Comstock's 0517 - May 2017

OPEN-SOURCE HEALTH | GIRLS WHO BREW | THE HIDDEN STRESS OF IVF

BUSINESS INSIGHT FOR THE CAPITAL REGION MAY ‘17 VOL. 29 | NO. 5

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BOSS Our annual salute to women in leadership

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Every EveryDay DayOffers OffersTeachable TeachableMoments Moments You are theDay best to Offers teach kids about good moneyMoments habits Every Teachable You are the best to teach kids about good money habits You are the best to teach kids about good money habits

T T T

by Anthony Johnson

by Anthony Johnson

by Anthony Johnson

management in the context of what you know. In fact, oday, children in Sacramento and around the management in thetocontext of what you In fact, oday, children in Sacramento and around the it’s more meaningful kids—and easier forknow. you—when U.S. are unlikely to learn basic financial literacy it’s more meaningful to kids—and easier for you—when U.S.in are unlikely learn basic financial literacy management in the what you Inno fact, give examples from yourofown life.

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As a banker, I see many adults still struggling to learn approach to suit them. activities.

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If you’re planning a those skills and who make missteps because of it. Add saved buying an item on sale.

If you’re planning a those skills and who make missteps because of it.

Add activities.

While shopping, talk about how much you skills and who make missteps because of it.

Add to that the Here are four easy ideas that can get big results: major purchase (i.e. car, home or vacation), discuss As a banker, I see many adults still struggling to learn to that the challenges of budgeting when faced with major purchase (i.e. car, home or vacation), discuss to that the challenges ofthings budgeting when faced with how saved buying an item on sale.

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In fact, 60 percent of want, too. to that the challenges of budgeting when faced with fast. In fact, 60 percent of Americans activities.

While shopping, talk about how much you want, too. fast. have In fact, 60 percent how grown-ups have to save up for the items they Americans don’t have enough savings to cover $500 unexday-to-day expenses and of things can don’t enough savings toAmericans cover aget acomplicated saved buying an item on sale. If you’re planning a major Introduce hands-on learning such the don’t have enough savings to cover a want, too. pected expense, according to a January Bankrate.com study. fast.

In fact, 60 percent of Americans $500 unexpected expense, according to purchase (i.e. Introduce car, home orhands-on vacation), learning discuss how grownthe tried-and-true piggy bank. Take itsuch to the $500 have unexpected according enoughexpense, savings to cover to a a don’t January Bankrate.com study. ups have to save up for the items they want,Take too.such tried-and-true piggy bank. it to the Introduce hands-on learning the We all want more for our children.

The good news is we next level with an older child by using a January Bankrate.com study. $500 unexpected expense, according to 2. Introduce hands-on learning the tried-and-true nextjars: level withsuch anspending, older child by using tried-and-true piggy bank.

Take it to the can absolutely change the tide, simply by integrating this four saving, donating a January Bankrate.com study.

We all want more for our children. piggy bank. Take itlevel to thewith nextan levelspending, with child an older fourinvesting. jars: saving, donating next using topic into our everyday lives.

Let’s find teachable moments and The older amount of by money We all want more for children.

The good news is we canour absolutely child by using four jars: saving, spending, donating and and investing.

The amount of money four jars: saving, spending, donating with our kids, nephews, nieces and grandchildren.

Talking in the container isn’t important, it’s the The all good news is we can absolutely We want more forby our children. change the tide, simply integrating investing.

The amount of money in the container isn’t in the container isn’t important, it’s the and investing.

The amount of money about money can be uncomfortable, but it’s worth it.

Just process. change the tide, simply bylives. integrating The good news we can absolutely this topic into our is everyday Let’s important, it’sin the process. process. the container isn’t important, it’s the like learning to ride a bike, basic financial skills are easier to thisteachable topic our everyday lives.kids, Let’s change theinto tide, simply by integrating find moments with our 3. One of the One most impactful things you can do may seem of the most impactful things you process. master wheninto you’re young.

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Seek out more ideas and information.

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If now you’re not theincreases parent, thekids odds theyfinancial will maintain good habits in adulthood. path to sound financial practices greatly Seek out and information. There are great age-appropriate topics. value of more savingideas versus borrowing. follow their lead.

Seek out more ideas and information.

There are great the odds they will maintain good habits in adulthood.

Here’s a simple road map to get you started: financial resources online, including free advice on Try: fdic.org/moneysmart and jumpstart.org.

• Put yourself in the child’s shoes.

Try to remember your Here’s a simple road map to get you started: financial resources online, including free advice on Seek out more ideas There are and great • If you’re a parent, speak with your spouse or age-appropriate topics.and Try:information. fdic.org/moneysmart top worries and priorities at that age.

Buying • partner If afinancial you’re a parent, speak with your spouse or age-appropriate topics.

Try: fdic.org/moneysmart and Here’s simple road map to get you started: However you approach the topic, remember to stay focused financial resources online, including free advice on so you’re both on the same page when it’s jumpstart.org. that new app orparent, toykids might be the perfect opening to talk partner soato you’re both on the same page when it’s jumpstart.org.

• time If you’re speak with your spouse or on the goal: to raisetopics. a financially savvy child who can go into age-appropriate Try: fdic.org/moneysmart and to talk the about financial priorities.

If about money. time to talk to the kids about financial priorities.

If However you approach the topic, remember stay partner so you’re both on the same page when it’s the world with the basic knowledge about saving andtospendjumpstart.org. you’re not the parent, follow their lead.

However approach theatopic, remember to stay Ask about their money.

The context of If you’re the parent, follow their lead. focused on you the goal: raise financially savvy child time tonot talk to thoughts the kids on about financial priorities. ing so he/she avoids thetotemptations of excessive spending.

• • Put yourself in the child’s shoes.

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Try to remember that new app or toy might be the perfect aboutcansaving and spending sothe he/she avoids the conversations more productive.

Buying that new app or toy might be the perfect who go into the world with basic knowledge temptations of excessive spending. your top financial worries and priorities at that age. opening to talk about money. temptations excessive spending. opening to talk about about savingof and spending so he/she avoids the Buying new app money. orontoy mightThe be context the perfect • Ask aboutthat their thoughts money. of • this Askconversation about thoughts on money.

The context of temptations of excessive spending. opening to their talk about money. will depend on their age, but it Anthony Johnson is a Senior Vice President at Banner this about conversation will in depend on their age, butofit • shows Ask thoughts on money.

Theand context Anthony is abillion SeniorinVice President atpartners Banner you’retheir interested their opinion make Bank.

WithJohnson nearly $10 assets, Banner shows you’re interested in their andbut make this conversation will more depend onopinion their age, it Bank.

With nearly billionVice in Banner partners financial conversations productive. with individuals and businesses to assets, support their financial Anthony Johnson is$10 a Senior President at Banner financial conversations productive. with individuals and businesses to support their financial shows you’re interested more in their opinion and make goals. at billion 916.714.2217 or Banner partners Bank.Reach With Anthony nearly $10 in assets, goals.

Reach Anthony at 916.714.2217 or financial conversations more productive. with individuals and businesses to support their financial Now that you’ve laid the groundwork, jump in. There’s anthony.johnson@bannerbank.com. that you’ve laid theexplain groundwork, in. There’s anthony.johnson@bannerbank.com. goals.

Reach Anthony at 916.714.2217 or noNow expectation that you globaljump economics or no expectation that you explain global economics or Now that you’ve laid the groundwork, jump in.

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Volume 29 Number 5 PRESIDENT & PUBLISHER Winnie Comstock-Carlson, Ext. 101 winnie@comstocksmag.com EDITOR IN CHIEF Allison Joy, Ext. 106 MANAGING EDITOR Sena Christian, Ext. 110 ASSOCIATE EDITOR Robin Epley, Ext. 104 INTERIM ART DIRECTOR Kelly Barr, Ext. 115 EDITORIAL DESIGNER Sara Bogovich, Ext. 108 AD DESIGNER Jason Balangue, Ext. 105 VICE PRESIDENT & DIRECTOR OF BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT Clayton Blakley, Ext. 109 claytonb@comstocksmag.com For more information about advertising, send an email to ads@comstocksmag.com

BUSINESS MANAGER Sharon Brewer, Ext. 103 WEB MANAGER & COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT SPECIALIST Kiara Reed, Ext. 112 MARKETING ASSISTANT Thomas Hanns, Ext. 111 CIRCULATION DEPARTMENT Tamara Duarte, Ext. 107 CONTRIBUTING WRITERS Katie Carr, Rich Ehisen, Tania Fowler, Laurie Lauletta-Boshart, Suzanne Lucas, Amy Westervelt, Karen Wilkinson, Steven Yoder CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHERS Richard Beckermeyer, Joan Cusick, Terence Duffy, Tia Gemmell, Ken James, Kyle Monk, Noel Neuburger PRINTING Commerce Printing Sacramento, Calif. commerceprinting.com Published by Comstock Publishing Inc. 2335 American River Dr., Suite 301 Sacramento, CA 95825 (916) 364-1000 Fax (916) 364-0350 comstocksmag.com

Comstock’s magazine covers commerce and community in the counties of Amador, El Dorado, Nevada, Placer, Sacramento, San Joaquin, Solano, Sutter, Yolo and Yuba, known as California’s Capital Region.

Comstock’s is published monthly by Comstock Publishing Inc, 2335 American River Dr., Ste. 301, Sacramento, CA. 95825. Comstock’s Volume 29, No. 5. A one year subscription to Comstock’s is $25 per year; a single copy is $4.95 plus postage, plus tax (if applicable). All rates are payable in U.S. funds.

Publisher is not responsible for unsolicited manuscripts and artwork. ©2017 by Comstock Publishing Inc. No part of this publication may be reproduced without the written permission of the publisher.

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TODAY IS THE DAY. TAKE ACTION. One courageous family can change the course of a child’s life.

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comstocksmag.com | May 2017

May 2017 CHAIRMAN RICHARD RAISLER President, trueHUE Enterprises Inc.

reen & gold gala reflections of gratitude

MIKE AMMANN President and CEO, San Joaquin Partnership MEG ARNOLD Principal, GSD Consulting JAMES BECKWITH CEO, Five Star Bank STEPHEN BENDER CEO, Warren G. Bender Co. CHRISTI BLACK-DAVIS Executive Vice President, Edelman CAROL BURGER President, Burger Rehabilitation TIM CARMICHAEL Manager, Southern California Gas Co. MAC CLEMMENS CEO, Digital Deployment JOHN FINEGAN Founder, Beck Ag STEVE FLEMING President and CEO, River City Bank JIM HARTLEY Vice President, CH2M OLEG KAGANOVICH Founder and CEO, Wyndow TOM KANDRIS CEO, PackageOne

Thank you to our sponsors

On March 24, Sacramento State’s signature black-tie fundraising event, the Green & Gold Gala, raised more than $373,000 for student scholarships and programs.

Thank you to our sponsors and supporters. You have truly made a difference for our students. redefine the possible level

University Enterprises, Inc.

DENTON KELLEY Managing Principal, LDK Capital LLC BRIAN KING Chancellor, Los Rios Community College District

gold level

JEFF KOEWLER Partner, Delfino Madden O’Malley Coyle & Koewler LLP LEO M C FARLAND President and CEO, Greater Sacramento and Northern Nevada Volunteers of America BILL MUELLER CEO, Valley Vision Inc. TIM MURPHY CEO, Sacramento Regional Builders Exchange MARIA OGRYDZIAK Owner, Maria Ogrydziak Architecture SANDY PERSON President, Solano EDC CURT ROCCA Managing Partner, DCA Partners VERNA SULPIZIO President/CEO, West Sacramento Chamber of Commerce DARRELL TEAT President, The Nehemiah Companies SANJAY VARSHNEY VP/Wealth Advisor, Wells Fargo The Private Bank JOSHUA WOOD CEO, Region Business Opinions expressed in this publication do not necessarily reflect the individual opinions of the members of the editorial board.

bronze level Capital Public Radio | Clark Pacific | Comstock’s Magazine | Crowe Horwath, LLP | Placer Ranch, Inc. Sacramento State Administration and Business Affairs | SMUD | The Sacramento Bee green level Margot ’72 and Dave Bach | Bernice Bass de Martinez David ’86 and Julie Bugatto/Alleghany Properties, LLC | Buzz Oates | Dale ’84 and Katy Carlsen Dignity Health | Drobny Law Offices, Inc. | EdR Collegiate Housing/Upper Eastside Lofts Jeff ’69 and Jane Einhorn | Mark and Marjorie Friedman | K-COE ISOM | Sacramento Magazine Sacramento Rainbow Chamber of Commerce | Sacramento State Office of Academic Affairs SAFE Credit Union | Vince A. Sales | Sand Hill Global Advisors | Sierra College Stanley and Pamela Stewart | Fred MBA ’95 and Nancy Teichert | The Weiss Group | Wells Fargo Bank scholarship level AT&T | AKT Investments | Five Star Bank | McClellan Business Park Gary ’65 and Judy ’66, MS ’99 Quattrin | Sutter Health Valley Area The Niello Group | Gordon and Mary Ann Wong

csus.edu/gala May 2017 | comstocksmag.com

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comstocksmag.com | May 2017

0366-16_8.125x10.875

CONTENTS n

FEATURES

May 2017

50 70

MOTHERHOOD

50 Birth Control

Modern women have more reproductive technology at their command than ever before, but IVF success doesn’t mean working women can have it all.

by Amy Westervelt

ON THE COVER: PHOTO: TERENCE DUFFY OPEN-SOURCE HEALTH | GIRLS WHO BREW | THE HIDDEN STRESS OF IVF

BUSINESS INSIGHT FOR THE CAPITAL REGION MAY ‘17 VOL. 29 | NO. 5

REAL ESTATE

58 Homemakers

Women have become the buyers, the sellers and every role in between when it comes to residential real estate — what does this mean for the market?

by Laurie Lauletta-Boshart

EDUCATION

like a

BOSS Our annual salute to women in leadership

64 A New Role Call

Gender parity in the classroom is covered by Title IX, but what about in the boardroom? Two California campuses are flipping the script.

by Steven Yoder

HEALTH

70 An Open Book

One local woman is leading the charge when it comes to taking control over your own medical information.

37 LEADERSHIP

She Who Leads

We’re highlighting six of the Capital Region’s most influential women leaders — including Sacramento County Deputy District Attorney Quirina Orozco, featured on our cover.

by Robin Epley

by Sena Christian

May 2017 | comstocksmag.com

9

n CONTENTS

May 2017

DEPARTMENTS

26

32

82

THE USUAL

24

EVIL HR LADY

letter from the editor

14

opinion

An unofficial title change can get some employees fuming

by Suzanne Lucas

26

13

TEAMBUILDING Does “groupthink” rule your workplace?

DISCOURSE

32

16

rsvp

22

worth noting

82

snap

86

the breakdown

Sacramento Bee Executive Editor Joyce Terhaar speaks about what the newspaper business looks like these days — and what’s to come interview by Rich Ehisen

TASTE In a male-dominated brewing industry, the Pink Boots Society encourages women to step out from the shadows

by Robin Epley

76

10

CAPITAL REGION CARES The sixth installment of our 22nd annual salute to nonprofits

comstocksmag.com | May 2017

Women can balance their need to please without sacrificing their ability to lead

by Katie Carr

by Tania Fowler

28

Women, with or without children, can learn from one another

Sacramento State Green & Gold Gala / American Red Cross The BASH / Sacramento City College Centennial Gala / KVIE Masterpiece on the River

Buzzword of the Month: Empower / Readers weigh in on Sacramento’s busking laws

The Placer SPCA is going to the dogs

Gender equality in higher education fails to make the grade

May 2017 | comstocksmag.com

11

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comstocksmag.com | May 2017

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR n

A SPINSTER’S GUIDE TO PROFESSIONAL PARENTHOOD P H O T O : K E L LY B A R R

I

wouldn’t call Kate an all-star employee, necessarily. She rarely listens to me, and her communication skills leave something to be desired. Sometimes I make her cry. She spends most of her time in the office “filing” scrap paper that will inevitably need to be thrown away and reorganizing postit notes that were fine where they were. But her occasional presence here enables me to accomplish some very important work that might not have otherwise gotten done. Because Kate is our art director’s 18-month-old daughter.

The intersection of parenthood, motherhood particularly, and the workplace is not a space without landmines. Next time you’re at a party, ask who has it tougher — then, run. There’s plenty to complain about on both ends. Moms have a full plate of responsibilities both at home and in the office, and often outdated stigmas can lead to them being passed over for promotions or important projects. Those of us without children often feel expected to put in longer hours and cover for our coworkers with children, and to better justify our use of PTO and flex scheduling ­— since what’s waiting for us beyond the office walls, anyway?

There’s truth to the tribulations (and assets) on both sides, but what is sorely needed is some frank discussion and collaboration between the two groups. So, with permission from Kelly (our art director), here is what I’ve learned as a non-mom managing a mom: • Life is Life: A healthy work/life balance is important for everyone, regardless of the specific people, activities or obligations being balanced. Non-parents may be needed to fill in for parents on the fly, as children are aces at the element of surprise. And parents, you may owe a colleague the freedom to take off early to catch a show or meet friends from out of town in exchange for the privilege of leaving at 2 p.m. last week to focus on a runny nose.

