How Does She Do It?

How Do You Do It? – Follow a passion and volunteer

My last story about Stephanie Ellis-Smith told us what opportunities may be waiting when we follow our passion. Stephanie took that terrifying step of putting her profession, and all that it brought (identity, status, security) -- behind in order to pursue something different – what it was, she didn’t yet know. Her new world opened up eventually through volunteering but first, she had to be willing to walk away from all that was familiar.

How have you done it?

Do you have an experience to share of pursuing a passion? What did you do, and where did it lead you? How about a volunteer pursuit? Do you have advice to share about where to go to find fulfilling volunteer opportunities, or how to shape your volunteer experience to get the most from it?

Click the comment button below this post and share your experience and ideas. There may be someone reading this who is looking for your guidance.

In my next stories, I write about women whose lives changed, not because they pursued an opportunity but because of an unexpected event that they were challenged to meet. Look for these, coming soon.

Thanks for reading, and thanks for leaving your ideas on How Does She Do It?

- Janet Pelz

 

   My husband Bob and daughter Casey take the plunge, in an icy stream

Stephanie Ellis-Smith: Volunteering Changed Her Life (and it could change yours)

It was the way that both Donna Moodie (see January archive) and Trish Dziko (see March archive) offered her name and hers only when I asked them whom I should interview next. “Have you met Stephanie Ellis-Smith?” they both asked. No, was my answer, but clearly I was meant to.

Not long after having found Stephanie at our café rendezvous (are you Stephanie?) I wondered how it was that I had lived in this town so long and known as many people as I did and not yet met her. I suspect Stephanie has this affect on everybody.

Stephanie Ellis-Smith by her own admission is a preparer. Like the scientist she was trained to be, there is a clarity and organization about how she expresses herself, and how she approaches life and work. And yet within that context, there is boundless creativity and impulse and passion, like the artist and cultural thinker she has come to be.

“I am inconsistent and I take some pride in that. To think bigger you do need to be inconsistent. I change my mind a lot. I like that about myself.”

After she had “literally wrung every nickel out of my education at UCLA“, taking classes wherever her curiosity led her, she finished with a double major in biochemistry and English literature. Which, she admits, should have tipped her off to what would come later.

She set out on a biochemistry career and then moved to Seattle with her new husband, Russian historian and author Doug Smith. In the world of science, she had developed a name for herself. Accomplishments aside, being noticed was never a problem.

“Being Black and being female – well, there weren’t very many women at all in the field, and no Black people period. Everybody knew who I was. There are plusses and minuses to that. When I was hot I was a superstar, and perhaps unnecessarily so. I think expectations were low, so when I would hit the mark, she is a genius! And I would think, no, I’m just doing my job. But the flip side – if I would make a mistake… well, we told you about those people. They’re not very committed, they’re not very focused.”

In Seattle Stephanie almost lived in the lab, working grueling 80-hour weeks while earning a meager paycheck. “I never saw my new husband – he would bring dinner to me at the lab. And I finally just said, you know, I don’t want to do this any more. But my whole identity had been wrapped up in science. That was a very, very difficult transition, not knowing what was coming next.”

   Stephanie Ellis-Smith with husband, Russian historian Douglas Smith

Released into daylight, she set out to discover the city she had been living in but “I had never seen an inch of because I was always in the lab.” One day she stumbled into the Francine Seders Art Gallery. (See related story on Gail Grinnell, December archives). Stephanie had heard that African American artist Jacob Lawrence lived in Seattle and on a lark asked the gallery staff if they happened to have any of his works.

“They were so kind they pulled down everything they had even though they knew I wasn’t going to buy anything.” After many hours of this they suggested Stephanie seek out “this little non-profit that had prints (of Lawrence) they were selling, for much less money to raise money for their work.”

It took Stephanie a few weeks, batting away a creeping depression that came with her lack of life direction, before she tracked down the organization. “It was a non-profit technically, but essentially it was just two art historians who were cataloging, researching and re-photographing for publication all of the extant works of Jacob Lawrence.”

