How Does She Do It?

Ginny Gilder: In training for Storm ownership all her life

Ginny Gilder is a rower. It’s something you should know about her. It explains a lot.

She brings the ethic of a competitive rower to most aspects of her life. Break it down. Train. Train some more. Persist. Bring the pieces together when it’s time to perform. Compete to win.

So, it’s no surprise, really, that she would be one of four women to buy the Seattle Storm basketball team from the departing owners of the Sonics. In some way, she was training for that her whole life.

And rowing played a big part.

“Almost everything I learned in life I learned from rowing – or my kids.”

It started when, as a junior in high school , Ginny went to Boston to see a rowing race. “I just thought it looked amazing.”

That race was the Head of the Charles, famous enough for this non-rower to know of. Ginny saw it for the first time in 1974.

In 1982, 1983, and 1984 she won it. She set the course record in the women’s elite single in 1982, and that record still has not been broken.

Ginny comes from a family where business acumen is held up as the ultimate trophy. No one in the family had much experience in sports. “I was a complete non-athlete; I was asthmatic.”  The summer after Ginny first saw the Head of the Charles, her dad suggested that for her birthday, “he get me some rowing shoes. There is no such thing as rowing shoes – it just shows you how much we knew about the sport.”

She started rowing as a freshman at Yale, training with two Olympic rowers. “So I thought, hmm the Olympics. I want to do that. No one thought I had much of a shot, with my coach at the top of that list.”

Ginny is one of thousands of women in this country who came to sports along with Title 9, who were instrumental in crashing down the doors that opened the field to millions of young women, Ginny’s daughter Sierra among them.

One door to crash – the lack of facilities for the women’s rowing team at Yale. After a month of waiting in wet clothes on the bus while the men showered at the boathouse, Ginny and her teammates held a ‘Strip In’. With ‘Title IX’ written on their backs, they walked in to see the head of women’s athletics, turned their backs to her, and dropped their sweats. The moment was caught by a New York Times stringer and the Yale Daily News and the image went out over the wire. By the following fall, Yale had started an addition to the boathouse.

Too bad the digital archives don’t go back far enough to relive that moment.

With Olympics in mind, she tried out unsuccessfully for the national team in 1977, 1978, and 1979 while still at Yale. After graduating, she moved to Boston and continued to train.

Finally, she made the Olympic team in 1980, the year the Americans stayed home.

After that huge disappointment she retired from rowing. Still in Boston, however, the Charles River lured her back and she learned to scull from one of her former Yale teammates. “By myself, I could practice when I wanted and hold a full-time job. And then I just got manic and good.

“One of the biggest things I learned from rowing was how to structure my life. I loved the rhythm of getting up and going to practice. So I’d get to work at 9:00 and I had been up since 5:30, and I would look around and just feel sorry for everyone because they hadn’t been out on the water; they hadn’t seen the sunrise; they hadn’t gotten to sweat; and all they had was this dumb job. And then I’d go and work out in the afternoons.”

In 1982 she made the national team in the quad (four scullers), racing in the world championships where her boat came in 4^th.

And in 1983 she won the singles trials, and was recognized as the fastest sculler in the country. That year she came in 3^rd in the World Championships.

Things were going well for Ginny. She was shooting to finally make it to the Olympics as the single in 1984, “but ten days before the trials I broke my rib. I was over-training and I injured myself. It was my own fault.”

The odds-on favorite, she went to the trials anyway, “but then it all came apart and I did really badly.” She went to the doctor the next day, who saw the broken rib on an x-ray. “He said, you’re not alone, some of our best athletes won’t be in the Olympics this year, and I just thought ---- you. I’m going.”

Her recent times combined with the information about her injury convinced the Olympic coach to add her to the quad (quadruple sculls with coxswain). “And I won silver as the stroke of the women’s quad at the Olympics in Los Angeles in 1984. So, it worked out ok.

“Rowing was the driving force in my life for 10 years. It’s all about testing, figuring out how much pain you can inflict on yourself. Plus, rowing gave me a sense of purpose. On some level at the time I was fighting a battle to know what was meaningful enough to keep me tethered. And I think rowing was it. It gave shape to my life at a time when I was not very solid internally.”

Family is another driving force in Ginny’s life, both the family of her parents and siblings, and the one she has fashioned with her own children and partner.

