A participant at Celebration. Photo courtesy of Austin Baker.

Celebration started in 1982, and was born of the fears among native communities in Alaska that their cultural traditions were disappearing.  They wanted to find a way to ensure that their traditional foods, songs, dances, and dress would be transmitted to subsequent generations.  The first celebration festivities were small, and there were not many children present, but they persisted because the goal was critical to the community.  Today, Celebration is one of the state’s largest events, and was attended by more than 5,000 people in 2010.

WDN’s trip will include Celebration activities as well as many optional excursions to be selected by the trip participants, including whale watching, a helicopter tour of the ice fields, a day cruise to the fjord Tracy Arm, hikes, and visits to area museums and places of cultural and historical significance.  Rosita Worl, Sealaska Heritage Institute’s (SHI) Executive Director and an anthropologist by training, has volunteered to take us on a day hike to sites of cultural and historical significance.

The most popular events at Celebration are the dance performances, which groups work on for months in advance.  Participants also spend a lot of time working on their regalia for the Grand Entrance and Grand Exit ceremonies, which bring all the native communities together.  The significance of this goes deeper than just the specialness of being together to celebrate their culture; it also creates opportunities to reproduce their cultures through creation of new regalia.  “Celebration is a reason to showcase your regalia and heritage,” according to Kathy Dye, SHI’s Director of Media and Publications.

Some of Celebration’s activities are new approaches to the county fairs of old, with art for sale and competitions for the best preparations of native foods such as black seaweed and soapberries.  Soapberries are tiny red berries found in northeast Alaska.  They are called soapberries because “when you whip them, it creates a red lather and looks like soap,” said Dye.  They are a little bitter, and so creative cooks find ways to make them sweeter and tastier.

The other popular events are the parade, the art show and competition, and lectures on local history and culture.  The event is meaningful for all generations.

“For young people, it’s important because they learn their traditional songs and dances.  The elders get to see the youth perpetuating the culture in a visible way,” said Dye.

Click here to learn more about Celebration.

If you want to register to come, contact Kathy Andreson at kandreson@womendonors.org or (415) 814-1333.

UltraViolet, one of the new partners of WDN's Reproductive Rights Circle, delivered thousands of "Thank You" cards to President Obama for his recent decisions on women's health.

Every day we are seeing it in the headlines – the attacks on women’s health care from those whose political agenda does not include the interests of women.

WDN’s Reproductive Rights Action Circle predicted this moment years ago as part of its Moving Forward project – even as others turned a blind eye. All along we knew that conservatives not only wanted to ban abortion, but also wanted to restrict women’s access to basic health services including contraception. And now, the Reproductive Rights Action Circle is mobilizing around this critical moment.

The Circle has just decided on a multi-pronged strategy to tackle the challenges in this current moment, including:

1. A seed investment in a new women-focused online organizing entity, Ultraviolet, to use the birth control fight and health care for women as wedge issues in 2012 and to build a significant online community that will remain part of the permanent progressive infrastructure.
2. An investment in the Communication Consortium Media Center (CCMC) to package our Moving Forward materials into simple, usable tools that present messaging to ensure how to win on reproductive issues, personhood issues and health issues.
3. A non-financial but serious investment in HERVotes, a self-organized coalition of 50 women’s groups interested in mobilizing women on Health and Economic ­Rights for the 2012 election. They are seeking to coordinate messaging, strategies and tactics.
4. In addition, we have joined the Coalition to Protect Women’s Health Care, organized just last week by major organizations mobilizing to address the attacks on women’s health care these past weeks.

UltraViolet, which just officially began its work in January, has already amassed a list of 250,000 people who are ready to keep speaking up and taking action on this and other critical issues that affect women — in part from their activism around the Komen-Planned Parenthood controversy. They are bringing a critical perspective to the current debate, while at the same time organizing women for the long term.

There will be an awards ceremony in New York on March 6. For more information about attending, visit NCRW’s website. Some of WDN’s members responded to the announcement with their own congratulations and recognition of Donna’s impact:

“Brava, Donna! A welcome nod of recognition and appreciation of what we in WDN have been privileged to experience up close — your exceptional, creative, strategic leadership, impressive impact and indefatigable dedication!”