On the white board in this little office was written in bold letters: FIND A RESEARCHER. “So I asked, what do you need a researcher for? And they told me they needed someone to call every single gallery in the country to ask if they had any works of Jacob Lawrence. So I said, well, I’m a researcher. I had zero marketable skills, much to my father’s chagrin after spending all that money on my education. I mean, I couldn’t even send a fax. But they said they just needed someone who could handle a lot of information, and I said, I can do that.”

Stephanie began volunteering 10 hours a week making scores of phone calls. After about six months, her volunteer post transitioned into a fulltime job which she held for five years. “The project we were doing is called a catalogue raisonné. It’s very, very prestigious. Only the most highly esteemed artists have a catalogue raisonné done in their honor. And this was the first one ever done for an artist of African descent. So it was a big deal. All of this I learned in the process.”

Stephanie Ellis-Smith is an evangelist for volunteering, and understandably so. Volunteering changed her life.

“Volunteering gives you the opportunity to just feed your soul, open your mind to doing something else. A job is not going to do that – that’s not the function of employment. With volunteering, you explore worlds and ideas that you can’t when you’re only working and coming home to turn on the TV. I just find it to be incredibly, incredibly rewarding. I mean, how would I have ever met art historians, or Jacob Lawrence and his wife Gwendolyn?

“I loved them so much – just thinking about them gives me chills. I’m very close to my family. I grew up with both sets of my grandparents. Leaving home, one thing I missed was being around old folks, so they were in a way my surrogate grandparents. And it was such a lovely way to learn about art history and museums and art book publishing, design -- the whole nine yards.”

Stephanie finished the catalogue raisonné, coming to appreciate how “Jacob’s work was unequivocally about the African American experience, but it spoke to so many people from all these different backgrounds – white, black, rich, poor – they each found nougats and kernels of importance in his work. I learned from that how the African American culture is so unique but so universal – it represents monumental triumph paired with struggle.”

One of Stephanie’s favorite works of Jacob Lawrence: “The Lovers” Taken from the site: The Jacob and Gwen Knight Lawrence virtual resource center

Working on that project along with her reading of Quintard Taylor’s The Forging of a Black Community – the History of Seattle’s Central District  “opened my eyes to the unique and inspiring history of African-Americans in the Pacific Northwest.”    

So, with a how-to book on starting non-profits and a founding Board who shared the vision: To inspire new thoughts and challenge assumptions about African American culture, Stephanie Ellis-Smith created the Central District Forum for Arts & Ideas.

“I wanted to get people thinking about African American arts and culture from a broader perspective -- more contemporary; what people are thinking about now.”

Initially, she gave the effort three short years, but a track record of successful programs kept it strong enough for Stephanie to retire from the organization ten years later. Along the way, she and the CD Forum collected commendations, including the 2004 Mayor’s Art Award for Outstanding Contribution to the Community, and the 2008 Seattle Weekly recognition for Best Expander of Cultural Boundaries.

Their program, Black to the Future – Blacks in Sci Fi, “was amazing. Hundreds of people came, 60% of them from outside Washington. It was avant garde, intellectual and slick.” Under her leadership, CD Forum examined LGBT issues in the Black culture, (“there’s a big strain of conservatism in the African American community”), identity issues, such as who is African American, and the impact of gentrification in the CD. Dance, theatre, and Food as Art were also part of the dynamic year-round programming that continues with Stephanie no longer serving as director.

“I loved the CD Forum, but it was my job. My first duty to this community is to unleash two well adjusted kids.” At ages 10 and 6, raising her kids is now Stephanie’s job. “I cannot outsource the existential growing pains of a 10 year-old girl – that is MY job, no one else’s. I’m just fortunate enough to be able to do this.

“I miss having an identity entirely around my job. But it’s actually more important to me to spend these next 10 years at home and get my kids out of the house to the best of my ability, and then I can get back to that. Right now, this is my priority.”