Ginny rowing the Head of the Charles with her son, Gilder, in a parent/child double in 2008

Her mother, fiercely pro-choice and “her own version of a feminist”, passed those qualities down to Ginny and her two sisters. Her parents divorced when Ginny was a pre-teen and it is her relationship with her father that has endured.

The shadow cast from that divorce still hovered over Ginny into adulthood. In the early 80’s Ginny had been in a relationship with a woman but broke it off because she wanted a family. “This was at a time when I wasn’t very close to my mom and I really needed my dad and I felt like if I came out then I would lose him.

“I met this very lovely guy and we were engaged within about two months. Everything was ok for a while, trying to be happy but not quite understanding why I wasn’t. And then I met Lynn. I had signed my husband and me up for tennis lessons because we needed to do more together and she was our tennis instructor.”

Falling in love with Lynn was “really was like a bomb going off. I knew that everything had changed. It was like walking through a door and not being able to go back.”

Still, facing the idea of divorce seemed impossible because of her kids – Ginny and her husband had their son Gilder then adopted Max and Sierra. “Because when my parents got divorced I resolved I would never get divorced.” Ginny shared her dilemma with a therapist who challenged the notion that she should stay married because of her children, pointing out the unhappiness and resentment that would result.

“One of the promises I made to myself was that this relationship was going to be worth breaking my kids’ hearts for -- each one of my kids to this day remembers when we told them we were separating, and it’s really hard to be the one who breaks your kids’ hearts the first time. I promised myself that I would not turn away from my kids’ pain – and that was the hardest part. Acknowledging when they were struggling and being able to look at them in the eye, hold them and listen. I just said to myself that there would be no question when they left our household as to what love looked like.”

Relaxing on the beach at Lopez Island: (left to right: Sierra, Ginny, Max, Lynn; in front, Gilder)

Ginny and Lynn merged their two families, creating a picture that makes the Brady Bunch look simple. Ginny had her three children (Gilder, Max and Sierra) and Lynn had a daughter, Toni and son, Jesse. “We had some very hard times with five kids. Lynn and I have been living together since 1999 and have had teenagers in the house the entire time. We call it ‘teenage hell swamp.’”

That will change soon when “my baby” Sierra heads off to Division One Colorado College with a soccer scholarship in the fall. (at signing day, below)

There’s plenty to fill the void, starting with the family business.

In the years after Ginny left home, Richard Gilder became hugely successful in his investment business, and has shared his success generously with many New York institutions. In addition to plaques and statues that recognize his generous contributions to the Central Park Conservancy and the Rose Planetarium, he has endowed the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, and owns one of the biggest collections of original documents from American history, which he is donating to the New York Historical Society. “He is extraordinary.”

Ginny’s tremendous love and respect for her father is a chorus to our interview.

In his late 70’s now, her dad began to wonder what would happen to the family business once he was gone. None of the four siblings were particularly interested in taking over, so Ginny has stepped in to help build a bridge to her family's financial future. She spent the last six years learning the investment business.

“I do it because I love my family and I love my dad. I’m providing for my family. But it doesn’t fuel my competitive fire to make money.”

Rather, Ginny gets her juices going with social justice issues, which she currently impacts through the family foundation she started, the Starfish Group. Focusing on the intersection of climate change and poverty, they “get to fund the issues and organizations we care about, all over the world.”

It’s not the only social justice effort Ginny has taken on. In 1992 she founded Washington Works, after she learned from the birth mother of her adopted children Max and Sierra that she had given up her kids because she couldn’t afford to raise them. Ginny stayed with Washington Works, a non-profit whose goals were to help women get off public assistance and into livable wage jobs, for about six years.

Later she served on the Board of Directors of Seattle Girl’s School (SGS) along with Dawn Trudeau. A private middle school, SGS strives to bolster self-esteem and academic confidence of girls during their critical adolescent years.

Enter the Seattle Storm.

“The world of finance is so heavily dominated by men I was just thinking, I really wanted to do something again with women.”

When her SGS compatriot Dawn Trudeau organized a lunch with Lisa Brummel, Senior VP for Human Resources at Microsoft and a former three sport athlete at Yale, Ginny was happy to meet with them to discuss the possibility of keeping the WNBA franchise in Seattle after the Sonics moved to Oklahoma. “The three of us talked about why we would do this. I think for Dawn and Lisa, they really love basketball. Me? I love women’s sports. I was intrigued by the idea that we could invest in something that would open the doors for women at the highest echelon of sports.