• Be Flexible: Rescheduling a staff editorial meeting can potentially throw the entire week off for our team. Knowing this, Kelly instigated a conversation early on about how to handle instances where childcare falls through. For me, having her bring Kate into the office so we can continue moving

forward is a no-brainer. We work in a creative environment and our most important meetings are with in-house staff.

Does Kate talk out of turn? Sure, but that extra 15 minutes in the meeting is better than having to wait until the following day. Plus, her antics often lead to some of our most popular social media posts.

• Have a Plan: That’s not to say that every boss should have an open-door policy on children. Obviously that won’t make sense in just any environment. The point is that if you have a set of expectations around last-minute emergencies, you’ll lose less time and foster less angst or uncertainty. As a leader, you can draw lines in the sand where you want, but it’s important to understand the hidden costs of arbitrary policies that leave little wiggle room.

While parents and non-parents should and can be better allies in the workplace, ensuring a healthy environment starts at the top. As a boss, make sure you are tuned in to who is putting in late hours and who is in before the sun rises. Everyone on staff should feel free to use time-off in a way that ensures they are better able to commit to their jobs while working.

Avoid grilling single or childless workers to justify their PTO or use of flex-scheduling any more or less than you would a parent. And don’t discount the hours parents put in working remotely or at odd hours when children are in bed. When expectations are clear and people are held accountable, you can minimize cause for resentment.

Allison Joy Editor in Chief

May 2017 | comstocksmag.com

13

n OPINION

WOMEN CAN’T LET A DESIRE TO PLEASE INHIBIT OUR ABILITY TO LEAD

by Katie Carr

T

his year, my daughter will turn 18 and head off to college, and now I find myself feeling rushed to teach her everything I can about how to be successful in her future career endeavors. As I reflect back on my career, I am keenly aware of choices made that I either regret or celebrate. The regretful decisions have become significant learning moments for me, as they all seem to have two common themes: I made those decisions based on 1) fear and 2) my need to be liked and please others.

My fears were related to concerns about being judged, thought of negatively or perceived as “difficult to work with.”

As a society, we often place labels on tough businesswomen that don’t necessarily get applied to tough businessmen. I am an action- and solution-oriented person with strong gut instincts that serve me well, yet my fears once prevented me from standing up, being decisive and leading with what I knew to be true.

Women’s desire to please can inhibit their ability to take charge. That is one of the many factors that contribute to women comprising more than half of the American workforce, yet only a small fraction of executives. And a large body of evidence by U.S. universities supports the concept of a “confidence gap,” where women feel less self-assured in the workplace, despite being just as — if not more so — competent than their male counterparts. We may not be able to control all the external factors that impact our ability to become leaders in the workplace, but we can focus on the internal obstacles holding us back.

Through years of experience and reflection, I have learned what is needed to overcome personal barriers to success, and propel all women forward as action-oriented, successful and courageous leaders that aren’t afraid to speak up and take charge.

nore your values to be liked by others? You will find a stronger sense of fulfillment working for a company that aligns with your truth. Women, especially, take note: Don't apologize for your values or purpose. If you make a mistake, own it — but apologizing sends the message that you aren’t confident.

OVERCOME YOUR FEARS: Ask yourself, “What am I afraid of and why?” What is the worst thing that could happen if you take this risk, share that opinion or make a certain decision?

Women leaders need to prevent fear from inhibiting their success or drive decisions to please others. If you are working in an environment where you are encouraged to challenge the status quo and choose not to, you are holding yourself back. Take risks, share your opinion, make decisions without apology.

It will be scary and uncomfortable — and worth it. Quiet the inner critic in your head, filling your thoughts with self-doubt, and take a chance. You’ll like the outcome.

Women, especially, take note: Don't apologize for your values or purpose.

If you make a mistake, own it — but apologizing sends the message that you aren’t confident.

KNOW YOUR TRUTH: Have you taken the time to understand your core values and purpose in business or life — and can you articulate them? Reflect on whether your values and purpose serve you as a leader within your organization. Are you being asked to operate against your values, or are you choosing to ig-

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BE RESILIENT: I once read a definition of resilience as the acceptance of reality, a deep belief that life is meaningful and an ability to improvise. I believe that our resilience is tested when we fail. It’s too easy to experience failure and then give up. But if you reflect on the failure, you will learn from it and have an easier time moving on. Identify what went well, what went wrong, what you would do differently and then let the setback go. As I look back on my life, I am so proud of what I have accomplished because I didn’t give up when things got tough. I learned from my mistakes and failures, and became a better leader, manager, partner and coach.

BUILD YOUR VILLAGE AND INVEST IN IT: In my experience, women tend to avoid asking for help, thinking it is expected that we should be able to do things on our own or figure things out without assistance. Women are under a very different microscopic lens in business than men, and some assume that asking for help is bad. I used to believe that if I asked for help, I was weak. What I now believe is that asking for help, connecting with others and nourishing those relationships makes us stronger and wiser. Seek out active power circles, mastermind

this month's

CONTRIBUTORS JOAN Joan loves a great story, whether CUSICK she’s reading it, writing it or pho-

"A Sisterhood of Beer" tographing it — as she did for this pg. 32

month’s feature on the Pink Boots Society. “My favorite stories are about the people and the things we love,” Joan says. “So I really enjoyed spending time with a group of women who are passionate about brewing beer.” Joan also documented the development and installation of public art at the Golden 1 Center. Her work has been published in Edible Sacramento, Outword and other publications. For more, visit www.joancusick.com.

groups, teams within your organization — and invest in giving back to them as well. When the time comes and a young woman seeks your professional guidance, you will know how to pass on the lessons you’ve learned.

BE A LIFE-LONG LEARNER: I wouldn't be where I am today if I wasn't willing to immerse myself in learning new things. I read multiple books a year. I ask questions and listen intently to responses, and then formulate my opinion. I listen to podcasts on leadership and other topics that interest me. I’ve hired a professional coach and invested over a year in working on bettering my professional self.

Women often put others first — our children, our spouses, our aging parents, our bosses, which doesn’t leave a lot of extra time for ourselves. We may fear that if we don’t put others first, we are being bad mothers, bad partners or bad employees. But we need to make the time to focus on our own personal and professional development, which also makes us better able to care for those we love. Don’t minimize your needs for everyone else’s. In addition, we improve when we expand our perspective. We become more confident with knowledge and humble with the understanding that we can always get better.

I can tell you from personal experience that by overcoming your fears and the need to please others, you will experience more satisfaction and success in your career. This is exactly what I’m telling my own daughter as she prepares to enter adulthood and develop herself into a leader.

Join me and other women in the movement to expand our imprint as great leaders. There is room for us all.

LAURIE Laurie is a freelance writer and editor LAULETTA- for consumer publications, Fortune BOSHART 500 companies, small business and

"Homemakers" pg. 58

higher education. She regularly writes about sports, architecture, business, politics, education, philanthropy and other topics. Her work has appeared in Dwell, ESPN, Comstock’s, Wall Street Journal, SI.com (Sports Illustrated) and others. She resides in Northern California with her family. “I was encouraged by the gains that so many women have made in the homebuilding and homebuying industries,” she says of this month’s story. “Each of the women I spoke with is incredibly competent and passionate about their work, and determined to make an impact in their respective fields.”

On Twitter @laurieboshart or at www.wordplaycommunications.com.

KYLE Kyle has an elegant and unique style MONK to his photography, blending mini"An Open Book" malism with storytelling. His work pg. 70 specializes in a range of expertise,

Katie Carr is a principal at Left Lane Advisors with over 25 years of experience in managing and developing leaders at all levels. She has a bachelor’s degree in psychology and an MBA. Carr has significant experience coaching senior professionals on leadership, developing followership, shaping strategy and succession planning. She actively sits on multiple professional organization advisory boards, and is a regular speaker at professional organization meetings and is certified in multiple coaching assessment tools.

covering a broad gamut from commercial and fine art to documentary.

A perfectionist, he believes his education will never be complete and lives to challenge his talents. He is constantly reinventing himself, collaborating with other artists on personal projects and always striving to push his photography. Kyle lives in Los Angeles and has contributed to Comstock’s for about nine years. Visit www.kylemonk.com.

May 2017 | comstocksmag.com

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n RSVP

SACRAMENTO STATE GREEN & GOLD GALA Sacramento State’s Green & Gold Gala is the university’s annual black tie event celebrating the impact of philanthropy on students’ lives. This year’s celebration, Reflections of Gratitude, raised more than $373,000 for student scholarships and the Emergency Grant Fund program, including $162,000 raised during an 11-minute “fund a need” auction led by David Sobon. Photography: Tia Gemmell

2

1 Gregory Kondos, artist. 2 Lisa Cardoza, chief of staff, office of President Robert Nelsen; Beth Lesen, associate vice president and dean of students, Sacramento State; and Samuel Jones, director of housing, Sacramento State. 3 Travis Hoehne, photographer, studioTHP; and his wife, Rebecca Hoehne. 4 Jody Nelsen; and her husband, Robert Nelsen, president, Sacramento State. 5 Kelly Cruchley, marketing director, Sacramento Magazine; Alyssa Huskinson, advertising manager, Sacramento Magazine; and Erin Umipeg, graphic designer, Sacramento State.

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more images at comstocksmag.com

AMERICAN RED CROSS THE BASH The American Red Cross BASH returned to Sacramento on Saturday, March 18, at the McClellan Conference Center to salute 100 years of serving veterans. Attendees dusted off old uniforms, found some scrubs or donned a favorite Hawaiian shirt to honor veterans by supporting the American Red Cross Service to the Armed Forces and 100 years of Red Cross service in our community.

Photography: Tia Gemmell

1 Rick Girton, special operations chief, Fire Department at Beale Air Force Base; and his mother, Jeanne Reaves, president & CEO, Jeanne Reaves Consulting and recipient, Spirit of Tiffany Award. 2 Edith Tsui, operations business support consultant, Western Regional Operations Nationwide Insurance; and Glenn Vanderford, recipient, 2017 Centennial Bash Certificate of Appreciation for Military Service. 3 Gary Strong, CEO, American Red Cross Gold Country Region; and his wife, Sonia Strong. 4 Deanna Hanson, principal, Hanson Consulting Group; and Kris Hanson, owner, Kris Hanson Design. 5 Elfrena Foord, financial planning, Foord, Van Bruggen & Pajak; and Bruce Hestor, senior vice president, Colliers International.

May 2017 | comstocksmag.com

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n RSVP

SACRAMENTO CITY COLLEGE CENTENNIAL GALA Sacramento City College celebrated its centennial on March 25 with a sold-out gala attended by alumni, faculty, staff, special guests and students. The evening featured entertainment by students from the college’s performing arts department and David Sobon hosted an auction raising $45,000 to support student issues. Event partners included SMUD, the UC Davis Betty Irene Moore School of Nursing, Sutter Health, Kaiser Permanente and Dignity Health. Photography: Tia Gemmell

1 Dave Tamayo, director, SMUD. 2 Michael Poindexter, vice president of student services, Sacramento City College; and Whitney Yamamura, vice president of instruction, Cosumnes River College. 3 Arthur Tyler and Dr. Kathryn Jeffrey, past presidents, Sacramento City College 4 Gregory Kondos, event co-chair, Sacramento City College; David Sobon, owner, David Sobon Auctions; and Russ Solomon, event co-chair, Sacramento City College. 5 Dr. Robert Harris, past president, Sacramento City College.

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Finding the cracks in lung cancer’s armor David Gandara, M.D. Health care innovator

One of the world’s most common cancers is also the deadliest.

But internationally renowned oncologist David Gandara is boosting lung cancer survivability. He’s using biomarkers – cancer “fingerprints” – to determine if and when targeted immunotherapy may work better than chemotherapy for individual patients. This research is changing the standard of lung cancer care.

This is health through innovation.

health.ucdavis.edu May 2017 | comstocksmag.com

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n RSVP

KVIE MASTERPIECE ON THE RIVER More than 150 KVIE supporters gathered on April 2 at the home of Marcy Friedman for “Masterpiece on the River,” a benefit event celebrating the acclaimed drama series MASTERPIECE on KVIE. The event raised more than $100,000 and will help KVIE continue to bring arts, ideas and adventures to everyone in the region through the integrity of public television. Photography: Tia Gemmell

1 Dr. Jonathan Breslau, board member, KVIE; with his wife Lisa Breslau. 2 Susan DeMarois, state policy director, Alzheimer’s Association; Tracy Beckwith, event committee chair and director of advancement, St. Francis High School and Sharon Aprea, principal, Aprea & Micheli. 3 Sierra Hersek; with her husband, Paul Hersek, vice president of marketing, SAFE Credit Union; and Carrie Thomsen, guest. 4 Dr. Barry Chebrazi, surgeon, Spine and Neurosurgery Associates; Simi Chehrazi, board member, KVIE; Sonbol Aliabadi; and her husband, Mansour Aliabadi, executive vice president, Kitchell. 5 Marcy Friedman, event host, KVIE; and Rob Stewart, host and executive producer, “Rob on the Road.”

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With a loan from Exchange Bank, your business won’t be small for long.

No one knows your business better than you do. That’s why every Exchange Bank branch has loan advisors on site who can sit with you and discuss your particular situation. Whether you’re starting a new venture or expanding an old one, we have the loan to fit your needs. exchangebank.com/roseville

May 2017 | comstocksmag.com

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n WORTH NOTING

buzzwords

em pow er

READERS SOUND OFF

/əm'pou(ə)r/, v.

To make someone stronger and more confident; to give (someone) the authority or power to do something.

BY Robin Epley ILLUSTRATION: Jason Balangue

I

Infrastructure Issues Demand Attention: Bob Johnson: What we don't need right now is Jerry Brown's Delta Tunnels boondoggle. Safety first: We need to make California's water system safe by repairing existing infrastructure before we spend another dime on a gold-plated set of tunnels to largely serve big agricultural interests exporting nuts to Asia.

Wayne Hancock: All that high hazard dam means is that if the dam were to come down property and lives would be lost. It is not saying anything about the dam integrity.

THE BUZZ Too many managers say they want to empower their team, “yet they tend to micromanage their staff, which actually can cause them to feel devalued, perhaps even powerless,” Dozier says. This can leave employees feeling that their boss doesn't trust them to handle the responsibility delegated to them, she adds, and that’s demoralizing.

“I think leaders or managers often intend to empower their staff, but they don't truly get out of the way and let them demonstrate their ability to exercise the authority they've been given to get a job done,” Dozier says.

THE WORD An example of well-executed empowerment is when a manager assembles a team to tackle a project, defines the purpose and desired outcome, and gives the team the freedom to plan how the goal is achieved. “A very successful leader understands and recognizes highly-skilled and capable employees,” Dozier says. First, they’ll define expectations and then “move out of the way” and let their employees apply their training to finish the task at hand, she says.

Remember that the next time you’re around the conference table and people start passing around the word “empowerment” like the chocolate syrup on a buzzword sundae. If you truly want to empower your staff instead of just talking about it, remember to step back and create an encouraging space — not one of micromanagement.

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The Cost of Doing it Yourself John: Before you continue to beat your head against the wall of Tina Lee-Voigt's office, do yourself a huge favor: Relax, take a deep breath, put on your creativethinking cap and read the portion of city code that describes what is exempt from the entertainment permit requirements: Zachary Green: This is a great article! Yes I think the city needs to ease off on the costs of these permits, and allow for more DIY art and music events! THIS is how our city will flourish. THIS is what other cities are starting to look to us for!

Have something to say? Email us. editorial@comstocksmag.com.

PHOTOS: SHUTTERSTOCK

t’s funny how closely “empower” and “in power” sound, considering their relationship to each other. Someone in power will always have to empower their subordinates to do get anything done. But it’s harder to do than it sounds — no matter how many bosses claim to empower their employees. The word is overused, and overuse leads to misuse. (Misuse leads to annoyance, and then we’re at a place where no one even understands or cares what you mean.)

But “empower” is not just another piece of jargon to be casually tossed around; employee empowerment really does impact your company’s bottom line. A 2012 Gallup poll found that “actively disengaged” employees cost their companies $370 billion in lost productivity. Alternatively, the Temkin Group’s Employee Engagement Benchmark Study in 2013 reported that highly-engaged employees are 480 percent more committed to helping their companies succeed. And to reach engagement, a boss needs to first empower.

We asked LaShelle Dozier, executive director of the Sacramento Housing and Redevelopment Agency (and featured in last year’s Women In Leadership issue), what she thinks of the concept — and what bad empowerment looks like.

ON THE WEB ONLY get social Read the full stories at comstocksmag.com

PHOTOS: SHUTTERSTOCK (TOP), KAREN WILKINSON (BOTTOM)

Action Items: Expanding Our Creative Capital

Lawmakers Must Focus on Alleviating California's Housing Crisis

by Michael Strech

California continues to struggle with a severe housing shortage that is driving home prices and rents out of reach for too many Californians. That is why it is critical we encourage policymakers to embrace solutions that reduce housing costs for families and help continue the housing sector’s recovery.

