Learning to Give, Curriculum Division of The LEAGUE

What did I do prior?  I was raising my children and working part-time on and off doing design work.  I went back to graduate school and got a masters degree.  My thesis applied a value-centered architectural programming model to environments for people with disabilities.  I got that masters in 1999. I was a founding member of this nonprofit in 1998 and have been on the board since its inception. We were incorporated in 1998. With very little resources available to this 501(c)3 and with the majority of the board being consumers, people with disabilities, there wasn’t a lot of movement forward just because of all the inherent challenges. 

Our President of the Board announced that she was moving to North Dakota. It was serendipitous because I wanted to go back to working with people with disabilities. It’s been my service work since I was in the ninth grade and I’m 47.  And so not only did I have the educational training, now I had been in service many years on and off with people with disabilities. My husband said, “Well, go for it.  This is what you want to do.” So I did it. I submitted a proposal to the board that they hire me as executive director and I’d be a volunteer.  So that was accepted and I was really more proud of anything that they accepted my position because I don’t have a physical disability (the President of the Board had always been someone with a disability).  That really meant a lot to me.

I was raised all over the world, mostly in third world countries, and so I went to boarding school in England. The boarding school that I went to actually had a very strong requirement to a commitment to service. It was just required.  It was also drilled into me that I had a lot of advantages that other people didn’t and that there were a lot of ways to be of service in community.  And so I was given a list of choices and I happened to start working in a preschool for kids with disabilities.  Then that transitioned into a job where I would walk into the village three times a week and take care of a woman with a disability. I did her shopping, made her tea etc. because she was in bed all the time.  She had use of her hands but was always in chronic pain. I developed a strong relationship with her for three years. 

My father is not American, he’s Irish and my mother is American. So I would come back and spend my summers with my [grandparents.] They lived in South Jersey.  My grandmother was a school teacher and my grandfather was a small town banker.  I became aware over the summers that every day there’d be fresh vegetables delivered by the Italian farmers.  I remember being old enough and asking my grandmother why was this happening. She told me that during the fascism in the 30’s that she and my grandfather had sponsored a lot of families—people who were having difficulties with the fascism and who were being persecuted. They sponsored them and got them out and they moved to South Jersey.  South Jersey has a high ethnic Italian population. So this was their way of saying thank you and it went on forever.  These farmers would bring these vegetables and then it would be their children who had grown up and were farmers.  That really made an impact on me as a child to see that kind of generosity coming back to my grandmother. My grandmother was a very self-deprecating individual. 

It’s a great question.  That’s a really great question because my husband and I made a conscious decision—though I had a lot of questioning and kind of ambivalence about it—that we were not going to raise our children in any particular religious faith. I appreciate the spirit of service in religious faiths.  In my spiritual life and practice, there is a lot of spirit of service involved. So it was a really difficult decision and I wondered what would be the consequences of such a decision. I didn’t talk to my kids that much about my grandparents or about my life overseas—just a little bit.  We just lived our lives.

Then the most remarkable thing was—my oldest daughter who is not very outgoing—was a ballet student all through high school and never did any service work.  It was just ballet seven days a week. She was going to be a professional ballerina. Then instead she decided she wanted to go to college and so she scrambled to take AP courses and get into a good school. Then at the end of her freshman year her aunt was living in South Africa and she went and worked in a township in South Africa.

It totally amazed me because I have never pushed my children or wanted them to be in service.  I’ve never had an agenda.  I’ve always given them unconditional love and support saying: if this is what you want to do, go for it, even though sometimes I felt differently about some of their decisions.  Then she started working with kids in East St. Louis.

And then my middle daughter was in ninth grade saving up her money to buy purses, very materialistically oriented, very into clothes, very into fashion, very social. Then in the fall of her junior year, she came home one day and she was going on and on about some program called Amigos de las Americas. I wasn’t really listening to her because she had a lot of ideas and always going on about something, so it was kind of in one ear and out the other.  A few weeks later she said we have our interview, and I said what interview?  She said for this program—I’m going to work in Central America.  She went through this process and got accepted and spent a whole year in training and then lived in a village for two months in the Dominican Republic with no running water and electricity.  She worked on a youth initiative project which she was a real advocate for. It’s not needs based in the sense you go in and we need to build this—it’s more that she worked with the youth, asking [them] what do you want, having them do the planning.  She loved it.

