Hollins University Alumnae Magazine Winter 2018

WINTER 2018

On the FRONT LINES

of ADDRESSING AMERICA’S OPIOID CRISIS

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Hollins Hollins Magazine Vol. 68, No. 3 January - March 2018 GUEST EDITOR Jean Holzinger M.A.L.S. ’11 Hollins University Box 9657 Roanoke, VA 24020 www.hollins.edu ADVISORY BOARD President Pareena Lawrence, Vice President for Institutional Advancement Audrey Stone, Director of Alumnae Relations Lauren Sells Walker ’04, Director of Public Relations Jeff Hodges M.A.L.S. ’11

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Hollins’ unwavering dedication to making our society a better place for all sets us apart from other colleges and universities. By President Pareena Lawrence

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CLASS LETTERS EDITOR Olivia Body ’08

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Questions, comments, corrections, or story ideas may be sent to: Magazine Editor Box 9657 Roanoke, VA 24020 magazine@hollins.edu

Time in the Wild Exploring the connections between learning survival skills and learning to lead. By Beth JoJack ’98

This Is How We Roll After Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies LeeRay Costa saw how transformative a rock ‘n’ roll camp was for her daughter, she brought it to Roanoke.

By Jean Holzinger M.A.L.S. ’11

DESIGNERS Sarah Sprigings, David Hodge Anstey Hodge Advertising Group, Roanoke, VA

The articles and class letters in Hollins do not necessarily represent the official policies of Hollins University, nor are they always the opinions of the editor. Hollins University does not discriminate in admission because of race, color, religion, age, disability, genetic information, national or ethnic origin, veteran status, or sexual orientation and maintains a nondiscriminatory policy throughout its operation. For more information, contact the director of human resources/Title IX coordinator, (540) 362-6660 or hollinshr@hollins.edu.

Families at the Helm At Children’s Therapy Center, Gay Lloyd Pinder ’68 and her two cofounders pioneered techniques of family-centered therapy for children with neuro-developmental issues.

By Martha Park M.F.A. ’15

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Hollins (USPS 247/440) is published quarterly by Hollins University, Roanoke, VA 24020. Entered as Periodicals Postage Paid at Roanoke, VA. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Hollins, Hollins University, Box 9688, Roanoke, VA 24020 or call (800) TINKER1.

On the Front Lines of Addressing America’s Opioid Crisis Hollins alumnae are not only witnessing the devastation of opioid addiction, they are also working with victims and families, writing about it, and changing laws. By Beth JoJack ’98

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Ann Atkins Hackworth ’82, M.A.L.S. ’95; Mary Ann Harvey Johnson ’67, M.A. ’71; Lucy Lee M.A.L.S. ’85, C.A.S. ’03; Linda Martin; Brenda McDaniel HON ’12; Sharon Meador; Kathy Rucker; Kate Stackpole

PRINTER Progress Printing, Lynchburg, VA

A Lasting Legacy: Public Citizenship and Social Responsibility

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Turning the Page on Early Literacy Partnering with a Roanoke nonprofit that promotes reading to children, three Hollins professors have transformed an unpublished manuscript by Margaret Wise Brown ’32 into an interactive tool for parents and caregivers.

By Jeff Hodges M.A.L.S. ’11

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Short Term 2018: Time to Try on Something Different​ A pictorial display of some of the things students chose to do during J-Term.

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In the Loop Alumnae Connections Full Circle Through new and existing programs, accomplished alumnae of color are returning to campus to connect with and mentor students of color. By Sarah Achenbach ’88 Focus on Philanthropy Class Letters

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Visit the online version of Hollins magazine at hollins.edu/magazine.

FROM THE

President

A Lasting Legacy:

Public Citizenship and Social Responsibility

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Hollins’ unwavering dedication to making our society a better place for all sets us apart from other colleges and universities.

BY PRESIDENT PAREENA L AWRENCE

ast March during their spring break, Meagan Rioux ’18 and three Hollins friends were anticipating taking the trip of a lifetime. They planned to embark on a 12-day hike covering the Cordillera Huayuash in the Andean Mountains, one of the top-10 trekking circuits in the world.

Unfortunately, they arrived in Peru to discover a nightmare: Widespread flooding and massive landslides had devastated the country’s northern region and blocked all access to the Huayuash.

A lot of people understandably would have cursed their bad luck and simply booked the first flight back home. Meagan and her friends’ reaction? “We’re here, how can we help out?” she recalled recently. The four students traveled to some of the country’s hardest-hit areas and provided crucial aid to local residents as well as to domesticated animals in harm’s way. For Meagan, a business and economics major, her time in Peru was life changing, and she was only just getting started! In October, she worked with Hollins and Roanoke College students to organize the Hurricane Relief 5K Run-Walk to raise money for the American Red Cross Disaster Relief Fund. She now plans to pursue a career in humanitarian work and has applied to join the Peace Corps after she graduates in the spring.

Since becoming Hollins’ 12th president last July, I’ve often been asked what differentiates our students from their counterparts at other institutions.

I believe the enduring legacy of the Hollins experience consists of the campus community’s profound sense of what it means to be a citizen, a deep sense of social responsibility, and activism. Meagan Rioux’s story isn’t an isolated one:

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• Alexus Smith ’19 fosters greater awareness of the issues that people with disabilities face. Now she is taking her activism to a statewide level through her appointment to the Virginia Board for People with Disabilities.

• Grishma Bhattarai ’20, from Nepal, is embracing the role of global citizen.

She hopes to enter a doctoral program after graduating from Hollins to “look at the economy and living standards of rural, struggling communities and developing countries from a women’s studies and developmental economics perspective.”

• A number of Hollins students have actively worked with the Small Cities Institute, an innovative partnership between Hollins, Roanoke College, and Virginia Tech that seeks to be the leader in exploring the issues of sustainability, quality of life, job creation, diversity, and economic development in small urban areas worldwide. Associate Professor of International Studies Jon Bohland played a significant role in creating the institute (see Hollins, spring 2017).

We are committed to preparing the next generation of leaders who will continue the legacy of alumnae like Mildred Persinger ’39, who turns 100 this year, who embarked on a career working for women’s rights and human rights, racial justice, sustainable development, and global disarmament.

One of my priorities as president is to see that our profound commitment to furthering society as a whole is embraced, reinforced, and widely recognized as a core component of our identity. Every day, many of our students

act upon the “We’re here, how can we help out?” philosophy through community outreach and advocacy locally, nationally, and globally. They are building upon, and making a significant contribution to, the important work that our faculty and alumnae regularly perform in the political, philanthropic, journalistic, educational, corporate, and volunteer arenas.