Setting priorities is a big theme in Stephanie’s life. “For the things that are really important -- you’ll find time for it. If people want to shake things up, get into a new way of thinking, we all have two hours a week we can spend on that – we just do. Whether it’s volunteering or whether it’s rollerblading. It comes down to priorities. We all have the same 24 hours a day.”

In her 24 hours, Stephanie continues to find time for volunteer pursuits, or “community writ large.” She was recently appointed to the Seattle Arts Commission and continues on the board of KUOW public radio, (to which she hopes you will pledge if you didn’t get around to it during the recent drive). She’s got more time to volunteer at her kids’ school, and most importantly, time for family and friends – “community writ small.”

Stephanie’s physical community is about to change for a while. She and the family are moving to London for a year while her husband is writing and researching his next book.

“My 20’s were about science, my 30’s were about art. I turn 40 in June – I think my 40’s will be about family. I can’t wait till my 50’s – I’m not sure what that will be.”

Now that I’ve met Stephanie Ellis-Smith, I can’t wait to know either.

- Janet Pelz

Stephanie Ellis-Smith (far right) with sister and parents

Stephanie’s not-so secrets for How She Does It:

• With a lot of support and sacrifice from my parents and family. I was raised essentially by 6 adults. They poured every ounce of everything that either they earned or mental energy into my sister and me. They gave me my education, which I think gave me the tools to manage my life currently.
• I ask for help, from friends, I hire help. I have no shame. I don’t believe in running myself into the ground. Self-preservation is a big driving force.
• I play squash to get out my energies and anxieties; I do Pilates to keep me relaxed.
• I take a lot of time with my husband who is my best friend, and other friends, socializing, going out to parties. I don’t think people do that enough, but it’s so important – it feeds your soul.

What books has Stephanie read recently?

• The Unwritten Rules of Friendship, by Natalie Madorsky Elman and Eileen Kennedy-Moore
• Wench, by her friend Dolen Perkins-Valdez (Stephanie just did a book launch party for her)
• The Pearl, by Stephanie’s husband Douglas Smith

(to find these books, click the Amazon ad on the right side of this page)

Whom does Stephanie want me to interview next?

• Sarah DeRuyck – a mom, a volunteer, a runner, and a PhD candidate. “She’ll be mortified I gave you her name but she deserves it.”

Esther Instebo: A Century of Giving

Esther Instebo rises slowly as my mother and I walk through the apartment door she has kept ajar for our benefit. She invites us into her tidy, compact living room, offering the two comfortable chairs while she settles onto the seat of her wheeled walker. Looking around the room I have a sense that everything here has a purpose and a place. The bookcase is the first piece that catches my eye, likely because soon upon getting settled Esther points out a particular volume there.

It’s Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. With a hint of the first grade teacher that she was for 41 years Esther tells me, “I think everybody should read that book. She’s definitely a brilliant woman. She’s also Canadian. I think Canadians are particularly good critiquing us – they can see our follies.”

And this is how we start our two hour conversation, which journeys far back into the past and farther into the future than many people half her age have gone.

Along the way it becomes clear to me that Esther Instebo has quite a head for numbers.

She would demure on this point, insisting that it was her late husband Al, retired from Puget Power as an accountant, who wore those stripes in their family.

But I would have to differ. Consider the evidence.

This year Mrs. Instebo will claim the big round number, turning one more tumbler on the date clock -- to reach 100 years old.

(Kelly Pelz, left, with friend Esther Instebo)

And how about these numbers? She was born in 1910 on a farm in northern Minnesota and got her first teaching job at age 19 through a program to encourage high school graduates to teach in rural schools. Hers was a one-room schoolhouse with 11 students spanning eight grades. She had a three mile walk to and from school each day, many of those battling the snow of Minnesota winter. For this she was paid $85 a month.