On this episode of Action Items, arts entrepreneur and restaurateur Clay Nutting joins Celestine Syphax, who serves on the board of several nonprofit arts groups, and host Tre Borden to discuss what the grassroots art movement can learn from institutional arts organizations in the Capital Region — and vice versa.

24 Likes 2 Comments 1 Share

Allen Young @allenmyoung: “'Shark Tank’ is the fake news of entrepreneurship. Real entrepreneurship is the guy that owns the corner store.”

It's Showtime! – Comstock's magazine

@jasmineleek: @comstocksmag Mostly true — there are one-off cases [with] experienced owner-operators looking for mass exposure/injection of cash @jasmineleek: @comstocksmag but the majority of episodes are filled w flashy, "quick buck" folks. It's a tv show that's gotta make ratings.

Sacramento Musicians Want a Clear Message on Busking NO CITY ORDINANCE REGULATES STREET PERFORMING, BUT CONFLICTING RULES HAVE CREATED LOTS OF CONFUSION

by Karen Wilkinson

According to city code, it’s illegal to provide an unsolicited service in exchange for donations in certain areas of downtown. But with such vast changes to the area, it may be time to change the wording.

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comstocksmag #ICYMI: Raley's at Fair Oaks & Howe just opened and they're calling it “the new generation in the grocery experience.” refillmadness Does that mean less #plastic packaging and more biodegradable packaging?

If so, I'll be it's newest customer! And our family spends a lot of money on food.

May 2017 | comstocksmag.com

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n EVIL HR LADY

DILEMMA OF THE MONTH

JOB TITLE WOES

by Suzanne Lucas ILLUSTRATION: JOHN CHASE

I

am an inside sales representative for a medical device company. I work hard to build relationships over the phone to sell and consult on products with doctors. When I was hired, the president of the company specifically told me this was not a telemarketing job. Recently, I caught the president introducing our team as "the telemarketers." This embarrassed and insulted me. HR agrees and will ask him to stop. I was going to ask this person for a letter of recommendation for medical school, but I don't want to inflate his ego. Is this a sign I should go back to school asap or find another job?

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FIRST, TAKE A STEP BACKWARD AND REREAD YOUR FIRST TWO SENTENCES. You have a difficult and rewarding job. When you write a resume, brag to old high school friends or apply to medical school, will it matter what your company president said to internal people? Of course not. If

you want to get into medical school, the last thing you need to worry about is inflating the ego of the company president.

What you want is a letter of recommendation from someone in a position of power and influence. If that means boosting the president’s ego, go for it.

Have a burning HR question?

ILLUSTRATION: SHUTTERSTOCK

Email it to: evilhrlady@comstocksmag.com

This doesn’t mean that it’s not super annoying. I can tell you all day long there’s nothing wrong with being a telemarketer — because there isn’t. It’s a respectable job that many people work very hard to do. But that won’t change the fact that many people see telemarketing as a last-ditch job, and no one likes to receive telemarketing phone calls. It also plants an inaccurate picture in people’s heads: Yes, you are selling things over the phone, but you’re not cold-calling strangers to get them to change their cable plans.

Titles are a funny thing. A good recruiter will look at the description of your accomplishments on your resume, and not just your job titles, but it’s absolutely true that a bad one will fixate on your titles. Some companies inflate titles — for instance, when my husband was only two years out of graduate school, he got a job offer at an advertising agency with a title of associate vice president. While that inflated his ego, he questioned the title and the recruiter said, “Oh, clients don’t want to deal with anyone low level, so everyone but the admins are AVPs and higher.” He didn’t end up taking that job — he took one as a “senior statistician” elsewhere. How can someone simultaneously be qualified for a senior statistician job and an AVP job? Because titles are unreliable.

might be inadvertent. But if not, then what? Should you look to move on?

It really depends on a lot of things.

You say you’re planning on medical school, which means you probably don’t have a lot of time between now and then.

Most companies aren’t looking to hire people for short-term stints. That means quitting right now probably isn’t the best path. A longer term job will look better

“Keep in mind that sometimes we have to suck up to people who are higher up in the food chain, especially if we want to climb the ladder ourselves.”

The HR manager having your back here is a good sign. If she can get him to stop, your problems are solved. And if the president is respectful of you and your role in the company in all other regards, then his misidentifying your title

and will result in a better letter of recommendation when you apply for medical school. However, if the president continues to call you a telemarketer and it continues to drive you crazy, it may result in a lousy letter or no letter at all.

Keep in mind that sometimes we have to suck up to people who are higher up in the food chain, especially if we want to climb the ladder ourselves. Let the HR person who agrees with you do the pushing back. She doesn’t need a letter of recommendation — you do.

As a general rule, let the title issue go. It doesn’t make a difference in your day-to-day job. It’s OK to be annoyed by his remarks, but it’s not OK to let it ruin your life. When you look back at this job, it won’t really matter what the CEO said when he was speaking to others in the hallway.

Never let a bad job title (and in your case, it’s not even an official one) stop you from achieving your goals. Make sure when you write your resume that you indicate the things that you accomplished — not just your titles. That is what will matter the most. n Suzanne Lucas spent 10 years in corporate human resources, where she hired, fired, managed the numbers and doublechecked with the lawyers. On Twitter @RealEvilHRLady.

May 2017 | comstocksmag.com

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n TEAMBUILDING

DON’T LET GROUPTHINK RULE YOUR WORKPLACE The best leaders encourage their team members to challenge questionable ideas and assumptions

BY Tania Fowler

ILLUSTRATION: SHUTTERSTOCK

GROUPTHINK IS ALL TOO COMMON WHEN PEOPLE WORK TOGETHER IN A BRAINSTORMING OR PLANNING SESSION. Psychology Today says groupthink “occurs when a group values harmony and coherence over accurate analysis and critical evaluation. It causes in-

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dividual members of the group to unquestioningly follow the word of the leader, and it strongly discourages any disagreement with the consensus.”

This phenomenon can veer a team or company off course, or it can result in people stereotyping others, includ-

ing their colleagues — neither is good for a company.

Working with groups, I often observe groupthink happen in real time.

For instance, in workshops on temperament and interaction styles, I facilitate an exercise based on polarities

This is an example of groupthink: People accepted a not-so-good idea as plausible to maintain harmony and coherence within their group.

They opted for conformity rather than critical discourse. of personality. If I am using extroversion/introversion, I’ll ask participants to stand up, self-select into one of those two groups and move to the appropriate end of the room.

Once in their teams, they brainstorm answers to the questions of what they like and dislike about their own personality type, and what they like or dislike about the other type.

While the exercise is usually fun, sometimes a more sinister tone unfolds: They engage in unflattering generalities and assumptions.

I have heard introverts say extroverts “suck the oxygen out of the room.” And I have heard extroverts say, “introverts are angry, unhappy and disinterested people.”

One time, a group of extroverts even suggested that introverts were more likely to murder than extroverts.

My eyes about popped out of my head!

I asked the extroverted group for their data on such a claim. They shrugged and guffawed knowing they had nothing but a hunch.

When challenged, they agreed they had gone too far and took back the accusation. But it’s important to note that it only took one person to throw out the murderer idea and, instead of challenging such a broad and baseless assumption, the group added it to their charted answers.

This is an example of groupthink: People accepted a not-so-good idea as plausible in order to maintain harmony and coherence within their group.

They opted for conformity rather than critical discourse.

Groupthink happens everywhere.

In another example, one company I worked with made a group decision to move quickly on an implementation plan because it was faster and less bureaucratic, which was exciting to them. But after a few years, the quality of the installation wasn’t there and they decided to go back to the slightly slower and less exciting process of utilizing tighter controls.

The next time your team comes together to make decisions, follow some simple suggestions to lessen your chances of groupthink: 1 Create team discussion norms for how the group will work together, such as: Put all ideas on the table.

Be respectful and listen to differing viewpoints. Challenge questionable ideas and assumptions by asking about unintended consequences.

2 The team leader should help teammates safely wade into ideological conflict to flesh out ideas even going so far as to force more conflict. When teammates shy away from an issue because of discomfort about delving further, that’s an opportunity for the leader to lead by saying, “This is a good direction, let’s keep going to get to a well-vetted solution.”

3 Allow enough time for a solid discussion to occur. In this fast-paced world, people tend to underestimate the time it takes to work through ideas.

4 Make

sure there are assertive people willing to step in and challenge ideas, while at the same time not co-opting or devaluing the process.

5 The team leader should hang back from influencing the process, other than to help people feel safe in the discussion.

Finally, if you are the leader of a team or organization, be on the lookout for how many “yes” people are in your orbit — those who don’t challenge assumptions and ideas in your presence. Reflect on what you might be doing to contribute to that problem and course-correct.

Groupthink is, unfortunately, alive and well. Have courage and be the person willing to ask questions to examine a decision that might not be in the organization’s best interest. n Tania Fowler, owner and founder of Interplay Coaching, is a business-focused coach who works with executives and their teams to help drive stronger team engagement and performance.

Want to know more?

Read more of Tania's columns at comstocksmag.com.

May 2017 | comstocksmag.com

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n DISCOURSE

On the Record Sacramento Bee Executive Editor Joyce Terhaar on how newspapers are adapting to modern times INTERVIEW BY Rich Ehisen PHOTOGRAPH: Noel Neuburger

O

ver the last few decades, the newspaper industry has endured some of the most challenging times in its long history. We sat down with Sacramento Bee Executive Editor Joyce Terhaar to talk about revenues, technology and reporting in the modern age.

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Declining revenues are a major challenge for newspapers. Is that the biggest challenge?

It clearly is a big challenge, but so is change. What’s going on with us financially is partly related to readership habits around print and how industries that are long-time advertisers of ours are changing themselves. I haven’t seen that anybody has a new business model figured out. Speaking only about the Sacramento Bee, we are diversifying forms of revenue. We do subscriptions now far differently than we did 15 years ago when websites were fledgling. We made a whole lot of money then, and subscriptions were pretty much completely subsidized. Getting, printing and then delivering the news household by household is a pretty intensive manufacturing business, and advertising paid for all of that. But in today’s world, our subscribers pay a much bigger share of the actual cost of delivering print. [Our advertising department] is undergoing its own evolution. I have been very impressed with the dramatic change they are making from essentially selling space on a printed page to actually partnering with businesses to help them figure out their go-to-market strategy.

We’re not just selling the Sacramento Bee anymore; we’re partnering with business to help them figure out how to best reach their customer and be successful.

Paywalls have gone in and out of use, though it seems most major publications now use them. Will they continue to be in vogue?

There are a couple different kinds of paywalls. One is the very hard stop where you can’t read anything unless you subscribe.

Consumer Reports is a great example. But most paywalls are pretty porous and have different reading limits depending on what device you’re on. But journalism costs money so, of course, I think people should subscribe. There are enough ways for the casual reader, who just isn’t going to subscribe, to

get your content anyway. If you’re doing a Google search, you can get to it. Or if you’re coming in through social media, you can get to a certain amount of it. You get that reader when a story goes viral, but they’re not ever going to be your market.

“

If you think back maybe seven or eight years, all the talk was about citizen journalism, that professional journalists were old school and weren’t going to be the thing anymore. Well, I think we’ve moved past that thinking.”

News organizations compete with one another, but we’ve seen some recent examples, like the Panama Papers, where numerous organizations came together to produce some truly explosive and valuable work. Are we likely to see more of these cooperative ventures?

The short answer is yes. The Panama Papers story was so big I suspect that would have been a partnership even if we weren’t in the current media climate. Such a massive data project is just a completely different thing from the usual investigation. But everybody’s doing some partnerships and most organizations are pretty open to it. If you think back maybe seven or eight years, all the talk was about citizen journalism, that professional journalists were old school and weren’t going to be the thing anymore. Well, I think we’ve moved past that thinking. But there also is value to some of the crowdsourcing. There have even been stories over the last few years where somebody gets a dump of documents and publishes them and asks the crowd to go in and read and point out things that look interesting. There’s no reason that something has to be closely held up until the moment you publish,

May 2017 | comstocksmag.com

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CHAMBER VIEW

Advocating for our Business Community A strong, vibrant region begins with the quality of its jobs. At the Sacramento Metro Chamber, we work daily to create an environment that supports job creators.

Whether by helping businesses through the services offered at our Small Business Development Center or fighting for policies and regulations that promote job creation, the Metro Chamber is constantly advocating on behalf of the business community to create a prosperous Capital Region.

Now more than ever, the business community needs representation, especially at the state and federal levels.

Too often, decision makers are quick to pass laws while failing to understand the unintended consequences and red tape that can shackle business owners and entrepreneurs and stifle growth. The costs of these laws can be high and often results in less hours for employees, the loss of jobs, or worse, the failure of the business itself. Instead of introducing bills placing additional restraints on business, we encourage our elected representatives to stay focused on supporting our growing economy and the long-term development of our region. Through ongoing dialogue with our elected leaders, and continued advocacy for our members, we can create an opportunity economy, laser focused on quality jobs and a thriving business community full of opportunity.

The Metro Chamber prioritizes advocacy and incorporates it into everything we do. Through our engagement with our elected leaders at all levels of government, we make certain that the concerns of businesses are presented and discussed. In many cases, we have been successful in stopping harmful legislation, and in others, we have helped minimize its negative impacts. It’s true that in California, business does not often win, but there is power in numbers, and together, we can have a greater impact, influence outcomes and create wins for business.

Change takes time, and most businesses are unable to dedicate the time and resources needed to fight bad legislation or educate their local public officials. By belonging to the Metro Chamber, you are ensured that your business has a constant advocate looking out for you, making sure your voice is heard, and supporting your needs, so you can grow your business in our Capital Region.

Robert Dugan

SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT PUBLIC POLICY & ECONOMIC DEVELOPMEN

METRO CHAMBER

Join Us (916) 552- 6 800 www.metrochamber.org 30

comstocksmag.com | May 2017

n DISCOURSE and it actually can be kind of fun to engage people. We’ve looked for those kinds of opportunities here on occasion, but I haven’t found a lot that seem like just the perfect fit, so we still have some experimenting to do.

How about partnerships with social media entities like Facebook and YouTube?

Both entities are well aware that their customers spend a lot of time on their sites reading news. I think both are in many ways as dependent on the news media as the news media is on their distribution platform. Are they going to have a model that makes economic sense for journalists? That remains to be seen. But they have strong reasons to want journalists on their site. A lot of Twitter followers are there because they get news faster. Reporters at the scene can tweet out in a shorter amount of time than it takes to actually file a post to their own site. So they need us and we need that distribution platform. I hope this leads us to something that makes financial sense.

What about the use of virtual reality, augmented reality and mixed reality platforms like Oculus Rift, Samsung Gear VR and Google Cardboard?

Well, being clear that virtual reality doesn’t mean made up, think about what it would feel like for a member of your audience to be able to feel like they stepped into a war scene or a flood. What would it be like if you were stuck on a roof with somebody who was stuck in a flood? There are opportunities for news media to bring experiences home to people in a way even television can’t do — because in TV you’re shooting an image off in the distance, you’re not in the middle of it. I think [virtual reality] is really powerful … We’re just starting to experiment with it.

Some newspapers offer podcasts. Is this something the Bee might do?

We have gotten heavily into video, so over the last three years you might have asked, ‘How are you going to do this with a room full of word people?’ Because that was the challenge.

But we do a lot of raw video and it’s really added value to our work. With podcasts, we have purposefully gone a little bit slower than other markets because we are doing a video push. … McClatchy did just hire someone to start developing a podcasting program throughout the company, and there are a handful of reporters here who are very eager to start podcasting.

I am constantly annoyed with how poorly most newspaper websites operate. They load slowly, are clunky to maneuver around in and are loaded with annoying pop-up ads. Why is there not more emphasis on positive user experience for newspaper sites?

I can’t answer that for the whole industry, and I don’t know if I can even answer that for McClatchy. I just agree. We’re too slow and advertising isn’t enough of a quality user experience yet. We are working on it and starting to do the kinds of advertising that will make for a better experience. News sites are complicated creatures. They’re not like every site out there. Getting advertising from many, many, many different sources like we do is the kind of thing that slows down how fast the site loads. There are some technical challenges for news sites that other sites don’t have. But it’s a legitimate criticism.

The term ‘fake news’ has come to dominate much of the conversation around media. How has this proliferation of intentional misinformation impacted the way news organizations work?

The term ‘fake news’ has been co-opted politically to a certain extent and so I’m trying not to use that term. You can just call it ‘made-up stuff’ because that’s what it is — it’s just fiction.

And I think that’s dangerous for everybody, not just the media.

It has surprised me how many people believe the [false] stuff they read ... This is just one of the very many things that play into the distorted view of whether the media is reliable or credible or not. In the studies we’ve seen on how much people trust the media, they never ask, ‘How much do you trust your hometown newspaper?’ or, ‘How much do you trust the

main TV station in your market?’ They say ‘the media,’ which frankly includes anything you read on Facebook or anywhere on social media and every single blog out there and every single cable show, whether it’s a national show or not. There is such a range of standards from one spectrum to the other.