In this issue, you’ll see why Hollins’ record of citizenship and social responsibility sets us apart among our peer institutions of higher learning. Faculty members Anna Baynum, Tiffany Pempek, and Ruth Sanderson are making key contributions to Turn the Page, an initiative promoting early literacy, and Professor LeeRay Costa’s “Girls Rock!” summer camp is empowering girls to follow their musical dreams.

Among the alumnae featured in this issue, Elizabeth Ropp ’99 helped spearhead the effort in her home state of New Hampshire to pass a law permitting recovery and mental health professionals to use acupuncture in treating drug addiction, a breakthrough that could set a trend nationwide. And Susan Chilton Shumate, who attended Hollins from 1986 to 1989, serves as publisher of the Charleston Gazette-Mail, which earned a Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting on West Virginia’s opioid crisis.

I commend these and the countless other Hollins students, alumnae, and faculty who are living a life of consequence and thereby changing the world.

In celebrating our accomplishments, let us be even more intentional in identifying the societal challenges that lie ahead and fostering the skills and desire to successfully address them.

As an institution and as a community, we have much work still to do.

IN THE

Loop According to the college guides

Literary lights Two Hollins authors praised for work

Hollins receives high marks in several key areas

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rofessor of English Cathryn Hankla ’80, M.A. ’82 was among the nine authors who were finalists for the 20th Annual Library of Virginia Literary Awards. Also nominated were Associate Professor of English Elizabeth Poliner, Beth Macy M.A. ’93, and Lee Smith ’67. The Library of Virginia’s annual literary awards recognize the best books published the previous year by Virginia authors or on a Virginia theme. The finalists were chosen by an independent panel of judges from hundreds of books nominated for the awards.

Hankla was one of three finalists in the poetry category for Great Bear, published by Groundhog Poetry Press (see Hollins, summer 2017).

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ollins was again named to the Princeton Review’s list of the nation’s most environmentally responsible colleges.

The company selected schools for the 2017 edition of The Princeton Review Guide to 375 Green Colleges after assessing data from its survey of hundreds of four-year colleges on their commitment to the environment and sustainability.

Hollins received Forbes magazine’s highest grade for financial soundness.

The “A” rating appeared in the publication’s 2017 Financial Grades report, which lists nonprofit colleges with at least 500 students.

According to Forbes, “Our grades measure… balance sheet strength and operational soundness, plus certain other factors indicative of a college’s financial condition, including admission yield, percent of freshmen receiving institutional grants, and instruction expenses per student.”

Forbes also ranked Hollins among America’s top colleges for the year.

U.S. News and World Report’s 2018 Best Colleges ranks the university as the 37th Best Value School in the category of national liberal arts colleges. Hollins is one of only three Virginia colleges and universities and six women’s colleges nationally to be ranked among the 40 Best Value Schools.

U.S. News also places Hollins at number 112 in the national liberal arts colleges category. The publication notes that schools in this category “emphasize undergraduate education and award at least half of their degrees in the liberal arts fields of study.”

Hankla

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s Close to Us as Breathing, a novel by Associate Professor of English Elizabeth Poliner, captured the 2017 Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize.

Established in 1976 and presented by the Susan B. Anthony Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies and the Department of English at the University of Rochester, the Kafka Prize is given annually to a woman who is a U.S. citizen and has written the best book-length work of prose fiction, be it a novel, short story, or experimental writing. Previous winners include Toni Morrison, Ursula Le Guin, and Anne Tyler.

Poliner

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IN THE

Loop How I spent my summer vacation Summer internships deepen knowledge and inspire futures

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Harrington

ith a lifelong interest in archaeology and a love of the Indiana Jones movies as her springboard, a history and classical studies double major has realized what she calls “a total dream”: working at the premier excavation site in America.

Meaghan Harrington ’19 spent six weeks performing hands-on fieldwork during the annual Archaeological Field School in Jamestown, Virginia, site of the first permanent English settlement in North America. A partnership of the Jamestown Rediscovery Foundation and the University of Virginia, the field school immerses its students in “the methods and theories of American historical archaeology,” according to the school’s website.

Harrington went through a rigorous and selective application process to become one of only 13 students accepted for the 2017 summer session.

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iology major Sunny Greene ’19 was part of a research team with the Undiagnosed Diseases Program (UDP) with the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. She competed with more than 10,000 national and international applicants to earn one of only 1,300 12-week student positions within the NIH Intramural Research Program, the world’s largest biomedical research institution.

“I worked on a rare genetic disorder called Chediak-Higashi Disease (CHD), of which there are roughly only 300 cases known worldwide,” Greene explains.

Because of her time at NIH, Greene says she is convinced she can pursue both her passions in the medical field: “I enjoy the clinical side and I love the research side and I kind of want to marry the two together,” she explains. “Both are important to me because I want to see who I’m helping.”

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For more stories about summer internships, visit www.hollins.edu/news.

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ne of the ways in which the study of the liberal arts demonstrates its power is when faculty from one academic major actively support and encourage a student from a completely different major, even when those programs seem to have nothing in common.

It was during her January 2017 Short Term in France that chemistry major Veronica Able-Thomas ’19 learned “about a summer research opportunity that would complement my pre-med track and biochemistry concentration at Hollins,” she says.

Professor of French Annette SamponNicolas urged Able-Thomas to pursue a Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) at the Virginia Tech

Carilion Research Institute (VTCRI) in Roanoke, where undergraduate students spend 10 weeks in a rigorous experiential learning program.

Able-Thomas was one of only 20 students accepted out of more than 80 applicants to the SURF program.

She spent the summer working with Assistant Professor James Smyth and Research Assistant Professor Samy Lamouille in the Molecular Visualization SURF program investigating brain cancer. Able-Thomas presented her research project at the Virginia Tech Undergraduate Research Symposia. She says her work as a SURF student has persuaded her to consider specializing in oncology.

IN THE

Loop

Sam Dean

Noted feminist author, cultural critic, public intellectual, and social justice activist bell hooks visited campus for two days in October. The film department hosted an evening conversation in which hooks talked about race, sex, and class in film. The next day, hooks talked with campus community members about spirituality and social justice. That evening featured her conversation with Beverly Guy-Sheftall, a pioneer of black feminism and the Anna Julia Cooper professor of women’s studies and English at Spelman College.

Mary Page Evans, Mustard Field Series. Pastel. Gift of the artist, 2005.173.

Karen M. Cardozo, who has worked as a career counselor at Harvard University and at Williams College, as a dean of student and academic affairs at Mount Holyoke College, and as a faculty member on all campuses of the Five College Consortium of Western Massachusetts, has been named executive director of career development.

