless. Here’s how the Core Mission funds helped the Virginia Garcia Foundation. 

The Virginia Garcia Memorial Foundation is the financial and community-support backbone of  the Virginia Garcia Health Center. Their 50,000-plus Washington and Yamhill County annual clients speak more than 60 languages and include farmers, small business owners, domestic and childcare workers, and migrant and undocumented workers. They face economic, racial and social barriers as well as challenges to access to health care, transportation, food and housing. Virginia Garcia Health Center and its 600 employees offer a vast list of services to help their clients overcome these obstacles.

State and local policymakers often have a remote relationship with their constituents. But the  staff of Virginia Garcia have a “boots on the ground” perspective because they work directly with their clients. They not only assess problems, they find solutions. To give them a voice and tap into their collective power, Policy and Advocacy Officer Felicita Monteblanco designed a five-month training program called “RISE: Reach. Inspire. Support. Engage” to educate Virginia Garcia staff  in policy making and advocacy.

Ninety-nine girlfriends’ $12,200 grant helped give rise to R.I.S.E., and the impact is already being felt. At least five R.I.S.E. graduates have joined public boards, councils, commissions and committees, one sought a City Council seat in the City of Newberg and many more are now armed with the knowledge, skills and power to enact real change in their communities. 

— Marcy Newton

Urban Gleaners Hopes Portlanders Start Wasting Food Again Soon

With the Covid-19 pandemic upending so many social services, we checked in with ninety-nine girlfriends’ 2017 grantee partner Urban Gleaners to see how the agency is weathering the storm. Urban Gleaners’ mission is to re-purpose and distribute excess and wasted food from restaurants, groceries, event venues and businesses to food-insecure families – and, in the process, keep perfectly good food out of the waste stream. 

Unfortunately, 85 percent of the agency’s food sources no longer exist. “The pandemic has completely changed what we can do,” says Tracy Oseran, founder and executive director of Urban Gleaners. From running 67 distribution sites that fed approximately 5000 people per week, the organization has had to slice its distributions to food boxes for around 500 families per week.

“It’s heartbreaking – we just don’t have the product,” says Oseran. “The supply chain is disrupted, as you can see by the empty shelves in the supermarket. Our model is based on eliminating food waste, and that has dried up.”

Urban Gleaners is creatively pursuing alternative food sources, including buying produce from farmers who previously relied on restaurant clients. Mainstays like Dave’s Killer Bread and Market of Choice are still contributing, and the agency is also buying through mega-wholesaler Sysco. One-time donations turn up, like 2000 pounds of healthful and delicious sausage that didn’t meet a local meat processor’s standards for retail sale. 

In the meantime, Urban Gleaners is distributing food boxes at four summer lunch program sites operated by Portland Parks and Recreation. Oseran continues to seek out other sources of high-quality food to serve the tremendous – and growing – need. 

“For the time being we’ll hobble along, and this too shall pass,” she reflects. “We’re Americans, and we like to waste. I have no doubt that we will start wasting again before too long.” 

When we do, Urban Gleaners will be there to feed Oregonians.

— Heidi Yorkshire

Elsewhere: I Be Black Girl

Just when we at ninety-nine girlfriends thought we had the coolest collective giving circle name going, along comes I Be Black Girl (IBBG).

Ashlei(cq) Spivey, founder of the Omaha-based group, said the name was inspired by author/professor/feminist/activist bell hooks—and in particular, by hooks’ book “Be Boy Buzz,” which Spivey often reads to her 6-year-old son.

Spivey’s schedule is dizzying. She co-owns an Omaha restaurant, Best Burger. She works at a private foundation in Kansas City. She has a 6-year-old. At 33, she has a background in issues involving racial and gender justice. She lives those issues as well, as often she is the only Black woman in a leadership role in her workplace.

IBBG began organically, Spivey said in a telephone interview, as an effort to extend the national conversation about philanthropy, and to allow “everyday women to see themselves as philanthropists.” Voting members must identify as Black women or girls, and must contribute a minimum annual donation of $150.

The group has given out more than $100,000 since its launch in 2017, with grants ranging from $3500 to $7500. Awardees are not required to have 5013c nonprofit status, but must serve at least 75% Black women or girls or be led by Black women. Grant recipients also are encouraged to provide volunteer opportunities to IBBG members.

But handing out checks is only part of IBBG’s mission. The group promotes economic empowerment and entrepreneurship and encourages connections among Black women and girls. IBBG organizes events ranging from film discussions to entrepreneur think tanks to “Mama and Kid” meetups. IBBG information sessions target issues that specifically concern their membership, such as #CurlCrew, a move to end natural hair discrimination in Nebraska workplaces.

Along with educational forums and social gatherings, IBBG also offers “merch” ranging from T-shirts (in mom-and-kid sizes), tote bags, mugs and computer stickers.

“We’re the first of our kind to be so comprehensive,” Spivey said.

– Elizabeth Mehren