Overall, has President Trump been good or bad for the business side of the industry?

Our readership is growing. It seems like everybody’s readership is growing right now. We are finding that we are getting more national readership, and I expect that to continue to grow given California’s response to the administration’s policies. n Rich Ehisen is the managing editor of State Net Capitol Journal.

His work has appeared in Sunset, San Francisco Magazine, California Journal, Sacramento Magazine and the Lexis Legal Network. On Twitter @WordsmithRich.

What print publications do you subscribe to?

TWEET US @COMSTOCKSMAG.

california

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May 2017 | comstocksmag.com

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A SISTERHOOD OF BEER

Sacramento’s chapter of Pink Boots Society aims to give women in the brewing industry a place to call their own

BY Robin Epley PHOTOGRAPHY: Joan Cusick

Kayla Brogna co-founded the Sacramento chapter of Pink Boots Society.

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D

uring her time as senior brewer at Trumer Brauerei in Berkeley, Rancho Cordova-native Kayla Brogna was one of the few women working in production. She was also heavily involved with the Bay Area chapter of Pink Boots Society, a national group for women in the beer industry to access networking and education.

When Brogna moved to her current job as a brewer at Sierra Nevada Brewing Company in Chico, “I saw a ton of breweries and a ton of women working around, but no Pink Boots chapter,” she says. “So that’s why I wanted to get one going.” In May 2016, she co-founded the Sacramento chapter.

Historically, the beer game has been just for men: Commercials for big brands have often shown guys clinking bottles together around a grill, or fly fishing while someone pulls a cold can out of the ice chest. The message was clear: Beer is manly, and you are made masculine by drinking it.

But, more recently, we are seeing females incorporated into this picture.

There are plenty of female brewmasters, owners, marketers and industry leaders who are just as interested and invested in beer as their male counterparts.

Pinks Boots wants to continue the challenge against old stereotypes.

According to a 2016 report by the Brewers Association, women ages 21-34 drink craft beer more frequently than the national average and represent 15 percent of drinkers overall. Yet according to the same report, 72 percent of women who drink craft beer on a weekly basis are frustrated with companies

who treat their female clientele as an afterthought. The Pink Boots Society, founded in the U.S. by Teri Fahrendorf in 2007 to encourage women working in and around the beer industry, now has 45 chapters, including ones in New Zealand, Hong Kong and Chile.

“Some of the best experiences I’ve ever had in this society were meeting women who were homebrewers or bartenders or saleswomen, who wanted to really take the plunge into the production side of the brewery but were a little intimidated to,” says Brogna, who started the local Pink Boots chapter with her friend and fellow beer enthusiast, Lindsey Nelson. “[They] hadn’t necessarily talked to a woman in production before, and I was able to just give them that little push.”

It’s not that most men in the industry aren’t supportive of women, Brogna says. Female brewers are just seen as rare and therefore are unexpected.

“This industry is incredibly supportive of each other … there are very few breweries or people in this industry who don’t wanna help each other out,” she says. “That’s why you’ll see a lot of breweries collaborating on beers, or hosting a guest brewer or things like that. So it’s a very friendly industry to begin with.”

But finding other women in the industry outside of one’s own company can be a challenge — hence the interest in monthly meetups. Pink Boots, which got it’s name from the ubiquitous galoshes brewmasters often wear on the production floor, encourages women who work in any aspect of the beer industry to find common ground with one another. The Sacramento chapter covers most of Northern California, excluding the Bay Area.

The networking has proven valuable, as men and women sometimes approach the same questions and workplace issues differently, Brogna says. “Sometimes it’s a little bit less intimidating to have a woman presenting something, so you feel more comfortable asking questions.”

The women discuss issues like not having the upper body strength to pull heavy sacks or stir the mash, all the way to how a vendor might treat a female co-owner differently from a male

More and more women are entering the world of beer making.

“This industry is incredibly supportive of each other … there are very few breweries or people in this industry who don’t wanna help each other out.” ~ Kayla Brogna, co-founder, Sacramento Pink Boots Society Chapter

co-owner. “It’s a little bit different in, say, the Bay Area, where a lot of the breweries are a little bit older and more established — people around here are just looking for more opportunities to learn,” Brogna says.

May 2017 | comstocksmag.com

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Teresa Psuty brews beer during the Pink Boots Society’s brew day in March.

a

b e n e fi t

to

Currently, the dozen members in the group range from brewers to marketing professionals to event coordinators, but all have a tie to the beer industry. Members include Amy Ruthnick, co-owner of Final Gravity in Roseville and Auburn; Bonnie Peterson, co-owner of Oak Park Brewing Company; Lauren Schwartzburg, yeast propagation lead at White Labs in Davis; and Jennifer Luckey, beer hall manager at Yolo Brewing Company.

“For me, it’s definitely the camaraderie,” says Kassandra Sutherland, West Coast sales development coordinator for Brewers Supply Group. “I love the unique perspective of other women in the industry and I love that we can ask each other questions. It’s easy to talk with them and collaborate.”

There was a lot of talking happening Feb. 8 when the women of the Sacramento Pink Boots Society gathered

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at Mraz Brewing Company in El Dorado Hills for a brew day. They sampled co-owners’ Lauren Zehnder and Michael Mraz’s Belgian and American ales, and brewed their own stout with a special Pink Boots-inspired label — the “Pink Boots Stout.”

“We can talk to each other passionately about beer, like the way people talk about food or wine,” says Kate Whelan, a Pink Boots Society member and director of Sacramento Beer Week, an annual event held each March that celebrates more than 300 different types of locally-crafted beers and more than 125 breweries. “I think a lot of people associate wine with women and beer with men, and that’s never been my experience.”

Beer is often inappropriately sexualized, Whelan says. Beer often isn’t marketed to women, and when it is, some brewers will feminize beer in a way that “we’re just not drawn to,” she says, like assuming they only want light or fruitbased beers. “We love a wide range of beer.”

There’s just a “weird perspective” in the craft brewing world, Whelan says. “I don’t think we’re discriminated against, but I don’t think people realize how many women are already in the industry.” A 2014 Auburn University study found that women make up 29 percent of brewery workers.

Historically, going back to ancient civilizations, women were the traditional brewers, Brogna points out.

During a March brew day, she launches into a short history of beer that involves the Sumerian goddess of brewing, the ancient Finns, the demise of hunter-gatherer societies and beerbrewing monks.

“What I do say to people now, since it’s a little bit different these days, is that brewing is for everybody,” she says. “It is an exciting and creative job. It is very physical, however there is nothing that any one person could not find a way to do.” n

Robin Epley is the associate editor for Comstock’s. She is also the founder of Millennials in Media, a Sacramento program for young journalists. On Twitter @robin_epley.

Have a favorite woman-owned brewery or female brewer in the Capital Region?

TWEET US @COMSTOCKSMAG.

WOMEN IN LEADERSHIP

CBRE, INC.

PASSION LEADS TO EXCELLENCE

C

ommercial real estate is a tough, maledominated business, but Amy DeAngelis excels at it. “I love negotiating, achieving compromise, and finalizing transactions,” she says.

As executive vice president with CBRE, Inc., the world’s largest commercial real estate firm, DeAngelis specializes in multi-market portfolios, primarily representing tenants of office space locally, nationally, and internationally.

“I started in 1999 as a marketing specialist, and was drawn to the brokers’ high-pressure environment,” says DeAngelis. “I knew there weren’t many women in the field, but it was meant for me.”

This year, DeAngelis was named Broker of the Year for the region, the first woman to earn the title.

“It takes thick skin and tenacity to become selfsufficient in this commission-based business, but it’s a great career” she says. “I’ve worked very hard and with technology today I am able to work at all hours and from any location, which allows me to be more involved in my daughters’ lives.”

“Passion and drive can lead to success, even in the toughest industries,” she concludes.

“I had people tell me I wouldn’t make it in this business, but that just strengthened my resolve.”

— Amy DeAngelis

Executive Vice President

916.446.6800 | 500 Capitol Mall, Suite 2400 | Sacramento, CA 95814 www.CBRE.com May 2017 | comstocksmag.com

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WOMEN IN LEADERSHIP

The women of 530

BANK OF FEATHER RIVER...COMMUNITY BANKING EXCELLENCE

PICTURED ABOVE [L-R]: LIZ GATES, EVP,CFO/COO | JENNIFER BECHTEL, OPERATIONS OFFICER | FAWN DULAI, VP, OPERATIONS COMPLIANCE MANAGER/BSA OFFICER | JULIE MOREHEAD, PRESIDENT/CEO MANDY JONES, VP, BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT OFFICER/MARKETING OFFICER | BARBARA VAN GILDER, VP, REAL ESTATE LOAN OFFICER

T

he women of Bank of Feather River help guide the bank in promoting the Yuba-Sutter area and enhancing the local communities’ economic position.

Founded in 2007 and based in Yuba City, this community bank is celebrating its 10th anniversary backed by $100 million in assets.

Bank of Feather River ensures that 100 percent of deposits raised in the YubaSutter area are lent locally, primarily to businesses for expanding, hiring new people, and providing local services. The bank stands apart from other banks with a staff that is 75 percent women, and with women in leadership roles, including President/CEO, EVP/CFO/COO, and four of six Vice Presidents.

The bank launched its Women & Conversations Breakfast Series three years ago to give local professional women a forum for shared experiences. “This series enables us to explore valuable topics for discussion and invite expert women speakers who present information about topics affecting women,” says Julie Morehead, President/CEO.

“Each gathering helps women and our community.”

“With Beale Air Force Base in our backyard, assisting our military community is a priority for the bank,” says Vice President/Business Development Officer, Mandy Jones. A former military spouse, Jones spearheads the “Happy Landings” program for military spouses arriving to the base. She shares her “favorite things” about the community to help spouses adapt to their new home. “Showing our appreciation to military families as well as promoting local businesses and events is a win for our community.”

The bank is regularly recognized as a top performer amongst peers, including being named one of the 2016 Top 100 Banks under $1 billion in assets in the U.S. by S&P Global Market Intelligence, and recognized as a “Super Premier” Performing Bank by Findley Reports.

“Precision, understanding, and commitment to enriching lives and shaping the Yuba-Sutter area’s future is what we are all about,” concludes Julie Morehead.

530.755.3700 36

comstocksmag.com | May 20 17

|

“Promoting local people and businesses makes our community stronger, a Bank of Feather River goal.”

855 Harter Parkway, Suite 100

— Julie Morehead President/CEO

|

Yuba City, CA 95993

www.BOFR.bank

SHE

WHO COMSTOCK'S CELEBRATES SIX EXTRAORDINARY WOMEN OF INFLUENCE

LEADS WHO ARE REDEFINING LEADERSHIP ON THEIR OWN TERMS

BY Robin Epley PHOTOGRAPHY BY Terence Duffy

May 2017 | comstocksmag.com

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n LEADERSHIP

MARTHA LOFGREN

B

PARTNER, BREWER LOFGREN

y age 48, Martha Lofgren had earned a bachelor’s in sociology from Wellesley College, a law degree from UC Davis, worked as a litigation attorney for Orrick Herrington & Sutcliffe in Sacramento, been Folsom’s first in-house city attorney and was the first female city manager of Folsom, serving six years. Then, in 2006, she was approached by a colleague about starting a law firm together.

“I’d worked for a really big law firm, I’d worked for government and now I had the opportunity to set up my own business,” she says. “Again, the door opened. Why wouldn’t I walk through that door?”

That led to the opening of Brewer Lofgren, a land-use and real estate law firm, with partner Roy Brewer in 2006 — just before the economic downturn. Lofgren says the company not only survived but thrived during that time because of her philanthropic work in the community, which allowed her to meet and work with community leaders and entrepreneurs. “My primary goal has always been to be challenged in my career, and so I look for opportunities that intellectually challenge me and where I feel like I’m contributing something in a meaningful way,” Lofgren says.

She often advises young professional women to take advantage of whatever opportunities present themselves. As the mother of two millennial-aged daughters, Lofgren says she holds a special place in her heart for helping the oft-maligned generation find their footing in today’s workforce, often going out of her way to advise young people who come to her for help.

“Networking is critically important and so identifying community leaders that are in a field you are interested in working in should be top-of-mind for anyone that is looking for career advancement,” she says. “Someone told me recently, people who have children that are millennials are the best target because they feel like they’re helping their own kids, and I have to say I feel like there’s a lot of truth to that.”

Lofgren says one of her favorite parts about being city manager was the many opportunities to meet people and engage with the community, and she filled that gap after leaving public service by serving on a flurry of nonprofit boards. She has racked up stints on the boards of the Sacramento Metro Chamber, the B Street Theatre, Folsom Lake College Foundation, Powerhouse Ministries and with Valley Vision. She also currently serves as a board member of the American Leadership Forum and does volunteer work with the American Heart Association. Her main care, she says, is simply to be involved with community leadership in some capacity. “How do we comport ourselves as leaders in the community? And I care a lot about that, I look for opportunities to have an influence and weigh in on leadership,” she says.

And what sort of leader does she hope to be? “I would hope to be inclusive, listening to people and really understanding different viewpoints and bringing different viewpoints into a common path or goals,” Lofgren says. “I would hope to be transparent. I think in most things we do, it’s best to be pretty open about what you do, [and] be worthy of trust. That way, people say, ‘This is a woman who leads, and I trust the direction we’re going in.’”

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QUIRINA OROZCO

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DEPUTY DISTRICT ATTORNEY, SACRAMENTO COUNTY

ast fall, three months before the November election, Quirina Orozco decided to make a run for West Sacramento City Council. The Sacramento County district attorney and mother of four was already involved in two separate city commissions and knew that serving as councilwoman would be a much larger commitment for her and her family. She felt called to the task, spurred on by a long history of public service, but it felt daunting.

Then she says she realized, “Who am I if I’m going to let my fear debilitate me?” At worst, Orozco says, she could only lose. And her children “would see that mommy was brave” and perhaps they would have a civics lesson in the process, she laughs.

But she did win one of the two open seats in November, along with Beverly Sandeen, totalling more than 64 percent of the vote between them. (Orozco alone nearly doubled the vote count of her nearest competitor, Martha Guerrero.)

Orozco attended UC Berkeley, then graduated from Harvard with a master’s degree in public policy from the Kennedy School of Government in 1999. She was recruited for her first job out of college by the White House for the Office of Management and Budget under the Clinton administration, returning to California in late 2001 for a job with Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante as the executive director of the Commission for One California, which sought to bring together diverse leaders from across the state to combat issues of prejudice, intolerance and hate.

Orozco has been a district attorney with Sacramento County for the past 12 years and is currently working with the State Targeted Offenders Program. In the STOP unit, Orozco prosecutes crimes that have occurred in prison, against prisoners. In her previous work with the Sexual Assault and Child Abuse unit, her clients were often young children and human trafficking victims.

Orozco says that it’s hard for her to separate being a woman and a mother from her career, partially because she believes that women have a very different skillset when it comes to leadership. There’s an empathy and an emotional intelligence that women and mothers carry with them throughout their lives, she says. But that can lead to a deep-seated anxiety about how she measures up against others (both male and female) in her orbit And though she’s had many role models in her life, Orozco speaks of how inspired she was by the courage and resilience of a young girl whose sex abuse case she worked on: “Role models come in a whole bunch of different shapes and sizes; they’re not necessarily older than you or more experienced than you,” she says.

“Sometimes they’re less so, and they’re younger but they have a fight and a drive, and it makes you realize what you fight for.”

Orozco knows she’d be in a very different place if it weren’t for role models that showed her the way: “People made this all happen so I could sit behind a desk and talk to you about my life,” she says, but more often than not, no one is there to show you the way. She imagines her life as a long journey on a road "fraught with potholes or broken glass or other obstacles to my travel." She can travel this road alone, or she can help the people behind her avoid the obstacles and find the opportunities — she has chosen the latter. “I know it’s my calling to make sure the opportunity doesn’t stop with me.”

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ALEXANDRA CUNNINGHAM

A

LEAD DANCER, SACRAMENTO BALLET

lexandra Cunningham, whom you may know for her lead roles in the Sacramento Ballet productions of Swan Lake, The Great Gatsby and Peter Pan, says she’d like to continue growing her career in Sacramento. But right now, that future is in jeopardy.

Cunningham’s parents are Ron Cunningham and Carinne Binda, artistic directors of the Sacramento Ballet. After serving the organization for 30 years, the duo were recently asked to step down in the 2018 season by the company’s board of directors, citing their desire for a change of vision. Cunningham, unsurprisingly, disagrees with the decision.

“I know we want to grow as a city but I think to see as a young leader — to see people just kind of cast away like that, almost unceremoniously, makes me feel like it’s going to be harder to retain people with real talent here,” she says.

Most professional artists expect a degree of unpredictability in their career, and this isn’t the first time Cunningham has had to adapt. In 2013, she tore her ACL. The woman who had been dancing onstage since the age of five would not dance again for nearly a year. “It was really hard. It was the longest I’ve ever not danced in my life,” Cunningham says.