Yes, there definitely is.  What happened was I was in graduate school—this is kind of an involved story, but it will lay the groundwork for it.  I had some surgery that didn’t go well and I developed chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia. At the time that I developed it, I’d done all my course work. I just had to write my thesis. I’d done a couple years of reading and research on my own about disabilities and the social political models and the psychology and just a lot of things that I was interested in instead of writing my thesis.  And then I got this illness and I was in bed for six months and didn’t know what I had. It was a really, really challenging time of my life and for my family and my children. 

I took a great approach.  I was in therapy.  I used a lot of holistic methods to heal myself and I got better which my therapist said she’d never seen anybody get better as quickly.  It took about four years.  But my health was at a point where I still couldn’t exercise, I couldn’t do anything, and so something just came to me intuitively to study yoga.  This was three and a half years ago.  My therapist recommended a teacher and I started studying privately with her with no expectations or attachments.  Just to try and get my health back.  It took six months for me to even be able to bend over and touch my toes because my muscles had atrophied so much.  So what happened was in doing this yoga with her, I came to see that through her practice, the lineage that she was teaching me involved a lot of meditation and breath work and posture work. 

And then I started noticing things changing in my life, that I was a different person.  I’d been in therapy but this was different.  The therapy was really helpful.  It really helped me with a lot of my personal issues, but this was different. I was aware of being guided more by my spirit.  And so it became, without my expecting anything, a spiritual practice. 

In October I went away and I studied the Bhagavad Gita. It brought me into a relationship with God that I had never had, a devotional practice to God. I feel very strongly that if I hadn’t been practicing this and it hadn’t become a spiritual path for me and I hadn’t begun to develop a relationship with God, there’s no way I could do this work I do now. That when this happened it was total faith and it felt like this was the thing to do. 

And I don’t know if this is what you’re getting at, but it just happened recently and it was just amazing to me.  My husband and I, we’re very busy people and we have the kids, so we don’t talk about our giving.  Tucson is 36 percent Latinos and I’ve been trying to network and make some inroads in the Latino community because I’m really committed to the Latino community being involved in the planning process so that their needs are met by this nonprofit. 

I had met back in June with a county supervisor who represented a portion of the city that was largely Latino. He told me very straightforward that it would really take three years to get their trust and that I had to do a lot of work to do that and I had to be really consistent.  I was really discouraged because I’m a one-person operation.  I’m the only staff for this nonprofit and I thought I don’t have the time to devote to building these kinds of relationships.  I’m so busy trying to raise money and all of the things that are involved in a nonprofit.  So then I kind of let it go. 

Then we had our survey. A thousand copies of our survey were being translated into Spanish, so now the surveys are at the printers ready for distribution. So again, I tried some of our Latino nonprofits and I didn’t have much luck.  And so one day I came home, one night, and I was talking to my husband and I said I’m really frustrated.  I don’t know what to do.  He says well, call Sister M.T. and I said who’s she? He says she’s the one I work with at Catholic Community Services which in Tucson is one of the main ways that the poor and the really vulnerable are reached in the Latino community.  And so I called to make an appointment. She called me back and said she could see me at a certain time.  I went to this meeting and we talked and I listened—I think one of the gifts that happen is in the building of relationships.  I love to listen to people, I love people, and so I listened a lot in this meeting to her story of how she came to service, how she grew up so poor. My husband also grew up very, very poor.  She said I’m so appreciative of the work your husband does. And I’m thinking what work? Because I knew a little bit of it but I didn’t know the details and so I’m going yes, yes . . .

That’s a good question.  It’s challenging.  It’s hard for me to receive.  I think I’ve learned more to receive because of the work I’ve done in therapy.  While I was in therapy and starting to think about doing this work back when I picked it for my graduate degree, one of my goals was to be really clear why I was doing the work. To make sure that I wasn’t doing the work to fulfill a need in myself, that it wasn’t motivated by something I needed to sustain my inner life. 

And I went into it in therapy because a lot of times I have met individuals in nonprofit work who do amazing work but sometimes I’ve seen burnout or emotional exhaustion. I became very clear that I didn’t want that to happen to me and that I really didn’t want to rely on external motivators to do the work, that I really wanted it to be clean.  That’s what I call it, internally motivated.  So then in that sense receiving doesn’t really come up for me. 

Oh yes, it has great meaning to me because I think that it’s a very pure phrase and I think it was kind of what I was alluding to.  I see spirit as something very internal and that the giving comes from internal motivation. It’s an opening of the heart. I really don’t think I’m being generous, you know?  I don’t really see it that way.