Full Circle, Part One
Ashley’s latest attempt at a blog
Back in June, I made a professional announcement that I haven’t posted about on my personal social media channels until now — which is sorta funny considering how blurred the lines are between my personal and professional lives these days.
Making the decision to step down as the Executive Director of an organization that I helped bring into the world was a significant step in and of itself. Figuring out how to write about it from a personal perspective required more time for reflection and a metabolizing of the experience. So here I am, a few months later beginning to write. As I unwind myself from the organization, I now have the freedom to share my personal experiences and observations on my own terms, some of which I’ve had to keep under wraps.
Of course, no one asked me to write about my experience. But I find writing to be clarifying and therapeutic, and I need some serious clarification and therapy. I’m also eager to finally have the freedom to share some observations that aren’t permissible in the Portland Nice Culture.
It’s been an intense 6 years since Mara Zepeda and I began fundraising for what would eventually become Business for a Better Portland. The job that I fell into has given me a front row seat to see how things work (or don’t) in this city.
This is a city I love. A city that helped me become a stronger and more loving person over the 19 years I have lived here. A city, I learned after I got here, that was born of conquest and exclusion.
A city that became the darling of hipsterdom and a cash cow for powerful people who now complain that its demise is someone else’s fault.
Over the summer, I considered starting my own Medium channel. After all, it’s the platform that birthed BBPDX, and cool kids like Mayor Pete use it to share about their lives. After trying to set up a Medium account, I found that I actually started one in early March 2020 and posted my first piece just before Lockdown. Damn, Covid sure has wrecked my memory!
It turns out that the topic I addressed in early March 2020– the need for a systems change approach to our social and economic challenges as an adjunct to philanthropy — is even more relevant now than it was pre-pandemic.
It is well known by now that the pandemic hit some communities and sectors of the economy much harder than others. This economic impact exacerbated the income inequality that was growing here in Portland before the pandemic, resulting in increasing homelessness and even more despair on our streets while many of us experienced an explosion of our home values and many large corporations made record profits.
In a future post, I’ll share what I experienced from my front row seat observing economic recovery efforts over the past 2 years — state, regional and local. It’ll require an entire post for me to detail that experience, the strong relationships forged, the optimism for a better future for our community and the missed opportunities bordering on criminal.
For this first post, what I really want to write about is the emotion of birthing and growing a nonprofit. Friends and colleagues have often heard me refer to this organization as my baby. This is often the case for nonprofit founders, but it is more poignant for me since I chose not to have children. I have poured so much love and care into this work, and although “she” is not entirely my own creation, of course, I acknowledge that I have channeled a lot of my maternal instinct and true love and care into this organization.
In the early years of the organization, I referred to “her” as a toddler experiencing the joy of learning to walk and then sometimes falling down and bonking her head on the coffee table. As a toddler, we all have our falls and boo-boos which is very much what the early days of Business for a Better Portland felt like. “She” had just turned 3 when the pandemic hit, and since she didn’t get to go to Pre-K, she experienced some learning challenges that prevented her from being ready for school. You get the idea.
Thankfully, I get to send her off to First Grade this fall, and I’m thrilled that her teacher is so brilliant and strategic. I have a feeling my gal is going to have quite a growth spurt and will likely skip a couple grades. Look out world!
The work of creating this organization was my expression of love for my community, for those who are marginalized, for the business owners who contribute so much to our economy and are tokenized by conventional organizations and many of our elected officials. My work, especially over the past 2 years, has been an effort to wring out as much of my personal privilege as possible to give voice to those who do the hard work only to have others reap the benefits.
My curiosity about how to contribute to a more socially just world started at an all girls Catholic school in Little Rock, Arkansas, of all places. “To whom much is given, much is expected” was imprinted on my heart in my early teens. I was fortunate to spend a week one summer in the 9th Ward of New Orleans with Sr. Helen Prejean, long before she published Dead Man Walking. The stories she shared about the injustice in her community and the people she connected us with, including my pen pal on Angola’s death row, certainly turned my insulated white middle class world upside down.
There were three more decades of formative experiences ranging from volunteering on political campaigns to working for a B Corp that informed my desire to engage in the world in a way that would make it better for others. But it wasn’t until 2016 when I was fortunate enough to be part of the American Leadership Forum of Oregon that I would be profoundly transformed by a curriculum and new relationships — so much so that the scales fell from my eyes, month after month, each time our cohort met.
It was this transformed person (still with a lot of learning to do) who co-founded Business for a Better Portland. By the time the pandemic hit in March of 2020, I’d been on the BBPDX journey for over 3 years, and I couldn’t unsee what I had seen. The layers of systemic failures and structural bias that prevented hard working folks from having successful businesses here was no longer impacting people out there. These were my friends, my colleagues. Part of my ever growing family of choice. I loved their children. Their children loved my dog. We were a community, and my community was in harm’s way.
As I sat alone in my house in March 2020, not realizing at that point just how long I would be alone, the reality of my privilege sank in deeply. I was not going to go hungry. I would be able to pay the mortgage, even if the organization could no longer pay me. “What’s the worst that could happen?” I asked myself as I considered the massive workload before us as an organization. The level of despair in the community was only starting to become apparent. “Well, I’d sell the house and walk away debt free with some money to get by on.”
And from there, I plunged head first into 2 plus years of fierce advocacy for those small businesses that were most adversely affected by the pandemic. The results of our work are well documented.
The work that went undone because of systemic and structural discrimination against those small businesses who lacked a lobbyist or a Political Action Committee? Well, I can only hope that someday, someone will document all of that.
In a 2016 interview with Krista Tippet (it’s possible that I am the first person to co-found a chamber of commerce based on learnings from a science and spirit podcast), Rebecca Solnit said, “People lock onto motherhood as a key to feminine identity, in part from the belief that children are the best way to fulfill your capacity to love…but there are so many things to love besides one’s own offspring, so many things that need love, so much other work love has to do in the world.”
Solnit goes on to talk about the climate activists she works with and the ferocity with which they love the natural world, and how fortunate we are that they do that work with such passion.
It helped me to hear her say that and to consider the ways in which our culture reveres women for their Mama Bear fierceness to protect their children but then derides women who are equally fierce in their defense of other humans or the planet.
I have certainly expressed my Mama Bear nature over the past few years with a fair amount of ferocity. Some might argue that “giving into” that Mama Bear side of myself was the beginning of the end of my effectiveness in this role. Time will tell.
My hunch is that I was just saying things that a lot of people wished they could say, but for one reason or another, couldn’t.
This experience has certainly opened my eyes to a dark underbelly of our city and state politics for which my skin isn’t thick enough. After some much needed rest, I’ll find a way to channel my Inner Mama Bear to be of service to my community in different way.
Back to that Medium channel idea. I’ve decided to call this and the upcoming series of essays Full Circle. So much of what I have experienced over the past 6 years has been a revisiting of past experiences going back 30 years in Oregon and the relationships that surface once again in the present. Thankfully, these full circle experiences have helped me make sense of my life, in some ways, but they’ve also revealed how suffering and injustice are perpetuated. And how short our memories are.
Thanks for reading, and let me know your thoughts, if they’re nice. I really don’t have time for mean people these days.