After a lengthy recovery process and three surgeries, Cunningham stepped back onto the Sacramento Ballet stage for the 2014-2015 season. And then something else catastrophic happened: In May 2015, the entire company was laid off for the remaining few weeks of the season.

The dancers were devastated. One of their favorite events of the year, Beer and Ballet, was coming up and a slew of almost-finished routines showcasing both apprentice and company talent would go to waste.

Not to be defeated, the dancers banded together and formed the Capital Dance Project.

Cunningham took the lead in securing the venue, finding sponsors and insurance, and producing the marketing. Three weeks after the layoffs occurred, the dancers were performing again.

About 500 people came to see “Behind the Barre.” Held at Crest Theatre, it featured routines from the canceled Beer and Ballet event.

Cunningham says she remembers when she and another dancer were trying to tie up loose ends before the show — but there was nothing left to be done: “It was like, oh, we just get to enjoy it now.”

Dancers who were hired back by the Sacramento Ballet, including Cunningham, now juggle both jobs. CDP performed its second annual “Behind the Barre” show in August 2016 to a larger crowd, almost twice the size of the crowd at the inaugural event, and only a few months after Cunningham re-injured her ACL and underwent another surgery. The third show will be held this August.

On the day of that first CDP performance, Cunningham says she was reminded of some advice an older ballerina had once told her: En pointe ballerinas have to hide the ends of their shoe ribbons while onstage, lest they fall out during the show. “She sewed her ribbons in because if they fall out, then you’re onstage with loose ribbons ... it’s one less thing to worry about when you’re onstage,” Cunningham says. That lesson stuck with her. “If you prepare well then you don’t have to worry about it later.”

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CAROL GARCIA

SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT OF MARKETING AND BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT, COMMUNITY 1ST BANK

C

arol Garcia thought that she would just work at Citizens Bank of Roseville in her early 20s while earning her teaching credential. Her family has a history of working in education: Garcia’s grandmother and mother were educators, and one of her two daughters is currently teaching at a Roseville elementary school. Chilton Middle School is named after her mother, and she is a fifth-generation Rosevillian, a direct descendent of the early pioneer family, the Fiddyments.

But, “I just moved up very quickly and I’ve always worked for community banks in Roseville,” she says, first at Citizens Bank in the 1980s, then at Roseville 1st National Bank, until she started Granite Community Bank with her mentor, Rich Seeba. Unfortunately, Seeba died suddenly of an aortic aneurysm in 2004 while serving as the bank’s president, and the bank was eventually taken over by the FDIC. “He always made me believe that I could be whatever I wanted to be, so I miss him every day,” she says.

Garcia knows a thing or two about leadership: She is a former mayor of Roseville and a former city councilwoman. She is also a past president of the Roseville Rotary Club, the Roseville Chamber of Commerce and of the Child Abuse Prevention Council of Placer County, as well as a founding member of the Roseville Chamber of Commerce’s Leadership Roseville committee, and has served on the boards of the Sutter Roseville Medical Center Foundation and the Roseville City School District Foundation. All of this is in addition to her full-time gig as the senior vice president of marketing and business development for Community 1st Bank — and she still finds time to play with her grandson on a regular basis.

“A good leader to me, is somebody who can raise a family, do their job ... but also give back to their community equally,” Garcia says. “And in order to do it, you really need to have the buy-in of those three entities.” Without her employer’s support, Garcia explains, she couldn’t do volunteer work in the community and still have time for her family as well. “Same with my family. I can’t do my job and do my volunteer work without their buy-in,” Garcia says. “And same when I was working with the City of Roseville, they had to be very patient with my paid job and the time with my family.”

Garcia is also the cofounder of the Placer Breast Cancer Endowment. Eighteen years ago, at age 39, she was diagnosed with breast cancer — an experience she calls “devastating.” Originally scheduled to just have a lumpectomy, Garcia eventually would undergo a double mastectomy. “I never hid any information from our daughters [who were 13 and 17 at the time] for fear that they may be faced with the same diagnosis at some point in their life,” she says. By 2014, the endowment had raised $1.5 million for a Breast Cancer Chair at the UC Davis Comprehensive Cancer Center. Now operating as a foundation, the organization continues to work toward finding a cure, Garcia says.

“I don’t think you can become a leader, I think you’re born a leader,” Garcia says. “When you have a hiccup in your life, like breast cancer … that’s when you stand back and think, ‘Am I doing the right thing? Where do I need to readjust here?’ And it’s that balance that continues to be difficult to maintain at times. It is hard. It’s hard to be a leader.”

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SHOBHA MALLARAPU

S

FOUNDER AND CEO, ANVAYA SOLUTIONS

hobha Mallarapu leads a team of “white hats.” They help companies identify their cybersecurity weaknesses before malicious hackers — the “black hats” — can take advantage of holes in a business’ technology and cyber-based data systems.

Mallarapu founded her business, Anvaya Solutions, in 2007, after eight years at General Motors and 10 years with Intel.

“Anvaya” in Sanskrit has different translations into English, but generally connotes the concept of a connection or agreement, Mallarapu says. She says she wants Anvaya Solutions to be the go-to name to help companies who may already be aware of weaknesses in their security and need some help pushing past them.

As an employer, Mallarapu says she believes good leadership is the ability to motivate her staff to do work that will enrich the businesses and themselves. “I don’t believe in monitoring every second of what they do,” she says. “I would like to delegate and be confident that they’d like to do it. That’s why I’d like to guide them into being more self-sufficient.” Rather than being authoritative, she tries to give her staff tools to grow on their own.

Though she doesn’t interact with a lot of women as colleagues in her industry, Mallarapu has sought out their presence in another form: as fellow business owners. Mallarapu is currently on the board of the National Association of Women Business Owners, Sacramento Valley.

“When I first started the business, I felt all alone,” she says. “I didn’t know any other women business owners.” After spending so long as often the only woman in rooms full of men, working with women was a bit of an unknown for Mallarapu. She says she found a welcomed sense of camaraderie. “I really didn’t know how working with women would be; but when I see the other business owners who are women, I really feel a connection.”

Mallarapu says she sees gender ratios in tech changing, though not toward greater parity.

The number of women in computing jobs is set to decline from 24 percent to 22 percent over the next 10 years, according to a report released late last year by Girls Who Code and Accenture, and the percentage of women in computer science majors last peaked at 37 percent in 1984.

Today’s share of female computer scientist majors sits somewhere around 18 percent, where it’s been for nearly 10 years. Mallarapu says she has seen this stagnation reflected in her professional life.

She places the onus on a lack of role models and of exposure to the industry, and it’s one of the reasons Mallarapu donates much of her time to speaking at middle schools and high schools, coaching and judging at robotics tournaments and working as a one-on-one mentor to young students. The young women who come to hear her speak — some classrooms she Skypes into — ask her what it’s like, how she got started and what classes they should take to follow the same career path as her.

She advises young women not to be discouraged by lack of representation, pointing out that “if they are not surrounded by people who are in those fields, they may doubt themselves.”

Instead, she tells them to be confident and explore their options. “Try internships, find out what you like,” she says. “Once you have the job, don't be afraid to speak up.”

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BRITTA GUERRERO

B

CEO, SACRAMENTO NATIVE AMERICAN HEALTH CENTER

ritta Guerrero says she never saw her own potential — it had to be shown to her. “I never saw myself as a leader,” she says. “I certainly had to be dragged along.” Now, she’s the CEO of the Sacramento Native American Health Center, which employs 140, and has a $16 million annual operating budget.

Guerrero says she had the opportunity to grow into a leadership role because she had mentors who encouraged her to follow her strengths. It’s something she tries to pass along to her young staff.

In 2005, while working at Sutter Memorial Hospital, Guerrero was contacted by Olin Jones, director of Office of Native American Affairs with the California Attorney General’s Office, to help revitalize the ailing SNAHC, then known as the Sacramento Urban Indian Health Project. When Guerrero arrived, SUIHPI was defunct and had lost its funding. “I have done every job in this clinic from front desk, to Medi-Cal eligibility, grant writing, marketing, HR … you name it!” she says. “I am someone who learns by doing.” She became CEO in 2012 and recently oversaw the center’s $6 million expansion.

Today, SNAHC is an accredited, state-licensed community health center that works closely with local hospitals to care for the uninsured, underinsured and socioeconomically disadvantaged. Guerrero oversees the work of the top executives, including the CFO, COO, the Center’s compliance officer and executive coordinator and several more.

Born in San Diego, Guerrero moved to Northern California to study English and political science at Humboldt State, planning to become a teacher. But working at Planned Parenthood motivated her to pursue a career in the nonprofit sector instead. “It was like I suddenly knew what I wanted for the rest of my life,” she says. “Working for the betterment of the underserved, it spoke to my heart.”

Guerrero is a member of the San Carlos Apache tribe, from southeast Arizona. “I think being a Native person, people think you are the authority on all things, and that’s just not the case,” she says. Sometimes she feels like she’s become the “token, or go-to” for native issues in Sacramento but that’s not a space she wants to occupy. Guerrero takes the responsibility that comes with her professional visibility very seriously — not just as a voice for women and people of color not present, but as an advocate for others to be brought into the room.

“I remember my aunt used to say to me when I was young, that if for some reason you find yourself with a seat at the table, you save the chair next to you for the next one,” she says.

“I’ve really done my best to do that. It’s not been easy.”

Guerrero says that it’s important in Native American culture to find a physical, mental, emotional and spiritual place to recharge and stay grounded. For her, that place is in training for marathons; she says running helps her to find a place outside of her professional self.

Guerrero has completed 10 marathons, eight of which were in the California International Marathon.

“I encourage people to find that place where they don’t have any titles. Someplace where your mind is able to be focused and go inside,” she says. “There are very few places where I don’t have a title. I’m either a wife or a mom or a CEO or whatever it is, and running is one place where I don’t have a lot of titles.”

May 2017 | comstocksmag.com

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birth

control

Even with advanced family planning methods more readily available, working moms still struggle to have it all

PHOTO: SHUTTERSTOCK

BY Amy Westervelt

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"

M

y story isn’t really the typical fertility story,” says Erika, an education researcher who lives in Grass Valley and telecommutes for a company in Menlo Park.

Erika, who asked to remain anonymous, decided she definitely wanted kids about the time she turned 39. She had been married in her late 20s and divorced five years later. On her 39th birthday, she had been with her then-boyfriend for another five years.

“I really loved the person I was with, but I was like I think I want to have kids and if you don’t we have to break up,” she says. “The following month I looked for a donor and less than a year later I was pregnant.”

Erika describes her journey as “easy” compared to other women she knows.

She got pregnant with the first round of in-vitro fertilization (it’s not uncommon for women to undergo multiple rounds, up to five, before getting pregnant, while

some never get pregnant with IVF), she didn’t have to deal with progesterone shots, and the oral medication she took didn’t affect her much. She was also in a financial position to qualify for a loan to cover the cost: $35,000 between medications, five failed IUI attempts, donor sperm and IVF. “I had really good insurance, but it covered almost none of this,” she says. Erika was also at a point in her career where she could take time off and not lose her place in line.

That’s not necessarily the case for all women who have decided they want to balance a career with parenting. While reproductive technologies have given women and families more control and additional tools, having it all still seems a far leap. Treatments are expensive (most insurance plans won’t cover much), timeconsuming and not always effective.

Meanwhile, workplace politics have been slow to shift and accommodate a growing number of working moms.

THE INS AND OUTS OF FERTILITY

Although no two women have the same fertility story, there is a typical trajectory: A woman tries for some time to get pregnant (usually about a year) and it doesn’t happen; she tells her gynecologist, who does a blood test to ensure the woman is ovulating and then prescribes Clomid, a follicle-stimulating drug that helps ensure her ovaries produce at least one egg per month; she may try that for several months, and if it still doesn’t work, she’s referred to a fertility specialist.

The specialist will do more tests, including testing the man’s sperm. The next step is intrauterine insemination, or IUI — depositing the sperm in the woman’s uterus while she is ovulating (for slowermoving sperm, this usually solves the problem). Most women will try IUI a few times because it’s far less expensive and doesn’t require all of the drugs that IVF does. Success rates can also increase with multiple tries, but remain in the range of 7-20 percent. Most doctors will recom-

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Edward Johnson, CRIS

Vice President Construction Risk, Partner Warren G. Bender Co.

mend moving onto IVF after three failed IUI attempts.

The IVF process typically starts with injections of a class of drugs called Gonadotropins, which contain folliclestimulating hormone, luteinizing hormone or a combination of the two. This helps the woman produce many more eggs during her monthly cycle than she would normally — because the more eggs produced, the more opportunities for a viable pregnancy.

When the woman’s eggs (called follicles in medical parlance) are mature and numerous, a procedure is performed to remove the eggs, which are then fertilized with sperm in a lab. After three to five days, the healthiest embryos are transferred back to the uterus (though sometimes the embryos are frozen for a cycle if the woman has responded poorly to the drugs). In most cases, the woman then must take progesterone shots to thicken the uterine lining enough to support a fetus.

Some specialists worry the modern, drug-assisted IVF process is overused. When IVF was introduced in the late 1970s, eggs would be harvested as the woman naturally produced them, without most of the accompanying treatments. According to Dr. Geeta Nargund, an international fertility expert based in London, too many women who don’t need drug-assisted IVF are being sold on the idea. “In a lot of cases, the woman has no fertility issue, it’s their partner that has the issue,” she says. In fact, this is true in 51 percent of fertility cases in the United States. “There’s a significant population of perfectly fertile women who are having fertility treatment and they don’t need it,” Nargund continues.

Nargund counsels women who ovulate on their own and have no issue with their fallopian tubes to try “natural IVF,” which requires the patient to inject hormones only for about 5-9 days, versus the current IVF standard, which includes 4-6 weeks of daily injections.

“We tend to forget because the field is male-dominated and they often take the approach of, ‘Oh well, women are doing all these injections, but they don’t mind that,’” Nargund says. “Well, how do you

know that? … Most women are working during this time and I’ve seen a number of them have to resign because of the intensity of this process — I think we owe it to women to make fertility treatments as safe and easy as possible.”

Side effects from fertility drugs can vary wildly from woman to woman.

Clomid, for example, is known for making some women feel everything from mildly depressed to outright psy-

chotic, but some women experience no side effects. In many cases, doctors don’t discuss these potential effects with their patients. Some consider Clomid a completely innocuous drug, while others believe women are willing to put up with any number of side effects in order to treat infertility — which is true in many cases, but that approach can have a real impact not only on patients’ personal lives, but also their professional ones.

WOMEN IN LEADERSHIP

Urata & Sons Concrete, Inc.

SHAPING SACRAMENTO’S FUTURE SINCE 1975

K

elly Urata guides the family’s concrete business alongside her father, Charles Urata, and cherishes working with him every day.

Her father and uncle founded Urata & Sons Concrete in 1975, and Kelly began working in the business as early as she can remember. She has been an integral part of the success during both good and bad times.

Headquartered in Rancho Cordova and powered by 250 employees, Urata & Sons Concrete does structural concrete projects throughout California and Nevada. Significant Sacramento area projects include Thunder Valley Casino and the iconic Golden 1 Center.

“I’m passionate about the work we do and love watching projects come together,” notes Kelly. “The Golden 1 Center went from nothing to a fabulous Sacramento landmark in two years, and it was very rewarding to take part in that.”

“I enjoy sharing responsibility for the company’s growth with my dad. Our consistent quality of work and longevity in the industry keeps our clients coming to us. We also employ the brightest and best people in the industry and clients recognize that,” she concludes.

“Our family business is strongly rooted in the Sacramento region and we are proud to help shape the area’s future.”

— Kelly Urata CEO

916.638.5364 | 3430 Luyung Dr. | Rancho Cordova, CA 95742 www.URATACONCRETE.com May 2017 | comstocksmag.com

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“It causes so many psychological emergencies in this country, women quit jobs, it causes relationship issues — it should not be taken as lightly as it is,” says Dr. Aimee Eyvazzadeh, a nationally recognized fertility expert who runs a practice in San Ramon.

Leticia McCann Murphy, an HR manager in Sacramento who had her first baby this year through IVF, had exactly that experience. McCann Murphy and her husband started trying when she was 28. After a year without getting pregnant, her gynecologist put her on Clomid. She was not told about any contraindications. “I got a blood test to make sure I was still ovulating but that was it — fortunately it didn’t make me feel crazy the way it did for a lot of women in my fertility support group,” she says.

After a year on Clomid, McCann Murphy tried four cycles of IUI before finally doing IVF. That process is common, and also makes many women less likely to opt for

“natural IVF,” which although far less expensive (typically about $5,000, according to Nargund), could take longer.

Fertility is often described as a numbers game: It’s a world dominated by discussion of success rates, number of eggs, number of viable embryos and so forth.

For many women seeing a fertility specialist, there’s a certain amount of panic involved, particularly if they’re over 35.

It’s a high-pressure situation and one in which the quickest fix with the highest success rate — drug-assisted IVF —is very appealing.