Esther’s body may not be moving quickly these days, but her mind has an agile grasp on the importance of numbers and not just those from her distant past. She can cite the cost benefit analysis of family planning ($1.00 spent saves $4.39 on pregnancy care) or the amount of money Senator Patty Murray has amassed for her re-election campaign ($5 million), or the level of taxes happily paid by Norwegians, for which they are provided universal health care, among other benefits (50%).

These days, Esther applies her numbers savvy to her ardent support of Senators Murray and Maria Cantwell, Planned Parenthood, and other charities important to her. Her reputation for filling tables at their fundraising events is legion, often paying for others to attend. “I just feel it’s our obligation to participate. There are so many people who could buy those tickets without even missing the money. I don’t have that much, but we all need to make sure that these people stay elected.”

Her career as a political fundraiser started when a friend invited her to a luncheon for Patty Murray back in 1998, and Esther decided it would be fun to take her sister as a birthday present. She had a wonderful time, sitting next to a social worker who knew a High Point housing project family that Esther had helped while she was teaching at the elementary school nearby. Esther was hooked. Since then she has become a mainstay at such events, often bringing with her dozens of her aging neighbors.

She is particularly loyal to women leaders and supported Hillary Clinton’s Presidential bid with passion. It was then that her fundraising prowess was caught by Erik Lacitis, who wrote in his feature story about her in the  Seattle Times:

It's doubtful that there is an older active fundraiser in Seattle. She sits in her studio apartment, and, on her 30-year-old IBM Selectric typewriter that she bought for $25 at a flea market, types out notes to her fellow residents at Horizon House.

    The Selectric just keeps running, like its owner.

    Instebo walks down the halls, attaching her fundraising messages to clips on the doors of each residence.

    "If you can support our senators in this way, you will find it an enjoyable experience," she typed out on a leaflet for $100 and $150 seats for the annual Patty Murray Golden Tennis Shoe Awards.

Esther Instebo promoting her Presidential favorite, Hillary Clinton photo credit Seattle Times, Steve Ringman photographer

Women in positions of leadership equate with economic and democratic prosperity in Esther’s mind. “That’s why China is where it is. It was Mao Zedong -- he would say China had to include women in their economy and educate women because they hold up half the sky.” As she says this she points out the volume on the table next to me, Half the Sky, Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide, by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn. Another must-read, according to Mrs. Instebo.

Given her forward-thinking politics, it may seem surprising to know just where Esther came from. Back there on the northern Minnesota farm, she was coming into her 20’s about the same time the Depression was hitting this country.

At the end of her first year teaching, “I went to Duluth and got a job as a maid for the summer for $30 month. Every girl should have that opportunity. I learned that I could keep a big house. And I still have a recipe from those days – pork chops and rice.”

Fortunately when she returned to teaching in the fall, she got assigned a school much closer to her parents’ farm. Living at home, she was able to save all of the $90 a month she was now earning. But this was the Depression, and the following year’s pay promised to go down, not up.

“But my father was far-seeing enough to know that there was a new teacher’s college opening in Bemidji, and there they could make a teacher out of you so you could teach in a graded school.”

After three years of one-room school houses she enrolled. “They had a nice dormitory that cost $20 a month for room and board but that was a figure I couldn’t possibly afford. I think my tuition was about $30 and the books were free. And for $5 a month you could rent a room and share a bed with somebody. There was a kerosene stove in the room and I brought most of my food over from the farm.”

Right about this time, Esther Carlson met Al Instebo, a Norwegian immigrant who had come to Tacoma, Washington to earn a living as a logger. But when the Depression hit there, Al thought, “why stand in government soup lines in Tacoma when he could work on a farm in Minnesota for room and board.

“He and his friend were working at my neighbor’s place. And one night that neighbor set the boys (my future husband) to churning ice cream for the evening (it took forever to freeze the ice cream because they were using snow and salt). He got very tired of cranking and grumbled quite a bit about it, but the neighbor said, ooh, the Carlson girls are going to be worth it! But the Carlson girls weren’t exactly enamored with the Norwegians. It’s a wonder I ever married him, but he was so good looking, and so smart!” she says laughing. “But he had such an accent!”