Drawn from the Vault, an exhibition mounted last fall in the Wilson Museum, featured a selection of drawings on paper in a variety of media. Many of these works dated from the second half of the 20th century and had never been exhibited. Included in the exhibition were drawings by Mary Page Hilliard Evans ’59 (shown) and Susan Seydel Cofer ’64.

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Connections

Through new and existing programs, accomplished alumnae of color are returning to campus to connect with and mentor students of color. B Y S A R A H A C H E N B A C H ’ 8 8

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aris Williams ’18 takes advantage of every mentoring, networking, and internship opportunity she can. A dance major with a minor in social justice and plans to earn a Batten Leadership Institute certificate, she has done Hollins’ M.F.A. in dance summer internship twice, completed a January Term Signature Internship at the D.C. Commission for Arts and Humanities, and created two other internships.

She attends Hollins’ annual Career Connection Conference (C3) to network and learn about alumnae careers, reaches out to alumnae on social media, and chats with them during reunion weekend and other campus events. “Networking is a great experience to meet alums using their liberal arts degrees and finding multiple avenues to create success,” she says.

The most far-reaching connections she’s made in pursuit of her dream—she plans to get a Ph.D. in dance and found a nonprofit for artists of color—are those with other women of color. “Meeting alumnae of color is incredibly motivating and necessary for the students of color,” says Williams, who is applying to Goldsmiths University in London for the M.A. in applied anthropology and community arts.

“Developing informal or formal connections deepens the importance for visibility on and off campus. These connections are the ways we sustain a dialog between the Hollins then, now, and the Hollins we would like to see in 10 years.”

Hollins’ thriving, decades-old internship program, Career Center, and newer programs such as the day-long C3 event are designed for every student and any career aspiration. Growth in diversity— this year, students of color make up 26 percent of the student body and 19 countries are represented—means expanding networking programs to address the needs of students of color.

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Left: Paris Williams ’18 (far right) at the 2015 C3 event. Right: Associate Dean for Cultural and Community Engagement Jeri Suarez (second from left) at the 2017 Network2Careers lunch, also attended by Andolyn Medina ’16 (far right).

Four years ago, Jeri Suarez, associate dean for cultural and community engagement (CCE), founded Network2Careers, which brings back to campus alumnae of color across a range of years and careers to talk with students of color. It’s one of several programs organized through CCE for current and past participants of the 13-year-old Early Transition Program (ETP) for students of color. Suarez runs ETP’s mentoring and community-building programs, a speaker series, and a program designed for international students through the International Student Orientation Program (ISOP).

Williams finds relevance and resonance from Network2Careers. “I love Hollins and the opportunities it’s provided me, but connecting with alumnae of color at C3 is very new and still minimal,” she explains.

“Network2Careers is a whole afternoon dedicated to talking, sharing memories, and giving advice specific to the nonwhite experience of being a Hollins student.

That time is priceless because it opens up a space for women of color who’ve graduated to connect with one another [and us] and share methods of success being a minority in America.”

Suarez adds, “When you go to a

predominately white college, students of color need to know where the resources are, to connect around culture and identity.”

She developed the Network2Careers program after receiving a grant from the Virginia Foundation for Independent Colleges. All current and former participants of the ETP are invited to the one-day program, which attracts an average of 20 to 30 students.

Andolyn Medina ’16 has witnessed the growth of Network2Careers from both sides. “The first year [I attended as a student], there was a very small group of us who came,” remarks Medina, who spoke at the 2017 event on October 21 about being in George Washington University’s forensic psychology M.A. program. “This year, to see the students outnumber the alumnae was so exciting. It felt like my soul was full after being there with the students.”

“Network2Careers showed us that we could make it beyond Hollins,” Medina explains. “We knew that there had been women of color before us, but we didn’t see them on campus and wondered what they did. It’s important to see alumnae who look like us.” Much of her graduate work centers on race in forensic psychology,

ALUMNAE

Connections

Left: Tamina McMillan ’95 attended the 2017 Network2Careers event and also participated in a C3 panel. Center: Alumnae Board member Antoinette Hillian ’00 was a 2015 C3 panelist. Right: Laura Mitchell ’20 is a veteran of Network2Careers.

a focus she says was made possible

by Hollins’ focus on cultural awareness.

“It [provided] the confidence, mentoring, and leadership development to think deeper and contextualize what I experience.”

In fall 2017, Network2Careers was held on the Saturday preceding C3, allowing Dr. Tamina Winn McMillan ’95 to participate in both events. It was only the second time she’s returned to campus since graduating. (Blame it on her schedule: The mother of four is also the director of pediatrics at the Nevada Health Center, a community health center in Las Vegas.)

McMillan recalls being the only black pre-med major during her time at Hollins.

Heavily focused on her studies, working two jobs, and fencing competitively, she didn’t participate in career programming: “I had a great group of other students of color who were my support system, but I was just ignorant that there were other resources for me.”

With current Hollins students during C3 and Network2Careers, she shared practical and philosophical wisdom gleaned from experience: Pre-med students should take the MCATs in the fall of senior year, so if they don’t score well, they can retake the test in the spring. And do the things

that scare you—growth comes from discomfort. When her CEO offered her the directorship of the Nevada Health Clinic, she said no, assuming she couldn’t do a good job. He kept pressing her, and she’s thrilled with her leadership position.

She speaks a truth for most collegeaged young adults, particularly women: “Knowing how to network is not instinctual.

It’s important that you see the reality of your dreams sitting before you. To interact with someone who has taken the path is invaluable.”

Suarez heartily concurs: “The key is to embrace the networks around you, for women in general, but clearly for women of color. To watch our alumnae, who are really accomplished in their own fields, come back and mentor our students—and to see those students really learn how to network and connect—brings it full circle.”

Alumnae Board member Antoinette Hillian ’00, Ph.D., a clinical research specialist at University Hospitals of Cleveland Seidman Cancer Center and past C3 speaker, remembers being one of a handful of students of color in her class and only one of a few science majors regardless of race.

Today, interest among first-year

students in majoring in one or more of the sciences is at least as high as the interest in majoring in English. Hollins has a pre-med and pre-vet advising program in place, but the Alumnae Board plans to create a more formal mentoring program for students of color. “Hollins is becoming more aware of the need to support all of its students,” she says. “The whole point of going to a women’s college is that it is a more nurturing and supportive environment, but that means being aware of the needs of various populations, including students of color.”

“At the end of the day, it means everything,” says Laura Mitchell ’20, a business and economics double major and veteran of Network2Careers, an ETP peer mentor, and a participant in the first-year internship program. “To be given these opportunities shows that our community does care and value our presence and actively wants to help support us and our endeavors. When there is a clear effort made to afford us all the great programs and opportunities, Hollins feels like home and a safe place we want to be.”