♦

“Congratulations…it is so deserving. I am very honored to be a member of WDN under your great leadership.”

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“Congratulations! It is truly amazing to think of what this organization has done during these ten years under Donna’s leadership.”

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“How exciting! And how well deserved. Donna, thank you for your patient, nimble, and adventurous leadership. You’re a great role model, teacher, and friend, and I’m delighted to see you publicly celebrated!”

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“Congratulations! You have done extremely important work, over the past decade, whose impact on improving the lives and effectiveness of American women is only beginning to become apparent.”

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“You’ve helped our members increase and grow and develop skills we didn’t know we had; and you’ve led us in having a growing voice and influence in improving the lives of others as well as our own. This award is richly deserved!”

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“You totally deserve this honor and recognition.  You have made a name for yourself and  have put WDN on the map for its  progressive, feminist work  that sees how interconnected gender, class, race and ethnicity all  are.  As many have already said, we are lucky to have you at our helm.”

The women who attend bring enough to share a nice meal together, learn about what is happening to women and girls around the world, and donate the money they would have spent on a night out to support grass-roots programs in education, healthcare, vocational training, micro-credit loans and economic development.

“I invited 20 of my friends for dinner, and we raised $700, and we started doing it every month,” Marsha says in the segment.

It is re-posted below:

Consolation, Through Work

By GEORGIA BERNER

MY father-in-law, Erling Berner, started the company that became Berner International, a manufacturer of air curtains or air doors. These units are usually placed above door entrances in stores, hospitals, schools, restaurants and other buildings, and create a seal across a doorway. They save energy and help control internal building temperature. In winter, they help keep the heat inside and the cold air outside.

In the late 1960s, I was engaged to marry Erling’s son Christian. As a wedding gift, Erling offered to help us set up an energy recovery business in Japan, which we thought would be great fun. Recovering energy involves providing fresh air without increasing energy use in a building. Christian ran the business, and I taught English grammar and literature to Japanese students. We had two children while living there.

In 1972, Erling decided to turn over the air-curtain company to Christian. Twelve years later, my husband, who was a pilot, was flying solo on a business trip to Boston when the plane went down. He died in the crash, and seven d

Georgia Berner is the president and C.E.O. of Berner International in New Castle, Pa.

ays later I stepped in to run the company. We had four children by then, ages 9 to 16. Focusing on the job was a lifesaver for me.

I have a bachelor’s degree in political science and two master’s degrees, in English literature and social psychology. Manufacturing requires common sense; you’re organizing items and putting them together. Fortunately, I already knew a lot about the company, because when you’re married to a small-business person, you’re married to the business.

After my first meeting with our accountant and banker, however, I realized I didn’t know enough about finance. I told them: “I just sat with you for an hour and I have no idea what you said. You were using common English words, but they had different meanings.” Our accountant gave me a two-day crash course in balance sheets and income statements, and I took a Small Business Administration course on cash flow.

When another company trademarked the words “air door” in the 1990s, I sued in federal court. Our lawyer tried to dissuade me, saying it would cost too much to pursue the case, but to me it was the principle involved. When a word becomes common usage, no one should be allowed to trademark it. Air door and air curtain are common terms. The court agreed and we won.

In 2000, we bought a start-up and renamed it Berner Energy Recovery, which we folded into Berner International in 2010. We consider ourselves an energy conservation company, so the purchase was a natural extension of what we do. The system captures the humidity and hot or cold air from a building’s exhaust and uses them to heat or cool incoming air. It provides fresh air and reduces energy costs.

In 2006, I ran in the Democratic primary for a Congressional seat in Pennsylvania. I lost, and while campaigning I learned how broken our health care system is. Berner International pays the entire cost of health care benefits for employees. To me, it only makes sense to have a health care system to which everyone has access.

My two daughters work in the company, my two sons own their own businesses, and all four serve on our board along with one outside director. Eventually, we’ll bring in more outside directors and have the children rotate so two are on the board at all times.

