Politics/Community Involvement

"I just think that we owe the next generation much more than we’re giving them. I think the environmental issues, the human rights issues, the financial issues, I just think we owe them trying to get things straightened out before they inherit the mess.  And I also think you think differently about the future [as a mother]. It puts you in a different place. I also think as mother, as a mother of sons, it’s important that they know that women have a place, a very important place, and deserve …. a place at the table and be important in decision-making.  I find that’s quite a big responsibility, to be mother of boys."

"It’s called the Culture of Peace Initiative and actually it was started by the Nobel Peace Prize winners in the 1990s and I’ve been working with it at the UN for a number of years, but I decided I would bring it to Worcester because there’s so much potential here for hope -- people don’t see that we can get beyond our divisions…so I’m pretty excited about this and I feel a little bit more intentional here in Worcester because it’s taken me all this time to realize how I can contribute. In Worcester, it’s a very unusual and wondrous community of people who, when I first came, always asked me, why would I come here from Cambridge? I keep feeling that they don’t know the potential, there’s so much here that’s possible for Worcester."

You really have to give yourself a balanced view of the political situation and figure out which one works for you. We are a democracy, we have more than one newspaper, we have more than one opinion. So you need to read all of it to form your own opinion.

Well in the mid-fifties -- I have two children, and they were born one in 55 and one in 58 -- and so I was wanting to get away from diapers and not talk about babies and I joined the League of Women Voters at the invitation of a couple of friends and that was a life changing experience for me, really. I went to a meeting first on foreign policy and you know I’d never been to a meeting on foreign policy, but I’d read stuff in the paper from Worcester at that time. So I joined them and by 1968 I was president of the Worcester League. We had 444 members which was a big organization and we had two meetings a month, it was a great big job, a full time job, more than I expected really.