Sarah Achenbach lives and writes in Baltimore.

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ALUMNAE

Connections

Paris Redux Paris II reunion renews love for the City of Light

Patricia Thrower Barmeyer ’68 and Bebeb Thrower MacCary ’63

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ore than a year in planning, “Hollins Abroad Paris II: Paris Today!”, with 31 participants, took place during the week of October 20-27, 2017.

A two-day French language immersion session, complete with improv workshops to bring back latent language skills, preceded the week’s events.

A motivated and enthusiastic group of Hollins Abroad–Paris alumnae worked closely with Hollins program director Audrey Stavrevitch to create a trip that included venues not on the typical travel itinerary. The goal was to highlight and promote the distinctiveness of the Hollins Abroad–Paris program, now in its 62nd year. Daily sessions on topics ranging from “French Culture and Cuisine” to “Women in France” featured guest speakers, authors, and walking tours. Highlights included a special session with Anne Sebba, author of Les Parisiennes: How Paris Women Lived, Loved and Died in the 1940s, and a VIP tour of the private collection of Emile Hermès. The trip was capped off by a farewell dinner at the Georges, located on the rooftop of Le Centre Pompidou.

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Sue Barth Dobbs ’63; Baruch’s guest, Linda Clark; Clark Hooper Baruch ’68; and Wyndham Robertson ’58

Beryl “Berry” Powers Robison ’61, Barrie Da Parma Kerper ’81, and Marcia “Missy” Van Buren-Brown ’76

Sully Amos and Peyton Page Wells ’92

ALUMNAE

Connections

Members of the class of 1952 at last summer’s reunion (from left): Anne Finlay Schenck, Jane Kelly Baugh, Betty Greear Cauthen, Beverly Doolittle Stafford, and Joan Ripple Clark.

Not shown but also attending the reunion was Emily Morgan ’79, whose mother, the late Honoria Wilson Morgan, was a ’52 alumna.

Morgan says, “It was an honor to be with these women during reunion. With a graduating class of approximately 60, I came to know many of my mother’s classmates, as I grew up hearing about them, and in many instances came to reunion and celebrated milestones with them.

This 65th was very special.”

BOYCE LINEBERGER ANSLEY ’68 LEADERSHIP SUMMIT Friday, March 16 – Saturday, March 17 Preconference events: Friday, 4 pm Networking reception and dinner: Friday, 5:30 pm

Come back to campus to reconnect with the Hollins of today and learn how you can contribute to keeping the Hollins community alive, relevant, and vibrant in the 21st century. Invest in your volunteer leadership skills and make an impact within your many communities and spheres of influence, including Hollins.

THE BLA LEADERSHIP SUMMIT FEATURES: • Group discussions • Kickoff address from on volunteerism, President Pareena G. Summit concludes: leadership, career Lawrence Saturday, 5 pm • Luncheon keynote development, admission, address from Hollins’ and community new executive director involvement of career development, TO REGISTER: Karen Cardozo www.hollins.edu/ansleysummit

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FOCUS ON

Philanthropy Next campus building project: New student apartment village Building campus vibrancy

Changes coming for the 1842 Society and Miss Matty’s Circle Condensed levels, improved communications take effect in July

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hen campus leaders unveiled Hollins’ 2007 strategic plan, they identified several projects designed to enhance students’ living and learning experience. Strategic plan projects already completed include the restoration of the Hill Houses, completed in 2015, and the renovation of classroom and lab spaces in the Dana Science Building, both funded through the generosity of Hollins alumnae and friends. The capstone project is a fresh, contemporary student housing village, to be built along East Campus Drive.

The village will replace the Williamson Road apartment complex, which has housed Hollins students since the 1970s. The apartments have become dated, and their distance from the heart of campus, across a busy street, has made them a less desirable location for students. The new units, designed to harmonize with the Hill Houses, will provide an exciting residential space for students.

Most important, housing all students on campus, while providing options for the autonomy they enjoy, will boost the sense of community and Hollins spirit.

The new apartments will offer a variety of living configurations, with flexibility for single and double bedrooms, communal living space, kitchens, and front porches. They will be constructed from materials 10 Hollins

consistent with Hollins’ commitment to the environment. Additional amenities include washing machines in each unit, shared green space, and spectacular views.

Because university leaders are committed to incurring no debt, construction will begin as soon as the $5-million level in commitments is achieved for the first phase of construction. The cost of the entire project requires $10 million in philanthropic support. Once students are relocated back on campus, Hollins plans to work with partners to develop the property across the street with a mix of retail, restaurants, and other residential spaces.

Donors seeking naming opportunities may consider these initial options: Name entire project: $5 million Name two buildings: $1,000,000 Name a building: $500,000 Name an apartment: $200,000 Name a common room: $100,000 Name the village green: $75,000 Name a kitchen: $50,000 Name a porch: $35,000 Name a bedroom: $25,000 For more information, please contact Suzy Mink, senior philanthropic advisor, at minks@hollins.edu or (202) 309-1750.

he 1842 Society is Hollins’ premier recognition society for annual donors to Hollins. The brainchild of the late Pat Bain ’49, the society dates from 1968.

It initially recognized members giving $1,000 or more yearly to the annual giving fund. In the 1990s, the membership buy-in level increased to $1,842 and has stayed at that level ever since.

Miss Matty’s Circle recognizes current students and alumnae who have graduated from Hollins in the last 14 years and are considered leadership donors.

Membership is currently based on a three-tier system based on years out of Hollins.

Beginning July 1, 2018, members will see changes to both the 1842 Society and Miss Matty’s Circle. These changes are intended to enhance both fundraising for Hollins and the methods for sharing important campus news with donors. The number of levels within the 1842 Society will be condensed from six to five. The Botetourt Society (gifts from $1,842 to $2,499) will remain in place, although the minimum gift to attend the 1842 Society weekend will increase to $2,500.

Miss Matty’s Circle gift levels will follow a rubric according to the number of years since graduation.

For the first year after graduation, donors who give $100 will be recognized as members of Miss Matty’s Circle, a decrease from the current $250. For a complete list of changes and incentives see www.hollins.edu/giving.

save the date

Hollins University’s Day of Giving International Women’s Day

MARCH 8, 2018

FOCUS ON

Philanthropy Donor Spotlight

Holly Mackay ’89: Why I made a planned gift

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ince I consider Hollins to be an extension of my family it seemed only appropriate to include “her” in my will. I participate in making annual gifts to Hollins because they are essential to the ongoing operations of the university, but I knew by making a planned gift I could have a more substantial impact.