TECHNOLOGY IS NOT ALWAYS A SILVER BULLET

Success rates are a big deal in the fertility industry, but they can be hard to decipher. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control’s most recent report, the average success rate for IVF ranges from 20-30 percent, depending on the woman's age. Some clinics boast much higher rates. The California IVF Center

in Davis, for example, has a success rate of 50-80 percent. That wide range is due to a number of factors: Some clinics take more complicated cases, which drives their success rates down. Some women, and the clinics that serve them, are willing to undergo multiple rounds of IVF in their attempt to have a child, which also drives down success rates.

“People have no understanding of success rates,” Eyvazzadeh says. Most of her patients have quite low chances of success because she is a specialist who takes pride in tackling challenging cases. She’s seen as a sort of miracle worker for women from San Francisco to Sacramento who seek her out when other specialists have failed them. “I tell them they have a 23 percent chance and they think that’s low, but in the world of assisted reproduction, that’s actually considered high,” she says.

That’s especially true for the many patients who come to Eyvazzadeh because of her reputation for cracking tough

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cases. “My theory is that there’s no such thing as unexplained infertility,” she says. “There’s always a reason.”

Ferreting out that reason and addressing any contributing health issues is important to ultimate success, according to Eyvazzadeh.

“If we address any contributing factors, then if and when we do go ahead with IVF it will have the highest chance of success,” she explains. “I don’t want to, after the fact, say, ‘Oh we should have removed those polyps’ or ‘Oh your husband should have seen a urologist.’”

yet thawed them and attempted pregnancy.” In other words, they don’t yet know whether the eggs will be viable once thawed — something the woman won’t find out until years later.

Zeringue explains that in his center, it took quite a bit of time and effort to come up with an egg-freezing process they know works: “We set up trials of different techniques and tested eggs after thawing to see if the fertilization rates

and pregnancy rates were the same as with fresh eggs,” he says. “Using commercially available materials and protocols, most of the eggs failed to make goodquality embryos.”

It was only after several adjustments to their process that his center was able to ensure a higher survival rate following egg freezing. Still, about 75 percent of frozen eggs survive the freezing and thawing process. “Without verification

TO FREEZE OR NOT TO FREEZE, THAT IS THE QUESTION

One potential tool for extending fertility and improving success rates is egg freezing. Heralded as a game-changer that could allow women to safeguard both their careers and their fertility, egg freezing has taken off in recent years, bolstered in part by high-profile announcements from Apple and Facebook that they would cover the procedure in employee health plans. In 2009, only about 500 women in the U.S. froze their eggs — in 2013, almost 5,000 did, according to data from the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology.

Fertility marketer EggBanxx estimates that 76,000 women will be freezing their eggs by 2018.

But it too is not quite the ultimate fix it’s been made out to be. Although the American Society for Reproductive Freedom removed the “experimental” label from egg freezing in 2012 because advancements had dramatically improved success rates, it still cautioned against overselling the procedure to women and giving them “false hope” of more control over their future fertility.

Ernest Zeringue, medical director and founder of California IVF Fertility Center in Davis, has some advice for women envisioning egg freezing as a fail-safe. “Egg freezing services are relatively new,” he says. “It is no longer considered experimental, however that doesn’t mean that clinics are proficient yet. There are many centers, I’d go as far as to say most centers that are freezing eggs, that have not

Iacopi, Lenz & Company

ACCOUNTING EXCELLENCE, COMMUNITY SPIRIT

C

PA Susan Lenz says, “We’ve developed incredible client relationships with nearly 40 years in business. It’s heartwarming to have worked with many generations of families. We’ve watched businesses grow over the decades, and we’ve grown with them.”

Founded in 1978, Stockton-based accounting firm Iacopi, Lenz & Company has clients nationwide, as well as many in Stockton. Susan, partner since 1982 with founder John Iacopi, is one of 11 women accountants in the firm. “Women outnumber the men in this firm, so we’re well represented,” she notes with a smile.

“As an accountant, I get to see clients’ quiet giving and what they bring to our community, and it fills me with pride and respect.” The firm’s team members are also generous givers, volunteering and holding seats on non-profit boards, city council, and school boards. In fact, that community spirit earned the firm the California CPA Society’s statewide Public Service Award.

“Our staff is dedicated to clients and community, and we take great pride in their commitment,” concludes Susan.

“We take pride in our professional service to our clients and commitment to our community” — Susan Lenz CPA

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of their techniques, places freezing eggs may not be offering any real benefit to patients,” Zeringue says.

In addition to not being guaranteed effective, egg freezing isn’t cheap. It costs about $10,000 to harvest eggs, a procedure that is typically done after a woman has taken many of the same follicle-stimulating drugs taken during IVF, which can cost up to $1,000 depending on your insurance. Then the storage fee is around $500 a year. If and when you decide to use the eggs, you’ll still need to go through the implantation procedure and, if you’re single, will need to pay for sperm. Women who undergo IVF often wind up paying for storage of fertilized embryos as well, which they will need to decide at some point whether to use, donate or destroy — a decision that carries increasingly uncertain legal implications.

For Erika, even though she’s quite sure she doesn’t want any more kids, “especially as a single mom,” it’s been hard to decide what to do with her embryos on ice. “Destroying them is a hard decision to make, and then donating to someone would be strange too — it would be a sib1:50 PM ling to my kid, and related to me — and I’m pretty positive I don’t want to have any more, but I just keep putting the decision off,” she says.

THE CAREER QUESTION

Planning for a family as a career woman is complicated. Some women have bosses they can be open with and a schedule conducive to attending doctor’s appointments whenever necessary. But even if they have both of those things going for them (which tends to be a luxury), dealing with the fertility process can be tough on your professional life.

For McCann Murphy, the HR manager, she had a flexible schedule and her boss and closest colleagues were aware of her fertility journey. Still, “it’s different when you can say a week or two weeks ahead of time that you have a doctor’s appointment, versus this, which is ‘You’re ovulating so you need to come in immediately,’” she says.

And there’s another unforeseen downside to colleagues being intimately

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WOMEN IN LEADERSHIP acquainted with your reproductive life.

“There was no keeping secrets when things didn’t work out, or when they did — I knew already at five weeks that I was pregnant and then everyone else knew immediately too,” McCann Murphy says.

“So rather than waiting the usual three months to make sure everything was OK and then telling people, we had everyone in on it right from the start.”

However, the support all but stops once the mother goes back to work. Neither McCann Murphy or Erika works for an employer that provides or subsidizes childcare (doing so is still so rare that companies will often send out press releases if they decide to offer such a perk to employees), and both struggle with how to balance motherhood and career. McCann Murphy is fortunate to have family in the area that helps care for her 4-month-old daughter three days a week, while she’s found a daycare nearby to cover the other two days. Erika pays for full-time daycare for her son, and says she relies on the other moms at work when her son is sick and she needs to care for him.

“We’re constantly tagging in and out covering work for each other,” Erika says. “But it’s really unfortunate when parents in the office offload night or weekend work to people without kids.

It’s unfair, and I don’t feel good about it. There’s this whole secret burden they bear because no one has really worked out yet how to actually support working parents.”

Because there’s no government-paid family leave, companies often use other employees to cover the leave they pay for, which means mothers are typically expected to hit the ground running the second they’re back at work.

“Everyone loves a pregnant woman and everyone loves a baby,” Erika says.

“But then it’s sort of like OK, you’re on your own now.” n Amy Westervelt is a journalist who lives in Truckee and contributes regularly to The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian UK and National Public Radio.

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A CAREER TO FULFILL THE AMERICAN DREAM

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“As a typist, I saw my future in the escrow department,” she notes. “Once there, I moved from receptionist through assistant, title searcher, escrow officer and then escrow manager for nine offices and 64 employees.” In addition to her previous escrow manager role, Denise worked as a sales rep, and earned the consecutive title as a top producer in her region.

Now, as sales manager for the Northern Central California sales team, she oversees 12 sales reps in 16 offices.

Experienced and successful in sales herself, she’s their ideal mentor. “I love achieving goals, providing training, and encouraging my team,” she says.

“My career with First American Title has been a great journey and an example of the American dream,” she concludes.

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May 2017 | comstocksmag.com

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Kandace Mulvaney, a Sacramento-based real estate broker, has noticed an uptick in female homebuyers in the past year.

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home makers A woman’s place in the home is as the buyer, seller — and everything in between

BY Laurie Lauletta-Boshart PHOTOGR APHY: Ken James

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ast year, Lisa Holm, a certified personal trainer, bought With the increase in female representation across the her first home. The 52-year-old divorced mother of two homebuilding and homebuying spectrums, the building had purchased homes before as a married person, but and real estate industries have an opportunity to target this this was different. growing market, which could shift the way homes are de“I wanted a place that was mine and I wanted to signed, built and sold. be in control and in charge,” she says. With the help of an experienced real estate broker and a seasoned mortgage pro- THE HOMEBUILDER fessional, Holm was able to fulfill her wish. “The financial In 2002, when Rachel Bardis launched Corinthian Homes, part is what drove my decision because I’m a logical person, she was an oddity among her homebuilding peers. She was and the rental market is very expensive here. But emotion- young, she was single and she was a woman. ally, I’ve never had a house I could call my own, and this was At 26, she had been around the homebuilding industry my chance to do that,” she says. her entire life — working for her uncle at Reynen & Bardis With the help of Kandace Mulvaney, a real estate broker Development and learning under the tutelage of her couswith boutique agency Miller Real Estate in Sacramento, and ins Tom, Mike and Pete Winn, founders of Wincrest Homes.

Sharon McKernan, a loan consultant with Kappel Mortgage While at Reynen & Bardis, she began to question why things Group in Fair Oaks, Holm was prequalified when her ideal were done the way they were. Rachel was particularly fohouse came on the marcused on improvements in ket. Within 24 hours of systems, efficiencies in the seeing a three-bedroom way things were processed, bungalow in Fair Oaks, what products were sold Holm had a personal letter in a home and why. “I was and offer in hand, ready to constantly met with the give the seller, also a single response of, ‘Well, that’s woman. Holm moved into how it’s always been done her new 1,200-square-foot in our building world,’ or home last May. ‘That’s just what we do.’

A 15-year veteran in But I wanted to know why,” the residential real estate she says. business, Mulvaney is noUnder the Corinthian ticing a subtle shift in the Homes label, Rachel built market that reflects remore than 600 homes in — Rachel Bardis, cofounder, Bardis Homes cent national trends: an Sacramento and entitled increase in female home1,500 lots in Idaho. But buyers, many of them single. According to an October 2016 with the collapse of the housing market, the company had to study from the National Association of Realtors, the number close its doors in 2006. The market was moving so fast, Rachel of single-women homebuyers has been on the rise, climbing found it hard to apply her “why” principle while keeping up from 11 percent in 1981 to 17 percent today, and is expected with market change and demand. to continue to grow. Women also represent 62 percent of all Now, the experienced homebuilder has co-launched a new certified realtors in residential real estate and are joining company, Bardis Homes, with cousin Katherine Bardis. With the professional ranks on the homebuilding side, founding similar homebuilding philosophies and a more conservative companies and occupying seats in the executive suite and on market, the pair have the chance to answer that question. industry boards.

“Our market hasn’t quite recovered yet, so we have an aweIncluding Holm, Mulvaney has sold homes to five single some opportunity of not only looking at how we do things, but women — a demographic outside her normal buyer profile asking those questions of why,” says Rachel, “and then taking — in the past year. “I typically work with couples, but I am the time to develop what makes sense going forward as a pristarting to see a lot more single, female homebuyers,” she vate builder and how we might approach things differently.” says. The women she’s worked with are educated, working One question the pair is tackling is the affordability isfull time and range in age between 35 and 55. All but one is sue, by finding ways to work with trade partners and product divorced. “If women can, they do,” Mulvaney says of single suppliers to build a unique, quality product that is costwomen purchasing on their own. efficient. One of its home communities, the Mill at Broadway

“Our market hasn’t quite recovered yet, so we have an awesome opportunity of not only looking at how we do things, but asking those questions of why."

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in Sacramento, features a 553-squarefoot, one-bedroom, one-bath efficiency unit called the “Courts Residence,” and is priced from the low $200,000s. Most Mill at Broadway homes are priced 10 to 20 percent below market rates for similar Sacramento homes. They also strive to be transparent. “We want to be an authentic and transparent builder,” says Katherine. “Anytime we build a model, we show a number of standard features so when people walk through the home, they aren’t blindsided by the fact that the home has $100,000 worth of upgrades and that’s not what they are going to get with the purchase price.”

At the Mill at Broadway, two out of the 10 models on display are 100 percent standard. In addition, Bardis Homes typically include a host of standard technology features, like a wireless entry keypad, in-house cameras and a cell-phone operated security system.

The Bardis cousins have also noticed the trend of more female homebuyers in the market. “There’s no question that there is significantly more single, female people buying,” Rachel says. “But I think because we are female, we tend to take for granted how a house should work. It’s a natural reaction of how we would like to see a design layout. We approach it that way because we are women and we know what they are looking for.”

The thoughtful layout was one of the things that attracted single, first-time homebuyer Jennifer Rubin to the Mill at Broadway. “It’s a great use of space,” says Rubin of her two-bedroom, 2.5bath home. The kitchen and living room are on the first floor and the bedrooms are on the second floor. The kitchen includes abundant storage and features a large, long island. “I love to cook, so those are really great features,” she says.

Born and raised in Sacramento, Rubin had been a longtime renter in Midtown before she made the decision to purchase last year. The 35-year-old

injury prevention professional with Dignity Health was tired of absorbing yearly rent increases and so, decided to buy. “I was at that tipping point where it would be the same to pay a mortgage versus paying my rent,” she says.

Rubin looked at condo communities downtown and in Midtown, but they were out of her price range — plus

the homeowner’s association fees were high. She looked at the Mill at Broadway and liked the idea of being downtown without paying downtown prices. She purchased a “Villas Residence,” which is a two-unit home with one shared wall. And the monthly HOA dues of $120 (which will go down once the community is built out) are a fraction

WOMEN IN LEADERSHIP

United Building Maintenance PUTTING EMPLOYEES FIRST

V

alerie Sherman, CEO of United Building Maintenance, puts employees first. She launched her company in 2002 with the heartfelt philosophy of profit sharing with her frontline workers.

The company saw $1 million in sales in its first year and is now a multimillion-dollar company.

Valerie bases this success on her employees taking ownership of the buildings they service. Based in Roseville with 250 employees, United now serves the greater Sacramento area and beyond.

“I’ve always made my employees number one,” says Valerie. “I teach my management staff that we’re here for whatever employees need. The employees feel that and take pride, and in turn, make our clients feel number one.”

Valerie is in a tough industry – full-service commercial maintenance, including janitorial, window washing, pressure cleaning, floor restoration and more – but with her guidance, United is known for integrity, reliability, and quality. “Clients know we’ll handle their needs, and even troubleshoot problems that don’t necessarily fall under our services,” she says.

“Being a good leader means serving your people, listening to their needs, and empowering them. I enrich my employees’ lives any way I can, and that means success for all of us,” she concludes.

“I believe that a business will thrive if the employees are its first priority.”

— Valerie Sherman Founder & CEO

916.772.8101 | 8211 Sierra College Blvd., Ste. 420 | Roseville, CA 95661 www.UNITEDFULLSERVICE.com May 2017 | comstocksmag.com

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WOMEN IN LEADERSHIP

n REAL ESTATE

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of the $300-$400 she found other condo communities were charging. In November, Rubin moved into her 1,005-square-foot home. She liked the team she worked with for the purchase, including the builder’s preferred lender.

“I also thought it was very cool working with a mostly female sales team and a female builder,” she says.

Joan Marcus-Colvin, chief marketing office for The New Home Company, a homebuilder with offices in Roseville, believes small touches can make a big difference in winning over buyers. In one home community, the builder placed an electrical outlet in the back of a master bathroom drawer, so women would never have to unplug their hair dryer. “This may not be life changing, but it makes a great impression for our buyers to see that we are thinking about how they live day-to-day,” she says.

The New Home Company uses targeted market research derived from focus groups to determine many of its decisions. “We are committed to going out and researching and holding focus groups at every single new home community that we build,” Marcus-Colvin says. What she has consistently found is that women are the drivers in the majority of home sales. “Women are definitely the more persuasive and the more passionate about their wants and desires,” she says. “They are really driving the lifestyle and location.”

EXPANDING THEIR REACH

In addition to greater representation in homebuying and selling, women are gaining ground in the building industry.

Outside of her corporate role, MarcusColvin is passionate about advancing the future of women in the homebuilding industry. While serving as chair of the Building Industry Association of Orange County in 2015, one of her initiatives included chairing the inaugural Women’s Leadership Conference, which is now an annual event. The inaugural event, featuring Carey Lohrenz, the first U.S. female naval fighter pilot and author of

Fearless Leadership, sold out with 350 attendees. Last year the event grew to 500 participants and this year the organizers hope to top that number. Marcus-Colvin also co-chairs the Women’s Initiative for the Urban Land Institute in Orange County. Her Roseville colleague, Bonnie Chiu, serves as co-chair of the Women’s Leadership Initiative for the Sacramento Chapter of the Urban Land Institute, and is director of forward planning for The New Home Company. She also is a board member of the North State Building Industry Association.

