Ever since I was a little kid growing up in Hell’s Kitchen, NYC in the late 60s, I’ve paid close attention to people’s stories.
My own family’s story – at least a slice of it – has been about poverty; living in the ghetto, being raised by a single, teenage mom, scraping by on welfare and surviving on food stamps. We were the family that hitchhiked to the laundromat and stood in line for surplus government food. After we got out of the city, our family story was about being barefoot hippies. We lived off the grid without electricity or plumbing as part of an early 70s commune dedicated to children’s education. We were hippies, poor ones and rabblerousers to boot. I was encouraged to question authority, marching in my first anti-war protest at eight-years-old. In our household, learning civil disobedience went hand-in-hand with registering folks to vote. Protest and poverty – two stories that helped define me.
The poverty part lasted well into my adult years. I was in my late 30s before I learned how the other half lived (updated now to the other 90 %). No one told me bedsheets had a thing called a “thread count.” I may have never had a savings account, but I was a damn good waitress, a newspaper reporter, an outlaw pot grower and am a single mother myself. My stories have taught me a bit about being the “other,” – about being ranked by a caste system of class. But not nearly enough about what it means to be white in a caste system of race. The story of race is homework for the rest of my life.
My bio has shaped my understanding of the government’s role- that it invests in families such as ours during times when we didn’t have enough to eat, and when we needed a place to live. In exchange, our role is to participate with our vote and join with the people who are doing the caring – and who’re doing the fighting.
My foundational stories of struggle, hope, community and action anchor my foundational values. They lead me late in life to AMRF as my final stop before retirement. It’s our shared vision to help dismantle the story of race – the way it’s weaponized as a technology to oppress brown and black people; the way it was created, and continually reinforced to advance people born white like me. My privilege is embedded in AMRF’s mission to help return extracted resources to brown and black communities. What fuels me with faith is my AMRF co-workers, and the communities we serve. Together, they invite me to join them in co-creating the mightiest of all stories: activating peace, creating justice as love in action and encoding compassion as our cultural DNA. They invite me to build community, to honor the work that’s come before us – and the work that’ll continue after us. And, being the lucky duck that I am, I get to do all of this at the epicenter of my own home story – in Mendocino County.