Seattle Storm owners at a game: (left to right) Ginny Gilder, Lisa Brummel, Anne Levinson, Dawn Trudeau (from Seattle Times)

“It was the opportunity to bring together all the things I love about life. I love working collaboratively. I feel really lucky to be part of an ownership group like this. We respect each other, we work well together and we work hard. I love that I’m doing something for the community. I love really getting to roll my sleeves up, to work on the business side. It’s rooted in my own history, and I can take my kids.”

A package deal. All of the things Ginny has been training for, peaking for this performance

Force 10 Hoops, the ownership group, “sees a business model that gets us to profitability and we’re investing to make it happen.” Just like any other professional sports team in America they need a deep fan base, a deep sponsorship base, good ownership and a championship caliber team. “We have the best player in the world – Lauren Jackson who just re-signed, and a great coach – he’s our diversity hire.”

Storm’s Lauren Jackson attempts to block shot of Becky Hammond. Aaron Last/Storm Photos

And that leaves the rest of us, the back-up band to the Force 10 lead singers. The Storm home opener against the National Champion LA Sparks is coming up May 16 at KeyArena. I’ll see you there.   Go to www.wnba.com/storm for ticket and schedule information.

- Janet Pelz

Ginny Gilder’s not-so secrets for how she does it:

• I don’t think I do anything particularly extraordinary, I just do what’s there.
• My general policy is to catch whatever ball is falling down fastest
• I do a lot of self care – I usually work out everyday.
• I try to remember, if I die tomorrow a lot of stuff would go undone and no one would care, so I try to deal with what I can handle and not worry about the rest.
• I have really good partners everywhere – nothing that I do I do alone. So I never feel that if I’m struggling, I have to figure out the answer by myself.
• I have a partner who has been really good at making it desirable to be at home. It’s really fun to be in this family.
• I’m a real believer that persistence pays – the darkest moments are before the dawn, so don’t give up.
• I love what I do, and I have a really clear sense of responsibility. I love my family and my work is an expression of who I have to be to support them.
• I think dysfunction occurs when you keep secrets and you don’t tell the truth, because you don’t get to have your assumptions tested.

What books has Ginny read recently?

• The Glass Castle, by Jeannette Walls (in case you think your family is dysfunctional!)
• The Hours, by Michael Cunningham
• American Pastoral, by Philip Roth (“a great book!)

Whom does Ginny want me to interview next?

• Karen Bryant, CEO of Storm, “she’s been involved in professional women’s basketball since it started in Seattle. She’s really quite an amazing person.”
• Sharon Hammel, a co-founder with Ginny of Seattle Girls School
• Nancy Nordhoff – “oh my God, she is incredible!”
• Leanne Moss – Executive Director of Women’s Funding Alliance, “she’s kick-ass”

Melissa Erickson: an athlete, teammate and friend, living with ALS

“I want people to know I’m just not a diagnosis.”

When Melissa isn’t struggling with some activity that she once could do while spinning a basketball on a fingertip, Melissa is the Melissa she’s always been. “I want to be viewed as strong, emotionally and physically; compassionate, empathetic and loyal.” And a really good basketball player.

Melissa Erickson came to the University of Washington with the first recruiting class of coach June Daugherty. After a strong career at her Colorado high school and an even more impressive traveling AAU team, Melissa had four universities interested in her. “I remember walking into Hec Ed and thinking, wow, this is so cool!” It was her first recruiting visit, but “as soon as I came home I committed to the UW.”

It’s a decision she’s never regretted, even during her junior year season when the team hit the skids. But their fortunes turned around in senior year and despite Mo’s (that’s what Melissa goes by with her teammates) ACL injury, which sidelined her for the end of the season, she was right in there cheering her team on to a PAC-10 title.

After playing four years at UW, Melissa tried her hand at coaching. She picked up a couple gigs, her first year at a small school in Louisiana, which taught her more about the reality of race relations in the south than it did about basketball. Happy to leave behind the Confederate flags, she took another graduate coaching job at UNLV in Las Vegas.

But she just couldn’t shake the urge. That itch to be out on the floor making the plays rather than calling them from the bench. So she pursued an agent, who landed her on a team in Krefeld, Germany, and in the fall of ’02 she went to Europe for the first time. “I loved it. It was exactly what I wanted to do. It was just a blast. I didn’t get paid very much. I basically got paid to travel and experience the culture.” And, what could be better? Paid to play basketball.