A few years ago, I remarried. My mother had introduced me to Christian, and two of my children introduced me to my current husband, Jim. They had gone to high school with his children. They loved him and thought that I should meet him.

As told to Patricia R. Olsen.

Carol has an MA in Political Science from Southern Methodist University, in Dallas.  SMU is also where she attended law school, studying to practice poverty law.  Carol worked for Dallas Legal Services and then Consumers Union, opening their Austin office.

She has done a great deal of work in housing and utility regulation, and is especially proud of changes she won in state law that improved habitability standards and due process protections for tenants.  The utilities work she did helped a lot of clients.  “We stopped rate increases and built in regulation that created an office to represent residential and small business rate payers, which is the kind of structural change we need,” she said.

Spirituality is a large part of Carol’s life.  She is active in the Church of the Movement of Spiritual Awareness in Los Angeles, and spends 3-4 weeks a year on spiritual retreats.  Most of her weekends are spent at the Texas organic beef and pecan ranch she and her husband own.  Carol is excited about her new grandson.

Carol’s interests include opera, dining, walking and hiking, and spirituality.  She is currently serving as Treasurer and doing pro bono work for the Texas Organizing Project, which is organizing in Dallas to fight the prison pipeline.  One of her major interests is transformational leadership, and she serves on the Advisory Board of Insight University in Santa Fe, where they are building a PhD program in Transformational Leadership.  She is also very involved with Annie’s List in Dallas.  “They train, recruit and support progressive female candidates, with a focus on the state legislature,” Carol explains.

She joined WDN to learn more about strategic giving, because a lot of her current giving is local.  She also wanted to be in community with other progressive women, and to learn more about philanthropy.  Due to her years working to change state laws, she has a lot of experience in lobbying, but not much experience in philanthropy.  It’s a new approach for her and she is eager to learn more through her participation in WDN.

Called “Aligning Our Actions With Our Values,” the statement talks about how WDN’s founding was intuitively about an intersectional gender-class analysis, because they recognized that as women of wealth, they are situated in the world differently from their fathers, brothers and husbands, and are also situated differently from people whose earnings do not allow for significant philanthropy:

Intersectional, in this context, means that we paid attention to both gender and class in the forming of the “women” “donors” network. The trajectories of our own lives confirmed that the experiences of class, gender, sexual orientation and race are not easily separated or compartmentalized, but rather have ramifications, both positive and negative, on all aspects of out experience.

Given this underlying analysis, WDN has been a space where friendships are built, information is shared, ideas are generated and leaders develop. But with this statement, WDN is becoming more explicit in our efforts to integrate class, which has always been implicit in our analysis, but not always directly expressed or applied to our work. The statement also takes into account the impact of racialization, a structural phenomenon that can influence outcomes in more subtle or indirect ways. This part of the statement summarizes how it works to use this kind of intersectional lens:

As we move into the third decade of our work, WDN is committed to supporting organization-wide efforts to understand how different forms of inequality work together to shape outcomes in WDN priority issue areas, and how we as an organization can improve our practices so that they reflect our values. Practically speaking, rather than focus on race, sexual orientation, class or gender issue as issue areas, WDN circle members will work together to understand how different forms of inequity shape outcomes in their respective issue areas — be that reproductive rights, environment, incarceration, and so forth.

The WDN Board is proud to have made this step forward in the pursuit of racial and gender justice, and the organization’s staff and members are working in an ongoing way to implement these critical ideas across all of the work we are doing.

TheGrio’s 100 are 100 people making history today — 10 people in 10 fields of expertise: Business, Health, Education, Science & the Environment, Media, Pop Culture, Arts & Culture, Service & Activism, Politics and Sports.

To make TheGrio’s 100, the body of your work cannot yet be complete. Folks who have already seen the height of their careers are not on this list. This list is for people who still have work to do.

We also looked at scale. It’s one thing to influence a small community or a certain group of people — but we specifically targeted history makers who have the potential to make changes and who offer inspiration to not just one neighborhood, not just one group of people — but to all of America.