“The Women’s Leadership Initiative is really about advancing women in the real estate development field, increasing the number of female members and providing visibility and networking opportunities,” Chiu says. Currently, 104 of the 380 ULI members are female, an increase of 6 percent since the Sacramento Women’s Leadership Initiative was launched in 2014. Chiu’s role with The New Home Company is on the entitlements side, where she is focused on the front end, purchasing raw land for development and entitlement approvals. She led the site planning and entitlements for The Cannery in Davis, the first farm-tofork new home community in California that includes an urban working farm.

With more female decision makers populating the homebuilding and real estate industries, women have a unique opportunity to impact the product and the messaging, and set a new standard. “We decided if we were going to do this, we were going to do it with the mindset that we wanted to be different than everyone else,” Katherine Bardis says. “We like to challenge everything from a policy standpoint, to the way things are applied, to what building products are used. And that’s how we approach our job every day.” n Laurie Lauletta-Boshart is a contributing writer for consumer publications and Fortune500 companies, including Dwell, ESPN, The Wall Street Journal and the Sacramento Business Journal. Contact her at laurie@wordplaycommunications.

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n EDUCATION

a new

RoLE CALL Women are still underrepresented in educational leadership — here’s how two state institutions of higher education came to lead the way in gender parity

BY Steven Yoder PHOTOGR APHY: Richard Beckermeyer

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Pamela Eibeck, president, University of Pacific

May 2017 | comstocksmag.com

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n EDUCATION

I

n July 1995, Pamela Eibeck took one of those less-traveled roads that would lead to a career she hadn’t imagined.

A few years earlier, she’d been a tenured associate professor of engineering at UC Berkeley, and her husband, William Jeffery, was a corporate attorney. They had four children, all under age 12 — including a toddler and infant born 18 months apart.

One evening, Eibeck was home trying to get dinner together while Jeffery was ferrying their two older boys to soccer practice. It had been a long day at work and a tiring commute from Berkeley to Palo Alto where they lived.

Suddenly, Eibeck says it hit her: She couldn’t do it all. She slid to the floor and started crying. “This is insane,” she thought.

She picked herself up and kept moving, but she and Jeffery discussed a change to make space for a more balanced life.

And in 1995, they did the almost-unthinkable, giving up prestigious jobs and Eibeck’s tenure at a major university to move to Flagstaff, Ariz. Eibeck took a position at Northern Arizona University as chair and professor in the department of mechanical engineering. Moving away from a larger city dialed down their pace and stress, and the family started spending more time together biking, skiing and exploring.

One day in her new job, a vice president told her, “You think different. You think like a president.” He encouraged her to get on a track toward a top position in administration. University leadership was not on Eibeck's shortlist of life goals. But she took him up on it, and he sent her to leadership programs and gave her leadership assignments. She started believing she could be a good administrator.

That led in 2004 to a job as dean of engineering at Texas Tech University. It made her one of only a handful of female engineering deans in the country. Five years later, she was appointed president at the University of the Pacific, where she is today.

That experience is part of why Eibeck thinks the career paths of women and minorities are more likely to be nontraditional. In academia, they’re less likely to follow a straight line of promotions toward full professor or department chair. They often broaden their research focus by working in interdisciplinary areas outside their specialties.

She believes those alternate paths can make for more creative thinking. And it’s why today she encourages Pacific’s search committees to be open to nontraditional resumes and career trajectories as they identify job candidates.

That’s a lesson in how diversity at the top opens up the hiring pipeline to good candidates who routinely get passed over. Across the country, women are still dramatically underrepresented as university leaders. But two California systems are showing other universities how they can broaden who gets considered for top roles.

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LEADERSHIP DIVERSITY IS GOOD FOR SCHOOLS

In the last 50 years, higher education’s customer base has become decidedly more female. In 1967, 40 percent of college students were women. By 2014, it was 56 percent. The U.S. Department of Education projects that will climb to 59 percent by 2025.

But the people responsible for delivering those educations are still overwhelmingly male. A 2015 study found that just over 1 in 4 college presidents were women. Data from the 2013-2014 school year show that a little over a third of chief academic officers are women. Fewer than 1 in 3 college board members and fewer than 1 in 5 board chairs are female.

It’s not as though women in academia haven’t earned the right to leadership roles. In the 2010-2011 school year, women researchers pulled in 56 percent of the top federal research grants in education, health, humanities and science. That’s despite making up only 30 percent of tenure-track faculty, according to a 2013 report by the Colorado Women’s College at the University of Denver.

Beyond fundamental fairness, all of that matters because there’s now a body of research suggesting that leadership diversity makes for better decisions. For example, a study last December by investment consulting firm MSCI found that companies with at least three women on their corporate boards enjoyed higher returns on equity than those with fewer than three. “The real power of diversity is that you get better ideas in play, more people touch them and more people own them,” says Timothy White, chancellor of the California State University system.

THERE’S ANOTHER WAY

That’s not just talk — the CSU system now may well lead the nation in the proportion of women serving as campus presidents in a public university system. With new hires in the last year, 11 of 23 CSU campuses have female presidents, which has made news nationally. Overall, about 47 percent of CSU management positions are filled by women.

Locally, the University of the Pacific has done something similar — its leadership ref lects its student population, which is 52 percent female. In 2009, the university hired Eibeck as its 24th president, but there’s gender parity up and down the organizational chart. Among their deans are three women and four men. Seven women and six men hold assistant or associate dean positions, and the program directors comprise nine women and 10 men. The board of regents is composed of 40 percent women (10 percent higher than the national average), and the board is chaired by a woman.

Those numbers aren’t accidental. Both systems deliberately aimed to diversify and set up processes to make it happen. Neither school says openly that they’ve made a shift

toward more gender parity in recent years. But the gender gains among CSU system presidents have all happened since 2010, when only 4 of 23 presidents were women. And a Pacific spokesperson says the school has a “long tradition of valuing gender parity” but calls Eibeck’s 2009 hiring perhaps the school’s “most recent and significant” move toward equal representation in leadership.

So at both CSU and Pacific, they’ve shaken up their search committees. Schools can talk about diversity, but it’s these committees, usually composed of faculty, that make it happen. That group usually helps identify sources of recruitment, writes job ads and whittles a pile of resumes down to a manageable number.

The makeup of those committees can drive who gets hired. “You bring in a bunch of folks who are all of the same gender, the same race and ethnicity, the same set of experiences, they’re going to identify some great candidates, but they’re going to look like that search committee,” White says.

So diversity is a key criteria that CSU departments use in picking members for those committees.

The classic study showing that demographics matter in hiring is what’s happened to U.S. symphony orchestras.

When orchestras began using blind auditions in the 1970s, with applicants playing behind a screen, the percentage of

female players jumped from less than 5 percent to about 25 percent.

Both schools also require search committees to recruit for diversity. At Pacific, search committee members undergo bias awareness training arranged by the school’s assistant provost for diversity. At the beginning of the search process, committees also create a diversity recruitment plan that they use to guide where to advertise, how to use personal networks to publicize the position and which professional organizations to contact about the job.

On CSU campuses, dedicated equity and diversity offices or diversity officers work with search committees and human resources departments to ensure a representative hiring pool. For example, they review job announcements and recruitment plans and offer suggestions for broadening the candidate makeup. White says CSU’s recruitment process has been “intentional and purposeful, and the process was designed to lead to a diverse pool of finalists. And then you let everything go and pick the best person. That’s how you do it.”

White says the CSUs also seed the job pipeline — lowerlevel positions like assistant department chair — with qualified women and minorities. Some people blossom in those leadership roles and work their way up the academic leadership ladder.

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n EDUCATION

CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY Female presidents: 11 Male presidents: 12 Total: 23

OVERALL MANAGEMENT POSITIONS 47% filled by women 53% filled by men

UNIVERSITY OF THE PACIFIC Female deans Male deans Total: 7 Female assistant or associate deans: 7 Male assistant or associate deans: 6 Female program directors: 9 Male program directors: 10

Take Ellen Junn, one of the 11 female CSU presidents and now head of Stanislaus State. She started as an assistant psychology professor at San Bernardino State in 1991. While teaching, she was asked to coordinate an educational equity and faculty mentoring program, then became acting head of a department. She’s since moved steadily up the ranks at five CSU campuses: director of a faculty development center, associate dean, associate provost, chief academic officer, provost and now president, launching new campus initiatives in every role. At Stanislaus, she’s shattered what she’s called the “bamboo ceiling” as a Korean-American female university president.

BRANCHING OUT GETS EASIER

Schools that broaden their leadership hires appear to create a kind of snowball effect. Eibeck says that once there

GETTING

DEALS

were women in Pacific’s president, board chair and provost positions, more women started applying for leadership roles. She believes women are more apt to apply for leadership roles when they see other women in management positions. “I think it gives them more confidence that they’ll be treated with respect and as an equal player,” she says.

A fair bit of research actually backs up that insight. A study last year by the Cornell Higher Education Research Institute concluded that a female university president who stays in her job for 10 years may increase the share of female full-time tenured and tenure-track faculty in the humanities by 36 percentage points. Similarly, a 2009 study found that institutions with female presidents, female provosts or academic vice presidents, and a larger share of women on their board of trustees had

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WOMEN IN LEADERSHIP

larger increases than other schools in their share of female faculty members during the study period of 1984 to 2007.

And a 2009 National Research Council study found that more women applied for positions in a science, technology, engineering and math department if the head of the search committee was a woman or there were more women on the search committee.

There’s another practical way that having more women as academic leaders could help younger colleagues: They may be more open to flexible work arrangements — ­ because they’re more often denied it than their male colleagues. A 2013 Journal of Social Issues study reported that women were less likely than men to get flex-time when they asked for it.

“I think we’re still structuring work in very antiquated ways during a time when the technology gives us the capacity for flexibility,” says Lynn Gangone of the American Council on Education. Her organization runs Moving the Needle, an initiative whose goal is to have half of college presidencies held by women by 2030. “I think you’ve got a lot of younger faculty looking to move up the ranks and still have families,” she says. “It doesn’t have to be either/or.”

More broadly, female academic leaders may help redefine what leadership means. We now have more examples of women who are tough, direct, strategic leaders who also have a warm interpersonal style, says Junn.

“Having 11 women presidents,” adds Chico State president Gayle Hutchinson, “is a signal to young girls that they can be a president too.” n Steven Yoder writes about business, real estate and criminal justice. His work has appeared in The Fiscal Times, Salon, The American Prospect and elsewhere.

On Twitter @syodertweets, and online at stevenyoder.net.

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As a busy mom, Basi is thankful for her support network within EY and at home. She describes herself as curious and enjoys the challenges and opportunities of working for a large organization, where she is constantly meeting new people and learning new skills.

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n HEALTH

Liz Salmi, a brain cancer survivor, believes patients deserve better access to their medical information.

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an

open Book The open-source movement has taken on patient health — and one local woman is in the vanguard

BY Sena Christian PHOTOGR APHY: Kyle Monk

May 2017 | comstocksmag.com

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O

n the morning of Monday, July 21, 2008, Liz Salmi started her first day of work at an architecture firm in Roseville. She had just turned 29 years old, and the new position meant a pay bump and a role handling graphic design and branding. Everything went well. She liked the vibe and creativity of the office, and one of the partners even walked around the office playing a Native American flute. “It just seemed like my dream of where a creative person could go,” Salmi says.

Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday were good too. On Friday, Salmi went out to lunch with her boyfriend, Brett.

At around 1:30 p.m., she was meeting with two colleagues when, suddenly, she felt dizzy.

“I couldn’t understand what they were saying, and I felt so dizzy I just sat down and stopped talking to them,” she says, recalling the experience. “I could feel this vibration inside me that was very strange, which I’d never felt before. A protective instinct told me to lay on the ground, otherwise I’d fall on the ground.”

Salmi rolled onto her side. Her body started shaking uncontrollably and she went unconscious. A grand mal seizure, which manifests with violent muscle contractions, had occurred. Her boss called 9-1-1. Salmi awoke in the emergency room and a scan showed a mass in her brain.

The doctor put her on anti-seizure medications and the following weeks were a blur. Salmi couldn’t concentrate.

Bills stacked up. Meanwhile, the architecture firm hired a temporary worker to fill her position. Brett moved into her apartment to become a caregiver. Family and friends fundraised to pay for her COBRA health insurance — more than $500 a month — until the coverage from her new job kicked in. The drugs weren’t working and the seizures kept happening. She felt scared and overwhelmed because there was just so much she didn’t understand.

Salmi was alone when she got the call that the mass in her brain had grown. “I remember thinking, this is like that big thing that’s going to change your life forever,” she says.

Decisions seemed impossible to make — and she had some big ones to consider. Who would take care of her after a surgery? Should she quit her job? She also had to answer questions on an advance directive, like would she want CPR if her heart stopped beating during a surgery? Would she be willing to be placed on life support?

Doctors removed the tumor in a nine-hour surgery. Her diagnosis: gemistocytic astrocytoma grade II, which is a slow-growing, but malignant form of brain cancer.

Since that Friday afternoon nearly nine years ago, Salmi, now 37 years old, has gone from carefree graphic designer to an advocate for the patient’s voice. Her latest quest is to get local health systems onboard with OpenNotes, a nationwide

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movement to enable patients to see their doctors’ notes. All patients have a legal right to access their medical records, but accessing notes — on an ongoing basis after each appointment — helps them make sense of medical jargon, register details of conversations with the doctor and track changes in their health care. It makes them better informed and more likely to take an active role in their health care, instead of leaving everything up to the doctor.

“Having access to my notes would have added a different dimension to what I knew about my diagnosis,” Salmi says.

But for all these years, she has had an incomplete picture of her health. “We live in a time where people can Google anything to find answers. If we had access to our notes, we could work more collaboratively with our doctors and be smarter about what we look for in those searches and the decisions we make.”

In the Sacramento region, at least one major medical provider is already on the same page with the benefits of OpenNotes. Across the country, an estimated 13 million patients can now access their notes. This open-source movement, proponents say, represents a shift away from a paternalistic model of medical care and toward a model of fully-engaged and informed patients. And that, they argue, is better for everyone.

THE OPEN-SOURCE PATIENT

Raised by a single mother, Salmi moved north from Southern California as a child and attended Elk Grove High School.

From the age of 18 to 21, she split her time taking classes at Sacramento City College and touring the U.S. with her punk rock band, Luckie Strike — they performed nearly 400 shows, recorded three albums and filmed a music video before calling it quits.

After three years as a marketing specialist for the City of Roseville, Salmi had been overjoyed to join the architecture firm. But ultimately she lost that job to the cancer — never returning after that first week ended with the seizure. Her surgery took place in September 2008; by January 2009, the entire tumor had grown back. Another surgery was scheduled immediately. This second operation went deeper into the brain, and this time she would need chemotherapy.

“I was going to have to become a full-time cancer patient,” Salmi says. She quit her job and let herself have a big cry. “I remember saying to myself, OK, my job now is not in a professional space. My job now is being a cancer patient and … I will be the best cancer patient that I possibly can be. I didn’t say I’m going to beat this, because there’s no cure for it. But I’m going to be the most awesome, and do brain cancer so rad that I’m going to be the best person with brain cancer ever.”

But how exactly would she do that?

Salmi decided first to express herself, using skills finetuned in her career — she would write, make videos and memes, design cool graphics and clearly communicate what she was going through to the outside world. At the time, not many online sources existed for patients with cancer to turn to in trying to understand their diagnosis and their new normal. So Salmi launched a blog called “The Liz Army” and wrote about her experience with brain cancer to translate the complicated, scientific language of doctor-speak into layman’s terms. In 2011, she ramped up on the blog and within that first year, she had over 40,000 page views.

Soon Salmi was being invited to speak on health panels and presented a TEDx talk in Sacramento in 2013. She volunteers as a community organizer for Health 2.0 Sacramento, which is a chapter of an international movement to develop health technology. She has also connected with UC Davis researchers working on the Quantified Self, which uses technology to track personal data for scientific research.

“I’m not the researcher, and I didn’t go to school to be this kind of citizen scientist,” she says. “But I’ve got this helpful data and I know that other people living with this condition, like myself, would be happy sharing this information if it led to positive outcomes for someone somewhere.”

In February 2015, she penned a blog called “I am the open source patient,” asking others to consider sharing their personal data for the greater good. The blog reflected an overriding philosophy in her life following her brain cancer diagnosis: Information is power. Salmi also launched the #BTSM (brain tumor social media) hashtag. “It doesn’t sound like a big deal — it’s just a hashtag,” she says. “But hashtags are how movements are started.”

Adam Hayden, who lives in Indianapolis, met Salmi through the #BTSM community. Hayden was diagnosed with glioblastoma in May 2016. Like Salmi, Hayden is a blogger and says he has been inspired by her example, especially when it comes to patient-centered health care: “Liz demonstrates how it is possible to get in the driver’s seat of one’s own health care and not sit passively as a passenger to the traditional doctor-led health experience.”