After the season in Europe she returned to the States and got a job working at Echo Glen, the state’s juvenile rehab center, in the drug and alcohol unit. “I really enjoyed it and felt I had found my niche. I’ve always wanted to help people who are less fortunate, and had been intrigued with at-risk youth.”

Soon autumn was coming and with it the migration back to Europe for women still playing. A friend of Mo’s was playing in Portugal and she was invited there for a trial and then made the team.

“Around then I started feeling that my body was kind of different. At the try-out I just figured I was out of shape. I remember not being able to get off the ground, and my balance was really off. But I played through it. I lost weight and got in better shape, but my deficiencies continued and began to get pretty evident. So I started to work out harder. I just figured that whatever was wrong with me could be overcome with getting stronger. That’s how athletes work, right? Well, obviously, that didn’t happen.”

Muscle weakness is a hallmark initial sign in ALS (also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease), occurring in approximately 60% of patients. Early symptoms vary with each individual, but usually include tripping, dropping things, abnormal fatigue of the arms and/or legs, slurred speech, muscle cramps and twitches and/or uncontrollable periods of laughing or crying.

In September of 2005 she started going to doctors to figure out what was going on. She remembers the date, September 18, when she got the initial diagnosis that “it was a motor neuron disease of some kind but the doctors didn’t know what.”

The process was frustrating. At first doctors thought it was a pinched nerve that could be cured easily with surgery. Melissa’s biggest concern at the time was how she would be able to take time off from work since she hadn’t yet accumulated sick time. “Man, if only it was that easy!

“With ALS there’s no blood test, nothing that says for certain, this is what you have. So the doctors kept coming back with what it wasn’t – it wasn’t cancer, it wasn’t MS. While I was happy that those were cancelled out I kept wondering, but what is it?”

Melissa was referred to the regional specialist at Virginia Mason, Dr. Ravits, who continues as her neurologist. (Melissa has nothing but praise for him. “He’s overflowing in compassion. He immerses his life in finding a cure and a treatment.”) Ravits takes on patients “that are a little different than the normal ALS.” Melissa’s young age, 26, and gender put her squarely in the column of ‘different.’

Most people who develop ALS are between the ages of 40 and 70, with an average age of 55 at the time of diagnosis. ALS is 20% more common in men than in women.

By Thanksgiving the diagnosis was confirmed.

When her doctor told her, he waited for a sign of understanding from Melissa. “I didn’t know what it was. I had heard of both ALS and Lou Gehrig’s disease and didn’t know they were the same thing. Even when they were saying it was a motor neuron disease, I didn’t know the gravity of that diagnosis.”

Understandably, the news hit hard, but with the conviction of an athlete she immediately focused on how to fix it. She tried alternative treatments “some of which were terrible and took my money and offered nothing; and others which offered, not a cure, but ways to treat it through dieting and other things.”

Fortunately, as the bad news came, Melissa’s friends and family stepped in. Her parents moved to Seattle from Colorado. Her girlfriend Jessica, who she started dating just a month after she was diagnosed, “has been there pretty much the whole way.”

(Melissa, right, with Jessica, left)

And then there were the teammates. Still getting her back, they started the Melissa Erickson Foundation to raise funds to help Mo manage the costs of the disease. www.melissaerickson.org

The dollars raised “are for anything I need. A trip to see friends, a bed that will be more comfortable, anything that helps me. I am surrounded by just, the most amazing people. My words can’t do justice to how awesome they are.”

In his famous retirement speech, Lou Gehrig told the crowd: “I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth. Look at these grand men. Which of you wouldn’t consider it the highlight of his career just to associate with them for even one day?”

Listening to Mo, I quickly understand that her teammates provide more than monetary support. They sustain the link to the Melissa inside, the one a stranger can’t see. To them, Mo is still Mo, the one who had their back on the floor and who might have snapped them with a towel in the locker room after the game.

“Melissa was a 6’2 reserve small forward who could hit the 3 and bang with the best of them. She was an enforcer who wore a goofy white headband back when no other white girls were wearing white headbands. She was different. Melissa never met a sprint that she liked and enjoyed partying far more than studying. I was a young and energetic first year D1 assistant coach and I was gung ho about class checks, discipline and following the rules. As you can imagine, I was Melissa’s worst nightmare and she was my biggest challenge. That might be why I loved her so much.”