I set up a fund to honor my mother, Susan Marckwald Mackay ’62, and to support those students interested in travel abroad. My primary catalyst was to recognize my mother and all that she has done for Hollins, but I never expected to get such immense satisfaction from knowing my gift was making a distinct difference in a student’s ability to go abroad. Getting letters annually from the recipients of funds is tangible confirmation that

Mackay

these gifts matter, and it inspires me to want to do more.

I don’t have children of my own, so I really appreciate leaving a standing legacy that will help other people’s children pursue their dreams. I have unwavering confidence that Hollins will act as a reliable steward of the gift I leave. After all, how many institutions have a proven 175-year track record!

Holly P. Mackay is a financial planner with Lincoln Financial Advisors Sagemark Consulting. An economics major, she started her career in the management trainee program with Chevy Chase Bank. When she was working for Chevy Chase Financial Services, she obtained her CFP, CLU, and ChFC designations and a master’s degree in financial planning.

Giving inspires giving How one act of generosity led to another

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uring Reunion 2017, Elizabeth “Liz” Donahoo Bishop ’92 related a moving story about the power of gifts that honor enduring friendships.

It began, she said, with Patrick Hayes, a good friend to the Donahoo family. He often visited the Hollins campus on his way to Williamsburg and the William & Mary campus.

“He fell in love with Hollins and the extraordinary women he met,” she said.

“Upon my graduation, Pat set up a trust [to] ensure that this group of Hollins women…could continue to see one another once a year and nurture the special friendship that had begun here at Hollins. We took full advantage of this opportunity to get together every year after graduation.

“Here we are 25 years later. We have all been in each other’s weddings.

We are godparents to each other’s

children. I even gained a sister-in-law, Jennifer Wake Donahoo [’92].

“It seems fitting and appropriate that his gift go back to Hollins where it all began, and we give it in honor of Patrick Hayes.”

Like the friendship that inspired his gift, Hayes’s legacy endures. At the time of his death last year, his “friendship” trust was used to create the Patrick Hayes Reunion Trust Art History Award, which will recognize in perpetuity outstanding work by a senior majoring in art history.

To read Elizabeth Donahoo’s letter to Patrick Hayes, visit www.hollins.edu/ magazine and click on “web only.”

Elizabeth Donahoo ’92 with family friend Patrick Hayes

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On the FRONT LINES

of ADDRESSING AMERICA’S OPIOID CRISIS

12 Hollins

Hollins alumnae are not only witnessing the devastation of opioid addiction, they are also working with victims and families, writing about it, and changing laws.

BY BETH JOJACK ’98

Sharon Meador

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ampant abuse of prescription painkillers in Western Virginia has changed the way Angie Wooten M.A.L.S. ’11 navigates the Child Protective Services system as a family services specialist for the Roanoke County Department of Social Services.

When she first started working with abused and neglected children back in 1996, Wooten remembers, she would drive to initial home visits of families, where one or more adults in the home had been accused of abusing drugs, and think to herself, “Gosh, I wonder if they’re really using?”

These days, Wooten admits that when she heads to that first home visit, her thoughts are different. “It’s wondering: ‘How much use?

How frequently are they using?’” she says.

Wooten meets the family with a pretty good idea of what substances are being abused. “It’s usually opiates,” she says. “They might be using other things, but we usually see opiates on the [drug] screen.”

Although concrete data aren’t available yet for how many children have been removed from their homes due to caregivers struggling with drug addiction over the last two years—considered the height of the opioid epidemic—experts believe the number is high. Wooten sees that in her own caseload. “More and more grandparents, aunts, uncles, et cetera, are having to step up and raise these children,” she says.

The current opioid crisis, researchers believe, stems from an increase in doctors legally prescribing opioids, like Vicodin and OxyContin, for pain. Maybe that increase stems from pharmaceutical companies launching aggressive marketing campaigns. Maybe it’s the result of a ’90s push among doctors to do a better job of treating pain. Whatever the reason, the number of prescription opioids sold in the United States nearly quadrupled from 1999 to 2010, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Some of those who became addicted to prescription opioids later switched to heroin or illegal fentanyl, which can be easier to obtain.

Wooten Angie Wooten M.A.L.S. ’11 has seen increased opioid use in the households she visits as a family services specialist.

Each day, more than 90 Americans die from overdosing on opioids, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse. In late October, President Trump declared the opioid epidemic a national public health emergency.

All over the country, Hollins alumnae are putting their liberal arts educations to work trying to address the crisis. While Wooten works on the front lines, caring for the youngest victims of the epidemic, Elizabeth Ropp ’99 fights to give mental health workers another tool to help opioid addicts in recovery, and New York Timesbestselling author Beth Macy M.A. ’93 puts the finishing touches on Dopesick, a book chronicling the opioid epidemic through the lens of three Virginia communities.

Winter 2018 13

D Elizabeth Ropp ’99

uring an October talk show program, New Hampshire Public Radio reporter Paige Sutherland singled out Elizabeth Ropp ’99, crediting her efforts for the swift passage of a state law that permits specially trained substance abuse and mental health workers in New Hampshire to practice an ear acupuncture treatment designed to relieve withdrawal symptoms in opioid addicts.

“She really took it on herself,” Sutherland said of Ropp, who has worked as a licensed acupuncturist for over a decade. “She brought this bill to legislation and got it passed.”

Ropp, who majored in theatre and women’s studies at Hollins, learned about using ear acupuncture to help opioid addicts as a student at the now defunct Atlantic University of Chinese Medicine in Mars Hill, N.C. She didn’t become passionate about teaching recovery and mental health workers the technique, however, until after becoming heavily involved in the 2016 presidential campaign.

After moving to Manchester from Asheville, N.C., in 2010, Ropp quickly became immersed in progressive activism. She served on New Hampshire’s steering committee for Bernie Sanders and even hosted the first house party for the candidate in the state (so many supporters came to hear Sanders speak that some had to stand in the yard and listen through an open window).

While she “felt the Bern,” Ropp also made a practice of showing up at events hosting other presidential hopefuls. She listened as pundits described New Hampshire as ground zero for opioids. The state ranks number one among states

Ropp, who describes herself as an “acu-punk,” began talking to other advocates about treating opioid addiction with a specific type of ear acupuncture.

14 Hollins

for deaths related to fentanyl (a synthetic opioid) per capita and number two for opioid-related deaths proportionate to the population.

Living near downtown Manchester, Ropp had seen plenty of evidence of the opioid crisis.

Walking to her job at the Manchester Acupuncture

Studio, Ropp frequently spotted needles in snow banks and on sidewalks. It was all the talk about the epidemic during the primary, however, that made her realize the seriousness of the problem and propelled her into taking action.