STRENGTHENING THE QUALITY OF CARE

In 2010, three medical institutions conducted a year-long experiment in which 105 primary care physicians shared their notes with roughly 20,000 patients in Seattle, Boston and rural Pennsylvania. The subsequent study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine found that patients with access to their notes reported feeling more in control of their health.

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free time, and family members can read them, and it’s right there in black and white.”

Currently in the Sacramento region, only Sutter Medical Group and the VA Northern California Health Care System make notes available to patients immediately following a visit.

“HIPAA provides all patients with the legal right to obtain their records, but it doesn’t make it easy,” says OpenNotes Executive Director Dr. Catherine DesRoches. “And while the electronic health record makes ready access possible, not every practice utilizes an EHR and not all EHR systems currently have the technical capacity to share notes with patients, though most are working toward adding that functionality.”

For most health systems, making the switch literally means just the press of a button. The two biggest vendors of electronic health records — Epic and Cerner — provide the note-sharing function, according to DesRoches, and because notes can be shared using existing records and the patient portal (or they can be printed and mailed), expenses are minimal.

A total of 76 health systems in 37 states, plus all U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs locations across the country, have adopted OpenNotes. Researchers are now beginning to analyze the economics of improved patient engagement.

Theoretically, giving patients the tools to take better care of themselves and ensure the accuracy of their records will lead to overall cost savings in the long run.

Liz Salmi attended the Salzburg Global Seminar in March to talk about OpenNotes.

KNOWLEDGE IS POWER

Stormy weather on a February evening hasn’t stopped about 50 people from coming out to the Uptown Studios marketing firm in Sacramento for PechaKucha, an international

PHOTO: SALZBURG GLOBAL SEMINAR/ELA GRIESHABER

They had a better understanding of their conditions, and were more likely to take their medications as prescribed and follow doctor’s recommendations. All of the participants supported the idea of seeing their medical notes, and no doctors elected to stop sharing notes once the study ended, according to the report. OpenNotes was officially born, funded by several public health foundations, and Salmi recently signed on as paid consultant to advocate for the cause.

The OpenNotes team learned of Salmi through a short documentary called “The Open Patient: Healing Through Sharing,” which features her story. (The film was produced

by Red Hat, a company that sells open-source software products.) “How insanely helpful would that be?” Salmi recalls thinking, when she first learned of OpenNotes.

Women provide the majority of care for their families, and this sure would make their lives easier, she says. For people with chronic conditions or serious diagnoses, accessing notes could be a game-changer in keeping them informed and decreasing some of the anxiety that accompanies endless doctor’s appointments.

Sutter Medical Group in the Sacramento region started sharing doctor’s notes in February 2016, after piloting the system for two years with 40 clinicians, according to Chief Medical Officer Dr. Michael Conroy. Sutter includes about 850 clinicians in a six-county region. “We look at it as a quality and patient-engagement issue,” Conroy says.

During the pilot program, Sutter found three main responses from patients: First, they gained a deeper appreciation for the level of thought that went into their care.

Second, if a doctor occasionally misdescribed something — like Ms. Jones had soreness on the left wrist, when actually it was the right wrist — this could easily be corrected.

Third, the patient was able to write back to update critical parts of the medical record, like if she learned her grandmother had breast cancer. Conroy says the use of notes also increases the likelihood that a patient will complete treatment or follow up on a referral to see a specialist.

Initially, Conroy says, physicians worried about a flood of incoming messages from patients. “That didn’t happen at all,” he says, adding that sharing the notes is “literally no extra work.” Once a doctor enters a note into the hospital’s electronic health record software, and then closes the page, it is automatically available to the patient. Sutter Medical Group produces over 150,000 notes a month, and Conroy says more than 20 percent are read by patients.

“We know that patients remember only about 20 percent of what is discussed in a patient visit,” Conroy says. “That’s independent of age, disability or educational level. [Open notes] allows them to study their notes at home in their

speaking event in which presenters tell their stories via 20 slides shown for 20 seconds each. Tonight’s theme is breaking the glass ceiling, and Salmi is here to present. The ceiling she’s trying to break is health care.

“Oh my god, this lady has so much energy, she’s working for social change, she’s so smart and she’s incredible,” Tina Reynolds, founder of Uptown Studios, tells the crowd.

Salmi, wearing a T-shirt that reads “Stupid Cancer Get Busy Living," begins her talk by declaring that she has brain cancer and noting how doctors told her the diagnosis had a five-year survival rate of 30 percent. “Spoiler alert: I’m still alive.” The crowd chuckles, and her dimples deepen.

“There’s no right way to respond to a brain cancer diagnosis,” she tells the audience. “I responded with curiosity.”

Curiosity also led her to recently re-engage with her absentee father after he too was diagnosed with brain cancer. The scientific community is still grappling with how much of this disease relates to genetics; it’s hard to find subjects to study because both family members need to be alive. Salmi’s father died a few months ago, and while she says she hasn’t shed a tear, he made her more aware of her mortality and forced her to ponder handling her own end stages when they come.

In February, Salmi finally got access to her doctor notes through Kaiser, as she prepared to switch insurance providers. The PDF document was more than 4,800 pages. “I was skimming through it and when I got to around page 900, I realized the story was from my health system’s perspective on what’s happening to me, meanwhile I’ve been telling my story on my blog … It’s like a movie that starts with one person and jumps to another person and you’re thinking, 'When are these story lines going to merge at the end?'”

A merging of the two, she believes, is

when the one true perspective will come through.

Salmi is healthy besides living with brain cancer, so in March she flew to Austria to participate as a fellow in the Salzburg Global Seminar, an annual conference to tackle topics of global importance. She was joined by her nowhusband, Brett. She quit her job at a

nonprofit health organization to pursue the opportunity, and she’s excited to see what will follow. “I’m open,” she says, “to everything.” n Sena Christian is the managing editor of Comstock's. On Twitter @SenaCChristian.

Transforming the Aging Experience

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2017 PART 6

c

Capital Region cares

omstock’s magazine is proud to present the sixth installment of our 22nd annual Capital Region Cares salute to nonprofits.

At Comstock’s, we seek to drive community engagement and the support of the business community by introducing our readers to the many charitable organizations making an impact in communities across Northern California. These charities — from food banks and animal shelters to museums and hospitals — are changing lives 365 days a year.

You’ll read about some of them in this issue of Comstock’s and online at comstocksmag.com as we build content for what will become our flagship Capital Region Cares annual publication.

In September, business leaders, philanthropists, volunteers and nonprofit organizers across the region will receive the final product, Capital Region Cares 2017, filled with moving stories, informative resources and contact information for over 500 local nonprofits that need your help.

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3strands

Global foundation

MOBILIZING COMMUNITIES TO FIGHT HUMAN TRAFFICKING

E

ach year, an estimated 100,000 children are victims of human trafficking in the U.S., and California has the nation’s highest incidence. 3Strands Global Foundation mobilizes communities to combat human trafficking through prevention education and reintegration initiatives.

3Strands Global has educated 23,000 ninth graders across 13 California counties, and now developed a scalable prevention education program called PROTECT (PRevention Organized To Educate Children on Trafficking) in partnership with the office of the Attorney General and CA Department of Education.

“The PROTECT program is presented to 5th, 7th, 9th, and 11th graders,” says Ashlie Bryant, president of 3Strands Global Foundation. “PROTECT will reduce the vulnerability of all children in California to human trafficking. It’s the

next logical step to eradicating human trafficking in our state.”

3Strands Global also helps highrisk youth and survivors find jobs.

The organization has partnered with JUMA and the Sacramento Kings to employ 35 youth at the Golden 1 Center. The Gila project, in partnership with Intel, PRIDE Industries, and other local nonprofits, targets jobs for at-risk youth and survivors up to age 24.

In the community, 3Strands provides GracePaks to trafficking survivors when they are recovered by law enforcement. Survivors are often found with nothing but the clothes they’re wearing. The packs include toiletries, pajamas, blanket, flashlight, and more, and represent hope to those healing from trauma.

“We also buy bracelets made by survivors worldwide and sell them at various events,” says Bryant. “Buying these products helps ensure survivors 3SGF.ORG

have sustainable income while sale proceeds help fulfill our mission.”

“Businesses can financially support our education programs and GracePaks and provide jobs for reintegration.

They can also sponsor our Folsom Break Free Run on October 7th. We can use volunteers at the Run, and in the PROTECT, and reintegration initiatives,” concludes Bryant. “Stand with us to fight human trafficking.”

PROFILE SPONSORED BY

The Kircher Family Foundation March May 2017 | comstocksmag.com

77

California Ymca O

Youth & Government

ur communities, our nation, and our planet face challenges that will require committed leadership to solve. California YMCA Youth & Government seeks to inspire young people to become those committed leaders, and to provide them with the tools they will need to become leaders of change.

For 70 years, California YMCA Youth & Government has provided middle and high school youth throughout the state and Greater Sacramento area the opportunity to learn about a wide variety of issues affecting their communities, our state, nation, and world. “We strive to develop critical thinking and public speaking skills that allow our students to articulate and act upon their beliefs 78

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by providing them a platform for service learning, social responsibility and personal development,” says Debbie Gabelich, CEO. “Our programs develop engaged citizens who are inspired to affect positive change in their schools, as well as the communities in which they live.”

Each year, California YMCA Youth & Government provides more than 4,500 youth a platform to find their voices and learn how to use them to foster positive change now, and as they transition into college and beyond.

“We are a volunteer-driven organization, and could not offer our programming without the time and talent generously donated by our volunteers.

916.287.9622 / CALYMCA.ORG

We invite the Sacramento community to experience Youth & Government and the many opportunities to volunteer. There are multiple ways to become involved in inspiring future leaders who will positively impact the Sacramento community and beyond,” concludes Gabelich.

CALIFORNIA YMCA YOUTH & GOVERNMENT’S

70 TH YOUTH GOVERNOR

TUESDAY JUNE 6, 2017

Inaugural Ball

SUTTER CLUB SACRAMENTO

JOIN US FOR A MOMENTOUS EVENT AS WE SWEAR IN OUR 70TH YOUTH GOVERNOR COLE CAHILL AND PAY SPECIAL TRIBUTE TO

Secretary of State Alex Padilla VIP RECEPTION | DINNER | LIVE AUCTION | DANCING

Proceeds will provide scholarships for youth participants in need.

Tickets and sponsorship opportunities are available.

1792 TRIBUTE ROAD, SUITE 480 | SACRAMENTO, CA 95815 | 916.287.9622 | GALA@CALYMCA.ORG

YMCA OF METROPOLITAN LOS ANGELES May 2017 | comstocksmag.com

79

• success story

s r e d holof STANFORD YOUTH SOLUTIONS EMPOWERS FOSTER CARE FAMILIES AND FOSTER YOUTH

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hope

BY Cherise Henry PHOTOS COURTESY Stanford Youth Solutions

A

melia Kelly-Semper and her husband have volunteered themselves as foster parents for nine years in the Sacramento region, helping to care for more than a dozen foster youth, ranging from 5-16 years old.

“We know being a foster parent is not an easy task,” Kelly-Semper says.

“Everybody cannot be a foster parent.

It takes diligence. It takes commitment. It takes understanding. It takes patience. Literally. When they say, ‘It takes a village,’ it means everyone in your household has to be a part of it.”

Stanford Youth Solutions, a Sacramento-based nonprofit organization, helps to support foster parents, foster youth and the families behind them through their foster care program.

The ultimate goal, says Program Man-

ager Christina Cagle, is for the kids to have the opportunity to go home to their biological family. If that outcome cannot happen, then the next best thing is to provide foster parents with what they need to achieve guardianship or adoption, Cagle says.

These goals are achieved, at least in part, through the layers of support and resources provided by Stanford Youth, including 24/7 on-call support, dedicated social workers with customized support, free trainings and more.

“You have to be the holders of hope for these children, and we have to train these families to be the holders of hope for the kids coming into their families,” Cagle says. “It can be a rough road, but if you’re willing to stick it out it can be a very beautiful thing.”

According to the Stanford Youth Solutions website, 68 percent of young people in foster care reunify with family, permanently connect through guardianship or adoption or move to a lower level of care. One Sacramento County social worker who has worked directly with Stanford Youth, says that the organization works well at meeting youth and families where they are at, building upon their pre-existing strengths and enhancing them.

“In my experience, they have brought creativity, stability and, most importantly, hope, to the families I’ve referred to them,” the social worker says. “Foster care is not an ideal place for a child to be raised; however it is thanks to vital and supportive programs like Stanford Youth Services that exist to help ensure the cycle can be broken.”

May is National Foster Care Month where communities across the country recognize and raise awareness about how to play a part in enhancing the lives of children and youth in foster care. Kelly-Semper says that when you become a foster parent, it’s important to understand that the youth are most likely pulled from bad situations and it’s all they know.

“There are no bad kids, there are just kids that are in need of something,” she says. “We don’t just need more foster parents, we need foster parents who are dedicated to the cause.” n Cherise Henry is a freelance writer, editor and journalist based in Folsom.

Read more at www.cherisehenry.com. On Twitter @cherisehenry.

May 2017 | comstocksmag.com

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n SNAP

WELL-BEHAVED

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Placer SPCA Behavior Department Coordinator Meghan Oliver, left, presents a terrier named Brooks to a toddler doll, held by Animal Care Technician Aleah Valenzano, to gauge his initial reaction.

Does the dog curiously sniff the doll, or

stiffen up and approach it like prey? “One husky accidentally took the head off and then ran around with it, but it was OK because at that point it was a toy,� says Oliver, who conducts an assessment of every dog and cat that enters the Roseville shel-

PHOTO: KEN JAMES, CAPTION: SENA CHRISTIAN

ter to ensure they are safe around other animals, children and the general public.

Each assessment takes about 10 minutes and includes monitoring how the dog socializes, handles tolerance (Oliver holds the animal’s collar, picks up feet, opens

the mouth), plays with toys and reacts to the removal of food. Oliver also does an exercise where she runs across a space to see how the dog responds: “Some get overly excited and try to tackle me, so that’s not fun.”

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n SNAP

more images at comstocksmag.com

PHOTO: KEN JAMES, CAPTION: SENA CHRISTIAN

German Shepherd puppy Jersey and pit bull Optimus Prime get acquainted at the Placer SPCA in Roseville, as the puppy learns how to socialize with other dogs through the help of Meghan Oliver, the behavior department coordinator. She says one of her favorite parts of the job 84

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is working with shy and timid animals to help them overcome their fears. “We take them on field trips out of the shelter like to Home Depot and the pet store to get them more experienced outside, or on a nice walk along the bike trail to see nature,” Oliver says. The hardest part is having to

say goodbye to animals she has grown attached to, although it’s also a proud time.

Fortunately, many owners who adopt from the Placer SPCA will send holiday cards and emails with updates on their new pets, which Oliver appreciates. “They know how much they were loved here.”

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n THE BREAKDOWN

PARITY IN U.S. HIGHER EDUCATION NOT COMPLETE

WOMEN REPRESENT AN INCREASING STUDENT DEMOGRAPHIC AT U.S. COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES

THE REPRESENTATION OF WOMEN PRESIDENTS IN HIGHER EDUCATION HAS BEEN SLOWER

13,353,000

Women Presidents: 27%*

12,028,000 9,937,000 8,944,000 4,132,800

2017

Men Presidents: 73%

2025

2,778,948

1967 Female Students Male Students

HAVE CHILDREN: 72% / 90%

MARRIED: 71% / 90%

ALTERED CAREER FOR FAMILY: 27% / 19%

* 2011 data from a 2016 American Council on Education report

EQUAL REPRESENTATION AND CLOSING THE PAY GAP FOR WOMEN PROFESSORS REMAINS AN ONGOING ISSUE

Doctoral degrees (have earned more than 50 % since 2006)

Women: 84,000

Women held only 31% of all full professor positions at degree-granting postsecondary institutions in 2014

Men: 80,000

No matter the academic rank, men make more than women Bachelor’s degrees (earned more than 50% since 1981)

Women: 982,000 Men: 734,000 Master’s degrees (earned more than 50% since 1991)

Women: 439,000 Men: 292,000 Associate’s degrees (earned more than 50% since 1978)

Women: 581,000 Men: 361,000

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and are more likely to hold a tenure track position

Male faculty members made an average of $85,528 in 2013-14 academic year Female faculty members made an average of $70,355

Men out-earn women by:

$13,616 at public institutions $17,843 at private institutions

SOURCES: NATIONAL CENTER FOR EDUCATION STATISTICS, 2016 AMERICAN COUNCIL ON EDUCATION REPORT

Although women earn more than 50% of all degrees * 2011 data:

KAISER PERMANENTE 2017 WOMEN’S FITNESS FESTIVAL Join us for fun and fitness at the Kaiser Permanente Women’s Fitness Festival on Sunday, June 4, 2017, at the State Capitol. Be sure to stop by our Thrive Pavilion for complimentary blood pressure screenings, body fat testing and more.

To register and get more information, visit www.womensfitnessfestival.com

kp.org/greatersacramento

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