-   Shimmy Gray-Miller, Head Coach St. Louis University women’s basketball, former UW assistant coach. Read her full story about Melissa here:  http://www.coachshimmy.com/blog.html

“ALS is kind of a funny disease because you lose parts of yourself gradually,” says Melissa growing quiet.

Until now our interview has reviewed a chronological progression from the University of Washington to where we sit today, Melissa in her electric wheelchair and I at her kitchen counter. It’s the first time we’ve met, but the conversation has flowed easily like two friends catching up after a long time apart.

She takes a moment to resist the tears that come despite her effort to hold them back. “I’m trying to get good at this so I don’t cry every time,” she explains, as if her left-handed hook has been eluding her.

“I mourn, I mourn the loss of basketball and the athlete. But even when that was gone, I still had so much more, I still walked and could do everything else. And then you lose walking and you mourn that and then you lose the ability to sit up and you mourn that. It’s like a never ending grief/acceptance, grief/acceptance cycle. And I think that’s the hardest part of living with this disease. I continuously say, if it just stops here I’ll be fine, but obviously it didn’t really listen to what I wanted.”

No, what Melissa wants is not part of the ALS agenda. So, like any good basketball player, she’s working on her defense.

Her basketball career and the incredible friends she made help sustain Melissa physically, emotionally, and spiritually. Even today, while she’s trying to get comfortable in the wheelchair she has relied on for the past two years, I can see in her smile that the feeling of running the floor is not far away.

Melissa is living her life everyday with strength, optimism, and humility. Though memory is leaking from her muscles it is still strong in her spirit -- memories of the adrenaline rush from a game, and the camaraderie of teammates afterwards, win or lose, on the court or off.

Basketball is that drug her doctor can’t prescribe, and it may be the thing that is most effective in her struggle against this insidious disease.

(Mo with her white headband at left)

Mo’s not-so secrets for How She Does It?

• “I surround myself with close friends and family.”
• Healthy denial – she doesn’t descend into interminable Google searches about the disease.
• Vodka – it’s part of the denial part but also important to being able to let loose and have fun
• “I try to view myself as normal as much as possible. I’m pretty independent and stubborn, which helps get me through my daily life with ALS.”

What books has Melissa read recently? In a book group now, she’s “super into reading recently.”

• Water for Elephants (“love it!”), by Sara Gruen
• Little Bee (“I recommend!” Amazon Best of the Month 2/09: “… braids the fates of a 16-year-old Nigerian orphan who calls herself Little Bee, and a well-off British couple”), by Chris Cleave
• Say You’re One of Them (“tells of the horrors faced by young people throughout Africa”) by Uwem Akpan
• and Mo’s confession, The Twilight Series, by Stephanie Meyer

Whom does Melissa want me to interview next?

• Sonya Elliott, a fashion model, basketball player, and designer. Check her out at Peace, Love, Basketball www.peacelovebasketball.com . 50% of their March profits go to the Melissa Erickson Foundation. “Sonya’s is a story of huge tragedy, which she’s come out with so much grace.”

What Can You Do to Support Melissa?

• Make a Pay Pal contribution on www.melissaerickson.org
• Buy a cool t-shirt this month at www.peacelovebasketball.com
• Stop by Jabu’s Pub, near Seattle Center, and enjoy one of two drinks named in Melissa’s honor: the Motini and the Motail. $1.00 from each drink will go to the Melissa Erickson foundation http://jabuspub.com/Home_Page.php
• Let Melissa and all of us know how her life and story has made an impact on you by leaving a comment by clicking the link below.

- Janet Pelz

Trish Millines Dziko: Transforming Public Education for Kids of Color

Trish Millines Dziko has a question for you. How much do you care about public education and how involved will you become to make it better?

For Trish the answer to both questions is ‘lots’. “Right now I spend most of my time trying to transform public education for kids of color.”

She has many reasons to care. Four of them live in her house. But there are hundreds of thousands more reasons as well. People Trish has never met and never will but whose stories she knows all too well. These are the forgotten children of color, low income kids, girls. The ones who, by virtue of the happenstance of birth have been tracked into low achievement and even lower expectations.

Trish might have been one of those back when she was in high school, but “I got lucky and had some teachers realize that I was put in the wrong track, and they made sure I got to where I needed to go. That meant I had to go to summer school every single year starting my freshman year all the way through college, in order to catch up.”