In “TheGrio’s 100″ profile of Carol, she is described as a media leader who is making history. We have cross-posted the story below:

TheGrio’s 100: Carol Jenkins, a media leader advocating for tomorrow’s female journalists

Carol Jenkins is an Emmy Award-winning broadcast journalist who is most widely known as the former co-anchor of WNBC-TV’s 6 p.m. newscast, a position she held for 23 years.

In addition to her anchoring position, Jenkins was the executive producer of the PBSDocumentary “What I Want My Words To Do To You,” which won an award at the 2003 Sundance Film Festival.

She is also the co-author of “Black Titan, A.G. Gaston and the Making of a Black American Millionaire,” which in 2004 was selected by the Black Caucus of the American Library Association as one of the best non-fiction books of the year.

Furthermore, Jenkins was the founder and president of the Women’s Media Center, a non-profit group dedicated to helping women succeed in media. In recent times, she serves on the group’s board of directors.

Carol Jenkins is making history … as one of the leading black females in media. With her decades-long career in front of the camera, and her behind-the-scenes roles as a producer and author, Jenkins has been a force in the media world, a place where women of color often face struggles to achieve longstanding and high-ranking roles.

What’s next for Carol?

Jenkins occasionally blogs about the media, specifically pertaining to women of color, on her website. She also continues to go on speaking engagements and consult with companies about their media needs. She’s in the process of working on a book about her family’s history in journalism.

In her own words …

“When my father and stepfather engaged in journalism — creating and working for the black press, it was due to extreme segregation. In the 1970s, I was among the first wave of black television reporters — and women,” Jenkins said during an interview for the Women’s Media Center‘s-media-center-2008/. “That inclusion came on the heels of rioting in the streets and federal mandates. It was a major source of wonderment that women and people of color would be allowed to participate. Now we see that there is still ground to cover — that the assumption that equality would be a natural process was faulty.”

A little-known fact about women owning commercials

Women own only 6 percent of all commercial broadcast TV stations in the U.S., while minorities own only 3 percent of them, according to a 2006 Free Press study.

For more information, click here.

We practiced our communication skills, in terms of talking about WDN and the impact of our work, learned how to better use WDN’s website as a tool for connecting and doing collaborative work, and practiced bringing an intersectional lens of race, gender and class to all of our work.

The program retreat is a wonderful opportunity for members working in circles to have some face time together and to do some long-term planning.

“The Barber of Birmingham” is an independent documentary film produced and directed by Robin Fryday and Gail Dolgin. Several WDN members helped to fund the film’s production, including Executive Producer Julie Parker Benello at Chicken & Egg Pictures, who includes this description of the film on her website:

The film features 85-year old Mr. Armstrong, an African American barber in Birmingham, Alabama, as he experiences the manifestation of an unimaginable dream: the election of the first African American president. This colorful and courageous activist of the Civil Rights era casts his vote, celebrates Obama’s victory and proudly unfurls the American flag as he is inducted into the Foot Soldiers Hall of Fame. Mr. Armstrong links the magnitude of the present paradigm shift with challenges he faced in the past: from his sons’ integration into an all white school to the Bloody Sunday march for voting rights. The documentary raises questions about democracy and patriotism in the face of adversity, and the vigilance and action required to ensure continued forward movement to end racial injustice.

Benello said that she and a few other WDN members approached the entire membership in December 2010 asking for help to finish “The Barber of Birmingham” before its Sundance premiere in January 2011. They were able to ultimately leverage about $60,000 from WDN members to complete the project. WDN members were motivated by the content of the film — which many believed would be a get-out-the-vote tool — as well as the role of beloved filmmaker Dolgin, who had lost her battle with cancer before “The Barber of Birmingham” was completed. Before Dolgin passed away, her co-director Fryday and dear friend and Co-founder of Chicken & Egg Pictures Judith Helfand vowed that they would finish it. The first five minutes of the work-in-progress was shown at Dolgin’s memorial service, where there was a sense of great anticipation for its future as a powerful short film. Today’s Oscar nomination is a great testament to that.

“WDN members were instrumental in completing this film and I hope will also be able to support its outreach and get out the vote engagement campaign going forward,” Benello said.