Ropp, who describes herself as an “acu-punk,” began talking to other advocates about treating opioid addiction with a specific type of ear acupuncture, also referred to as acudetox or the NADA protocol, a treatment that involves applying up to five needles just under the skin at designated points in each ear. Clients and clinicians report the treatment, which has been practiced in the United States since the 1970s, leaves many individuals who are addicted to opioids feeling more positive about recovery, as well as experiencing reduced cravings, anxiety, and sleep disturbances, according to the National Acupuncture Detoxification Association (NADA).

While attending a conference of the People’s Organization of Community Acupuncture in Tennessee in 2016, Ropp heard from acupuncturists in Rhode Island who were working to get a law on the books that would allow trained substance abuse workers to practice the NADA protocol on people in drug treatment. Ropp became determined to follow their lead. “I decided that was going to be my next project,” she says.

At the New Hampshire AFL-CIO Labor Day breakfast that year, Ropp approached state legislator Bob Backus. “I said, ‘If we want to do something about the opiate crisis, this is what we could do,’” Ropp recalls.

A few days later, Ropp says, she saw Backus at the Unitarian Universalist church they both attend, and he agreed to sponsor a bill.

Now Ropp had to get the legislation to the governor’s desk.

Through her work with the Sanders campaign, Ropp had become acquainted with lobbyist Huck Montgomery. When she told him about her work on HB 575, the bill that would allow specially trained recovery and mental health workers to use the NADA protocol, he gave her an hour and a half of free advice. “He basically laid out everything I needed to do,” she says.

In particular, Montgomery recommended that Ropp think carefully about whom she wanted to provide testimony on the issue to the House’s Executive Departments and Administration Committee. So Ropp spent about 30 hours a week last winter recruiting recovering addicts, family members of addicts, doctors, recovery and mental health workers, and acupuncturists from other states to testify. “I would have just had

Paige Sutherland, New Hampshire Public Radio

lots of patients calling the committee, but it wouldn’t have been very pragmatic or systematic,” Ropp says. “[Montgomery] got me to focus on how to get all different kinds of testimony, and so that way everyone had a different perspective of why we needed this.”

Support for HB 575 came from both sides of the aisle. “Passage of this bill will bring another source of aid to the substance abuse victims,” state Rep. Peter Hansen, a Republican, told the New Hampshire Union Leader.

Opposition stemmed mostly from the members of the New Hampshire Board of Acupuncture Licensing. Minutes from the licensing board’s March meeting stated that members found the bill’s “rule-making section is not adequate and it does not give specific enough authority for qualification, ethical standards, training and scope of practice.”

In reality, Ropp believes, the board members’ opposition, as well as the resistance the bill received from some acupuncturists in the state, stems more from concern about protecting turf and bank accounts. Ropp points out that most people struggling with addiction can’t afford traditional acupuncture offices. And anyway, she adds, there aren’t enough licensed acupuncturists in New Hampshire to meet the demands of the masses suffering from opiate addictions.

As she worked to get the bill passed, Ropp also began volunteering once a week to individuals struggling with addiction. For a while, Ropp administered the NADA protocol at a respite care facility, where addicts went while waiting to get into intensive treatment programs. “They were basically coming in off the street and getting clean cold turkey because there was nothing to offer them,” Ropp says. “They were uncomfortable.

They had headaches. They were nauseous.

They had body aches. …A lot of people walk out of respite care because they can’t handle the withdrawal symptoms.”

There, Ropp saw firsthand that the ear acupuncture could reduce cravings, help with the symptoms of withdrawal, and ease the anxiety that leads some addicts to try opioids in the first place.

Working at the respite care center showed Ropp that the law needed to be as flexible as possible because people working on the front lines with addicts are often peer coaches, individuals who have struggled with addiction themselves, not licensed mental health providers.

When the licensing board tried to get the bill amended to require that a licensed acupuncturist

be on hand whenever a trained recovery worker practiced the NADA protocol, Ropp fought hard.

“This would totally make it unaffordable,” Ropp told the New Hampshire Union Leader in June.

“The whole way this works is to allow recovery workers to give this treatment without the administrative overhead.”

On July 20, 2017, Governor Christopher Sununu signed the bill—a version that lacked the amendment the licensing board wanted tacked on.

When Ropp saw Bernie Sanders at this year’s AFL-CIO Labor Day breakfast, she gave him a birthday card that had a copy of HB 575 inside.

“He hugged me and it was really beautiful,” she says. Ropp’s experience left her passionate about New Hampshire politics: “I saw the best come out of a lot of people around this bill.”

She continues to provide ear acupuncture once a week at a recovery center in Manchester.

Once the rules for the legislation are ironed out, Ropp expects she will help with organizing trainings for mental health workers who want to provide the NADA protocol.

Ropp doesn’t rule out eventually running for a state office herself. “A lot of people are asking me to,” she says, pointing out that New Hampshire has a mammoth state house with 400 members.

“I feel like everybody at some point runs for the state house [in New Hampshire], so I am sure that at some point I will run.”

Ropp was instrumental in getting a law passed in New Hampshire that allows trained practitioners to use acupuncture to treat recovering opioid addicts.

Winter 2018 15

Macy’s third book is about opioid addiction in Southwest Virginia.

Beth Macy M.A. ’93

A

cclaimed author Beth Macy M.A. ’93 gravitates toward stories of unlikely heroes. Her first book, 2014’s Factory Man, profiles John Bassett III, a brash Galax, Virginia, furniture maker who fought back against low-cost Chinese furniture imports, saving hundreds of U.S. jobs.

With her 2016 follow-up, Truevine, Macy turns the spotlight on Harriet Muse, an illiterate African American maid in the Jim Crow South.

The book pushes modern readers to understand the remarkable courage Muse demonstrated, especially during a time when lynchings still occurred, by speaking out for justice for her two sons. When they were just boys, the Muse brothers were abducted by or sold to a circus promoter and forced to work at a sideshow because their albinism qualified them as “freaks.”

When Macy decided to focus on the opioid epidemic for her third book, she gave careful thought to how to tackle a subject so engulfed by misery. “I chose to write about the helpers and the people fighting back,” she says. “It just seemed a little bit more hopeful and less scary to me.”

“I chose to write about the helpers and the people fighting back,” she says. “It just seemed a little bit more hopeful and less scary to me.”

16 Hollins

Part of the book—tentatively titled Dopesick, and slated for release in August 2018—is set in Virginia’s coalfields. Macy features the work of an octogenarian nun who tirelessly helps addicts and a country doctor who, in the 1990s was among the first to argue that the prescription opioid OxyContin was addictive, even as pharmaceutical sales reps repeated that “the risk of addiction was

less than one percent” over and over again like some kind of mantra. “He’s still kind of on the front lines,” Macy says of the doctor. “[In the book] you see him back then and you see him now.”