Catch up she did.

She went to college and got a degree in computer programming, setting in motion a course for her life that would continue to circle back to that realization, that she, among legions of African American girls, had been shown a door that she pushed her way through.

After graduation, Trish moved through a career ladder that wasn’t exactly accommodating to people who looked like her. “It was hard getting a job because people weren’t hiring Black folks no matter how smart they were. Really, the only place where you could get a good job was with a government contracting company.”

That path took her to, among other places, Hughes Aircraft Company. “I realized that was going to be a dead end, working on military style machinery, going from radar systems to missiles.”

She came to Seattle in 1985. After a stint with a start-up that crashed and a time working for herself, she got swept into the Microsoft maelstrom. Before long, she was working the not-atypical Microsoft workweek of 70 – 80 hours as she and her team pushed to get a new product to market.

After leaving that group, Trish got hooked into Microsoft’s outreach efforts to attract more people of color. Trish would do campus visits to the historically Black colleges, “where I would tell them, I could not have made it in Microsoft as my first job. I was not confident enough, but you are.”

Then Trish had a run-in with management about her commitment to grow in the company. “Because I had made a commitment to recruit students of color instead of staying behind to work, the comment was made, ‘you’re killing your career’. My manager at the time didn’t want me to go on this one recruitment trip, so she found another colleague, who was in marketing mind you, not technical, and she says, ‘John can go for you, he’s half Black’.”

Trish made the trip.

Then Microsoft created a job for her, the Senior Diversity Administrator. “It was a tough move – it’s where my heart was but it was hard, because if you’re not a technical person at Microsoft you don’t have much credibility.” During her two years in that position, “I realized this stuff is never going to change unless we change the pipeline.”

In a real way, this notion of feeding the pipeline is one that has guided Trish ever since. Recognizing that it takes a long time, Trish has directed her life to seeding the pastures of change.

She approaches life with the sensibilities of an engineer or a program manager. You can’t expect a quality machine if you use faulty parts. If your expectation is for a quality, diverse work force, the people coming into that system must be quality and diverse. What goes in comes out.

Trish met her partner Jill in 1995, a social worker whose clients were in the middle school behavior disorder classrooms “where there were always lots of African American boys. One day Jill brought a group of her kids over to the campus to meet some of my interns. We took them over on the campus shuttle and they were a little rowdy. And then we walked into this conference room, where there were six interns doing product testing. You could have heard a pin drop. Jill’s clients could not believe they saw these kids, who were just a little bit older, doing this work.

“It was an ah-hah moment. It was the thing that said to me, we need to do more.”

And that’s how TAF, the Technology Access Foundation was born. http://www.techaccess.org/

Jill and Trish left their respective jobs in 1996 to work fulltime for TAF, which:

“…prepares students of color for success in today's technology-driven world. With support from our programs more students in our public schools graduate high school on-time, ready to enter college.”

“I watched over the years how in the technology industry you really don’t see growth among people of color. Girls have had a little easier time. In corporate America you’ll have more women at the top and every rung all the way down. But with people of color, you may see a few at the top but then nobody else until you get all the way to the bottom, so the ladder isn’t full.

“I felt that I could help the generation behind me make their way through this industry a little bit easier. You’ve got to hold your weight once you walk through those doors, but some of those doors have to be opened for you.

Trish wasn’t seeing those doors open, so she committed herself to transforming public education for kids of color, to prepare them for careers at the next Microsoft, or whatever else they might take on.

While others might be intimidated by the enormity of the challenge, Trish seems to draw on her experiences of pushing through year after year of summer school, or successive 80 hour weeks bringing a product to its launch point. It’s not a dispassionate approach – you have to be hugely passionate to set a goal to transform public education– but it is analytical. It’s deliberate. As I listened to her talk about everything from her kids to educational pedagogy, I was struck at how Trish is intentional, about all manner of choices, even about the books she reads. (“I read one at bedtime and one during the day. My day book is usually about some sort of management/work thing. My bedtime book is my ‘social’ book.”)

By their second year (1997) TAF had launched two programs, Connecting Communities of Color (C3) and Technical Teens Internship Program (TTIP). In 2000 they started TechStart, a free K-8 afterschool academic enrichment program for students of color. Then after some time, “we saw that kids were coming to the after school program having had no academic rigor in their day-to-day schooling,” so in 2008 they reached a major milestone in opening their first school, the TAF Academy. http://www.techaccess.org/Programs/TAFAcademy.html

They opened a public school, located in a diverse community in Federal Way (south of Seattle). TAF Academy is a 6th through 12th grade public school “that prepares students for college and life by using project-based learning rooted in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM).”

