Public policy, social issues, gender politics, religion, civitas, and other taboo topics fall under the hammer of Shava's iconoclasmic force of natural philosophy.
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Sunday, February 23, 2003
12:03 PM
A sketch of circumstances
As I write this, I document some of the circumstances of my life. Some seem more important than others, some seem more fun. A few I'd rather not mention, but they are important to understanding who I am.
To most of the world, in all likelihood, I am a successful if outspoken businesswoman, VP of Marketing and Business Development at eMarket Group, a reasonably successful dotcom here in Portland, Oregon. I was nominated for woman entrepreneur by the Portland Business Journal this year. I'm coordinating the Growth Company track for the Oregon Entrepreneur Forum "University of the Entrepreneur" conference in May. It's likely that my company will get 100 Best Companies to Work For from the Business Journal next week, and we will certainly be in the BizJournal's Top 100 Fastest Growing Private Companies in Oregon in the top ten again this year.
Me, I'm the person they send to NY and LA and SF and various places to sign up new contracts. I go there from this little company in a warehouse in Portland's industrial NW, and walking into the office of, say, a VP at Viacom, and convince her that we are exactly what she needs. It's actually really fun -- and a LOT easier than raising large donations for a nonprofit from major donors!
Yes, woman entrepreneur is only my day job, my secret identity cover. In my own hours, I have three things I do that seem far more important, most days, although it can be hard to work on each, every day.
First, I'm a single mother, with an incredibly wonderful and gifted ten year old son: Joseph, named after my dad. My parents were married over 55 years when my dad died last year -- I never really expected to be a single mom. Yet incredibly, my last two husbands both left me for younger women from North Carolina named Melissa. What's that about? I have tried to engineer my life so that me and my kid can be relatively sane. We live in a "single parent co-op," a big old victorian monstrosity in a nice neighborhood (NW 19th & Lovejoy, more or less, very old pedestrian neighborhood, packed with coffeeshops and restaurants, and on the trolley line to downtown) where we are five blocks from Joseph's school, and eleven blocks to my work. We share our house (and its one bathroom) with another single parent family. My friend Ioan Mitrea, his 11-year-old son Will, and 2-year-old daughter Kiva. Ioan works at home and covers the boys for afterschool and when I have to travel. When I am in town, I have teaching projects with both boys, this year. I'm working with Will on his writing, and teaching him a bit about cooking, and I'm working with Joseph to teach him to sing, and we're learning Spanish together. I love my kid, and I love spending time with him, but most of the time, he'd prefer Age of Mythology to hanging out with me!
Then, I'm a social crusader -- until recently in semi-retirement, but these are times that try our souls. The Portland Public Schools are cutting off four weeks at the end of the school year. When Oregon Measure 28 got voted down, I thought, "Omigod, that's another $600 or so in Parks & Rec day camps" but then I realized: there might be no day camps. The Parks & Rec centers are already scheduled. The college kids (backbone of their summer staffing) won't be here yet. And, the summer day camps were never set up to cover *all* the kids at once. I saw a train wreck. In Oregon, it's illegal to leave a child under 10 unattended (even in the car for five minutes to run into the store). What would all the already stressed low income parents with elementary kids do?
I anticipated that the possible regular church, community, neighborhood, parks, clubs and other normal ways to cover these youngest kids would fall short. I started talking to my friends about it. Everyone agreed -- there might be thousands of kids who wouldn't be able to get care. So, being a civic animal, I knew to call Lew Fredericks, who is the public information officer at the Portland Public Schools. Lew is an incredibly friendly guy, and we had a good time talking about back "in the day" when both our families were involved in civil rights activism. Lew told me that there are 25,000 kids in K-5 in PPS, and that an estimate that 2,000-5,000 of those kids would be without oversight from institutions nor friends & family was totally reasonable. He referred me to a group meeting the next week (now two weeks ago) for a Furlough Summit at OMSI.
At the Furlough Summit, I made myself a nametag: "Shava / Mission K5" Mission K5 was just an idea I'd had, that I'd recruited some interest in from some of my networks of folks around Portland. The idea was that, if someone else were planning to cover these unserved younger schoolkids, we'd volunteer. If no one were, it was just necessary to make sure that someone was there for them. I mean think about it -- 5,000 kids, under ten, alone at home or on the street for four weeks. We'd have house fires, accidents, child predators, lost and kidnapped children -- you could just go on. Not to mention all the kids with no lunch at all without their such-as-it-is USDA hot lunch programs.
Well, everyone seemed to think "Thank God someone's thinking about this." Parks & Rec offered us space or spaces if we want multiple sites. The Girl Scouts are pitching in volunteer training, curricula and volunteers, and (perhaps most critically!) liability coverage for every girl on site. Volunteers of America offered to make our lunches if we could get the materials, in their USDA certified kitchen with their menu plans. All sorts of people chimed in, and more since.
Of course, the only problem with this project is that it's impossible. But more on that later. I am, in fact, a woman who's traditionally pulled off impossible things.
And, finally, I am a writer, when I have time, and often when I do not. I want to write unpopular nonfiction -- not in the sense that I set out to make my work unreadable, but that I want to write about things that might be overtly unpopular topics. For example, I want to write a book based on a curriculum for "applied civics" called Civic Ecology, that would be something like "Activism for Dummies." The world needs a nonpartisan, every day guide to how to constructively raise hell and change the civic environment, and today most people have no clue how. More on that later too. There are lots of things I might write, and I'll post a couple items I've written recently on mailing lists that I'm on -- in essence, I'm an essayist, so blogging should come naturally, neh?
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