Macy also takes readers to Roanoke, where she has lived for nearly three decades and where she covered the opioid epidemic in 2012 for a series in The Roanoke Times, the newspaper where she worked for the bulk of her career. Macy focuses on suburban Roanoke County, where she depicts a community slow to realize the scope of its drug problem.

“It was easier to hide in the wealthy suburbs because people had money,” Macy explains.

“So not only were the kids having an easier time hiding it, they weren’t getting busted like the people in the coalfields were for breaking into houses and driving stolen lawn mowers down the street. …Their parents would have money to send them off to treatment and keep it quiet.”

In Roanoke, Macy profiles mothers who watched their kids struggling with opioids.

These mothers are now working with the Roanoke Valley HOPE Initiative through the Bradley Free Clinic, a program that connects addicts with treatment and works to keep them out of jail.

Dopesick also portrays a small town in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia where a drug dealer moved following a prison sentence to work at a chicken plant. He later began importing heroin. “One reason that’s a good story is because you can see in this one small town… the progression of the epidemic,” Macy explains.

“Overnight almost, this town goes from having a handful of known heroin users to hundreds.

The heroes in that locality are the cops and an ATF agent who sort of banded together and said, ‘Not in our town.’”

In an email to followers who sign up on her author website, Macy describes Dopesick as a sort of sequel to Factory Man. “It’s the story of what happened in the forgotten parts of America when a flood of opioids descended at the same time the factories and mines were shutting down, and how that flood became a heroin epidemic now plaguing most of America’s cities, towns, and suburbs,” she writes.

Macy, whose father was an alcoholic, calls the book the hardest thing she’s written.

“People who are really impaired make me scared and nervous,” she says.

Carole Tarrant, who was the editor of The Roanoke Times when Macy wrote the series on the opioid epidemic, has read drafts of Dopesick and thinks it showcases the best

reporting Macy has ever done. “It has a wide sweep—looking broadly at the history of opioids and then zooming in with the kind of authentic details that make Beth’s reporting feel rock solid,” Tarrant wrote in an email. “You know the people she’s reporting about—they are real and not stick figures.”

Macy received some pushback when she reported about opioid abuse in 2012, according to Tarrant, now coordinator of development at Virginia Western Community College. “Some key leaders in the Roanoke Valley didn’t want to acknowledge what was happening and treated it like this was a random blip of a few troublesome rich kids,” she explains.

The series was widely read, Tarrant writes, but she wishes it had spurred more action in the community. “I know we’re both deeply saddened today by the fact that we thought the series would have made more of an impact,” she writes.

“Maybe it did open a few eyes—maybe some folks emptied their medicine cabinets. But five years later, all you have to do is read the obits carefully and you see so many more young people in Roanoke are dying.”

While Macy puts the finishing edits on Dopesick, her first two books continue to gather steam. Paramount Pictures purchased the rights to Truevine, according to Macy, with Leonardo DiCaprio envisioned as playing Candy Shelton, the man who, for many years, pocketed the fortunes the brothers made on the circus circuit.

Meanwhile, according to the Los Angeles Times, playwright and screenwriter John Patrick Shanley, who won an Academy Award for Moonstruck, is penning the miniseries based on Factory Man for HBO and Tom Hanks’ production company, Playtone.

When Dopesick gets released this year, Tarrant hopes the book “will finally make everyone see this as the crisis that it is.” The opioid epidemic has received an onslaught of media attention in recent months. So much, Macy had to stop looking at her Google alerts because she was being inundated with articles. “Everybody in the world is writing about this, so it’s pretty intimidating,” she says.

But at the end of the day, Macy says, all she can do is tell the story she knows how to tell.

“I think what we have is a fresh contribution,” she says. “I hope it will help with the battle against the shame and the stigma.”

Beth JoJack is a Roanoke writer and frequent contributor to Hollins magazine.

Pulitzer Prize for “Courageous Reporting” Follow the pills and you’ll find the overdose deaths.

The trail of painkillers leads to West Virginia’s southern coalfields, to places like Kermit, population 392. There, out-of-state drug companies shipped nearly 9 million highly addictive—and potentially lethal—hydrocodone pills over two years to a single pharmacy in the Mingo County town.…

In six years, drug wholesalers showered the state with 780 million hydrocodone and oxycodone pills, while 1,728 West Virginians fatally overdosed on those two painkillers, a Sunday Gazette-Mail investigation found

S

o began the Pulitzer Prize-winning series of stories in the Charleston Gazette-Mail about the crisis that’s killing so many West Virginians. Reporter Eric Eyre wrote the series, which

received the 2017 prize for investigative reporting. The Pulitzer

committee wrote that Eyre “performed in the face of powerful opposition, to expose the flood of opioids flowing into depressed West Virginia counties with the highest overdose death rates in the country.”

In her Washington Post article about the newspaper’s award, Margaret Sullivan wrote that “what motivated [the reporting and editorial staff] was the West Virginia paper’s unofficial motto: ‘Sustained outrage.’”

The newspaper’s publisher, Susan Chilton Shumate ’90, praised staff members for their dedication to “changing the world for the better.” The Gazette-Mail has been in Shumate’s family for more than 100 years. Her mother, Elizabeth “Betty” Easley Chilton ’50, still serves on the newspaper’s board.

Winter 2018 17

18 Hollins

FA M I L I E S at the H E L M

At Children’s Therapy Center, Gay Lloyd Pinder ’68 and her two cofounders pioneered techniques of family-centered therapy for children with neuro-developmental issues.

G

B Y M A R T H A P A R K M . F. A . ’ 15

ay Lloyd Pinder had never lived away from home when she arrived at Hollins College in 1964.

“Basically, I grew up at Hollins,” she says, “I arrived there as a kid, and I left there independent, confident in myself, and with a real excitement about life ahead and the world that was out there.”

She graduated in 1968 with a degree in philosophy, and although she “received a superb education, I wasn’t going to land a job with a degree in philosophy.”

So she set out to find what she wanted to do. “I had an eagerness to go and see the world,” she remembers.

Pinder’s father was a minister.

A woman in his congregation suggested Pinder reach out to her sister, who’d founded a therapy home in Huemoz, Switzerland, for children with cerebral palsy. “The town was so small we couldn’t find it on a map,” Pinder says, “but my parents, bless their hearts, put me on a plane. I’d never been on a plane, but off I went, and I was there for two years.”

She worked as an aide at Chalet Bellevue in exchange for room and board and $25 a month. By the time she flew back to Virginia, Pinder knew what she wanted to do with the rest of her life.

In 1972, she received a master’s degree in speech and language pathology from Boston University.

After graduating, she returned to Virginia to work at Petersburg Training School, a facility with 2,000 residents

and two speech therapists. “I always say that was the largest caseload I ever had in my life,” she says.