When the lumber business picked up Al went back to Washington. “I thought that would be the end of Al, but he didn’t forget me. At Christmastime he came back and stayed around for Christmas break, and there’s where I discovered his talent. I was knee deep in chemistry, and Al helped me with such aplomb that I got all my homework done. And that’s when I came to really appreciate how smart he was.

“That summer, he came again to solidify the relationship. He had a beautiful new wardrobe – I remember that gray flannel suit,” says Esther, keeping up a steady chuckle. “He really got to me that time, he was so good looking.” Esther gets up slowly from her chair and crosses to the bedroom to fetch a photo of her Al. Indeed, he was a looker.

She insisted he go to college. “I’m not sure another woman would have pushed him so hard, but being a teacher, I couldn’t see myself married to someone who didn’t have a college degree.”

Esther throws in a few more chuckles and draws a deep breath. “I know you’re not getting much from me, but you’re giving me an audience, which is very nice of you. I guess that’s what old people like most of all, to reminisce. And most people don’t want to take the time to hear our stories.”

For much of their marriage, Al and Esther had her brother or mother living with them, despite the fact that her brother George was very difficult. “He told this story of seeing a fortune teller when he was a young man. The fortune teller looked at his palm and said, I see here that until you’re 40 years old you’re going to be lonely and depressed. And George asked what would happen after that and she said, you’ll be used to it. It was the saddest thing. And then I began to understand why he had been so difficult and mean – because if you’re lonely and depressed, you’re going to be difficult and mean to your loved ones.”

Years past his death, Esther has pondered the cause of George’s loneliness. “I think he had been a Gay man all his life and not known it. It makes me sad every time I think of him, living out in the country alone and wondering why he wasn’t like the other farm boys. He lived to be 90, and what a frustrated life it must have been.

“And that’s why I’m hooting and hollering for the rights of Gays and Lesbians.”

Walking home from Plymouth Church in 1995, Al had a cardiac arrest, his fourth. “The doctor realized the seriousness of his heart condition but first, he had to prove to Medicare that Al was worth a pacemaker. They finally put one in, but 17 days later Al died, pacemaker and all.”

For the first time in our interview Esther has stopped chuckling. “The first year I had to live without him. Which…. is the hardest thing I think we all have to do eventually.”

But hard doesn’t stop Esther. My mother, who was the one who encouraged me to interview Mrs. Instebo (see her story in the November archives), tells the story of seeing Esther in the copy room shortly after she returned from a hospital stay during which she was seriously ill. “I asked her what she was doing and she told me that the lovely nurses who cared for her didn’t understand what was in the health care bill. So she was planning to take this information back to them.”

It will be difficult to keep Esther Instebo down, as long as she can be standing up -- for a good cause.

- Janet Pelz

Esther with Vice President Joe Biden at a recent Patty Murray fundraiser

Esther Instebo’s not-so secrets for how she does it:

• She continues to make a difference for the issues she cares about.
• “I’m not quite ready to die, but I don’t want to be a centenarian for long.”
• She’s up at 4:00 am to take her medications and then goes back to bed to let them settle and wakes up again at about 11:00.
• In her community at Horizon House she finds many other seniors who share her passion for civic activism and keep her company at events
• She continues to expand her mind and her attitudes through reading, conversation, and introspection
• She has a great filing system that allows her to put her finger on any piece of information when she wants it.
• About the scholarship endowment she made to Bemidji Teachers College she said, ““One’s halo really shines when we realize it allows us to live on in the lives of the young people who receive the scholarships long after we have gone.”

Mrs. Instebo’s must-read book list includes:

• Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, by Naomi Klein
• Half the Sky, Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide, by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn

Whom does Esther Instebo want me to interview next?

• Someone connected with the Death with Dignity movement