“Our goal is to have 75% kids of color, and 50% girls.” Into their second year, TAF Academy has come close to meeting their goals. “We’re working hard on outreach and marketing, but it’s pretty tough. For so long these kids have been hearing, ‘you can’t do this stuff’, so it’s become internalized.”

I asked Trish if she were concerned that TAF Academy would become popular with white families, taking away places for her target students. After all, it’s a public school where preferences aren’t allowed. “We’re very public about who we’re trying to attract, so only the bravest of the white families will come – those who don’t have issues with their kids being around mostly kids of color.”

TAF plans to open a network of five TAF Academies by 2015. Interestingly, it’s not likely that one will be in Seattle, the state’s largest city with a highly diverse public school population.

Putting it nicely, Trish has some issues with Seattle’s commitment to educate all its children.

Perhaps not ironically, Trish and Jill have moved their kids out of the Seattle Public Schools. They recently moved to Vashon Island, a short ferry ride away. True to form, Jill and Trish made an appointment with school administrators there before moving the family. They liked everything they saw. “The staff was very open and accepting of our family structure and our kids seemed excited to visit the classroom.

“We went to some of the stores in town to see what kind of reaction we would get. People are so nice it’s ridiculous. We decided it was the place for us.”

When I asked what it was like, to work hard creating learning environments where the majority of kids were of color and then to send her own kids to schools that were primarily white, Trish was pensive. “I look at our family and we have a lot of resources and I look at the kids that TAF serves and they don’t. What we are trying to do at TAF is to create the best public school environment for where you live. Not everybody can move to a better school.”

Trish and Jill carry their sense of purpose to the raising of their four kids, three of whom are adopted.

“We’re very intentional. I want my kids to live, so I talk to my boys about how to act if they get stopped by the police, because I want them to come home. Things haven’t changed that much. People tell us, your kids are so good. Well, our kids are good because they have two strong parents that brought them up that way.

“I want my kids to be proud of who they are and I want others to release their stereotypes when they deal with my kids of what they think Black people  behave like.

“We have a lot of strong Black men and strong men of color in our family. It’s really important that our boys see responsible men of color as role models. And our daughters, should they end up straight, that’s the kind of man they want to have in their lives. Those kinds of things are important to us, and we have the ability to surround our kids with those kinds of people. That’s not necessarily true for all kids.”

Trish’s kids are part of the pipeline, and like the many other children given a hand by TAF, they’ll be ready to take on whatever they dream of no matter, like the task Trish has set out to accomplish, how ambitious its scope.

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

• “I have a lot of good people in my life, starting with my partner. We are very lucky having two adults in our house with one of those being at home at all times. I was raised by a single mom, so I know how tough it is.
• “Two things are important to me – my family and my job. I’m getting better at compartmentalizing so I can let the work go when I come home.
• “We live a very, very modest life. We don’t have a lot of things. So the priority for us is doing things with our kids; making sure we’re there for their activities, parent teacher conferences, and I’m lucky I have a job that allows me to do that.”
• In terms of taking care of herself – “that’s the thing I haven’t squeezed in yet, but I’ve begun to make it a priority.” Trish is recovering from a pulmonary embolism, a condition she learned is common yet rarely discussed. Of those who get it, 20% of people die in the first 90 days. It occurs particularly among people who travel a lot -- too long sitting in one place, they get blood clots in the leg that travel up to the lungs. “Right now I can’t walk for more than about two minutes before I start to get exhausted, but I’m trying to get up to six.”

What book is Trish reading these days?

• Measure of a Man: A Spiritual Autobiography, by Sidney Poitier
• The Audacity to Win, by David Plouffe
• Stones into Schools, by Greg Mortenson
• First, Break all the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently, by Marcus Buckingham.

Whom does Trish hope I interview next?

• Stephanie Ellis Smith – also recommended by Donna Moodie, so Stephanie and I are trying to find a time to get together!
• Rebecca Sandinsky, who started Powerful Schools

Want to help Trish and The Technology Access Foundation?

Here’s an event coming soon,

or donate on-line here: http://www.techaccess.org/Contribute/giveonline.html

By Janet Pelz