Over the course of three years at the school, Pinder learned she wanted to work with kids before they became institutionalized. She moved to Maine to work in a home-based program.

During this period she took a neurodevelopmental treatment course (NDT) that focused on working with kids with neuromuscular problems. This course was pivotal in Pinder’s professional development and would be the basis of her later teaching.

From Maine, she moved to Seattle.

She didn’t know it yet, but she’d contracted a viral infection and was losing her hearing. “If you have to go deaf,” she says, “Seattle’s a great place to do it.”

As she lost her hearing, Pinder went to a local community college to learn sign language as quickly as she could. She also went through a training program to learn how to use an interpreter. At the same time, she was working at a clinic with physical therapists Nancy Hylton and Sue Hudson. The three therapists shared a dream of opening a small clinic in which services were needed most.

“The three of us had enough work experience that we knew what we wanted in a place, and what we didn’t want. We started what we thought would be a tiny private practice.” Within several months, it became clear that Children’s Therapy Center (CTC) would be larger than they’d ever imagined,

Left: Gay Lloyd Pinder with a Children’s Therapy Center client. She became a feeding therapist after she lost her hearing.

Winter 2018 19

Left: Pinder (center), Sue Hudson, and Nancy Hylton, founders of Children’s Therapy Center.

Right: One of three centers; this one is located in Kent, Washington.

and would need to be restructured as a nonprofit. “That was in 1979,” Pinder says, “and we’re all still here.”

Since its beginning, CTC has grown to employ 160 people at three sites, with a fourth site on the way. “We were outside the box from the beginning,” Pinder says. “From a managerial perspective, we wanted it to be a place where everybody who worked here owned it— so no hierarchy.”

They also wanted to change therapy culture as a whole, to put families “at the helm,” Pinder says. In this model, ultimately “the therapists see themselves as guests. The chief in the program is the family, and as the child grows up it becomes the child.

“In 1979, the norm was that children would get therapy three to five times per week. One day would be physical therapy, another speech therapy, another occupational therapy. We did not want that model,” Pinder says.

Instead, all therapists would work together, cotreating the child, with the parents actively involved. Parents would learn how to give physical therapy while changing a diaper, or feeding therapy during snack time. “Our whole goal was to see them once a week, so the rest of the week was theirs,” she says.

In other words, they wanted to treat the whole child. “In the early ’80s,” Pinder says, “that was out of the box.

And now, that’s best practice.”

It took about seven or eight years for Pinder to lose her hearing completely.

By 1985, she was deaf and had to make a decision. “I’m either going to stay in my field—I’m not sure how I can do that— but I also love what I do. I’m a speech therapist,” she says. “But a deaf speech

20 Hollins

therapist is an oxymoron. So I said, ‘I’ve always wanted to be a car mechanic.’”

And she set out to do just that, beginning to look into a program to study car mechanics. That’s when the staff of CTC asked if she would consider becoming the director. “Car mechanics would be, I’m sure, very fun,” she says, “but I decided I was going to give this a shot.”

She shifted her professional focus from speech to augmentative communication (AAC) and oral motor/ feeding therapy. Today, she says, “People know me as a feeding therapist. That’s been another fascinating journey.”

Pinder says she is a much better therapist, now that she is deaf. “As a deaf person, my concept of communication is so different than it was when I was hearing. It’s broader, and I’m acutely aware of the power of communication and what happens when people are unable to communicate for whatever reason.”

In 1994, Pinder graduated with a Ph.D. from the University of Washington’s Department of Speech and Hearing Sciences. For the next two decades, she would participate in a collaborative effort between the University of Washington and CTC, studying the development of prelinguistic signals in young children with neuromuscular challenges.

Today, Pinder is gradually cutting back her work. “I realized if I don’t step back, nobody’s going to have the space to step up,” she says. “I have absolutely adored every minute of my career.” The highlight of her work has been “the power of empowering.

To empower a family to empower a

child, that’s been remarkable to watch.

And in my teaching, to empower the therapists I teach.”

When Pinder graduated from what was then Hollins College, she couldn’t have imagined all the lives she’d go on to change, the clinic she’d one day found, and the contributions she’d make to the field of neuro-developmental therapy.

But when asked about her start at Hollins as a philosophy major, she says, “Hollins is the best thing that ever happened to me, no question. Hollins gave me myself. It prepared me for the world.”

Though she no longer has an active caseload, she still teaches all over the world. Last year, she received the award of excellence from the NeuroDevelopmental Treatment Association.

She does monthly consultations with younger CTC therapists and the children they work with. And she has a few ideas for her next project. “The Children’s Therapy Center is so strong,” she says, “because of the management style, the concept that the center belongs to everybody. That’s the book I’m going to write.”

Pinder using the feeding therapy techniques she and her colleagues developed.

Martha Park is a writer and illustrator from Memphis, Tennessee. She received an M.F.A. from Hollins’ Jackson Center for Creative Writing and was the Philip Roth Writer-in-Residence at Bucknell University’s Stadler Center for Poetry.

E M TI

D L I W E H T IN

s e r o l p x e n p e m e a w c t GEMS nections be lls n i k o s c l e a h v t i v r u s g . n d i a n e r l o lea t g n i n r a e l d an BY

JOJA BETH

98 CK ’

Camp founder Dina Bennett (above right) with a GEMS camper

I

f Allie Mitchem ever finds herself among the cast of TV’s Survivor, she’s certain to be in high demand as an alliance partner—even at the tender age of 13.

After attending a five-day overnight camp for middle-school-aged girls called Girls Empowered at Mountain Shepherd (GEMS) each of the last two summers, Mitchem is now skilled at making fires, building shelters out of a rope and a tarp, and finding food when stranded in the wilderness with no supplies.

Until she attended GEMS camp, held on a secluded 100 acres in Catawba, Virginia, at the Mountain Shepherd Survival School, the most exotic thing Mitchem had ever eaten was calamari.

As a camper, she gobbled down black ants, which she didn’t squish dead before ingesting. “You just have to grab it and eat it really fast,” she says.

Winter 2018 21

Allie Mitchem, 13, attended the camp for two summers.

While admitting insects are high on the “eww” factor, Mitchem didn’t hesitate to complete this optional camp activity because GEMS founder Dina Bennett ate ants right by her side.

“After I ate the first one, it was really cool,” Mitchem recalls, “and I kept trying some.”

The partnership between Hollins and Mountain Shepherd Survival School, which is located about 40 minutes from campus, began in August 2012 when Bennett called Abrina Schnurman-Crook, executive director of the Batten Leadership Institute, to tell her about Mountain Shepherd Survival School. SchnurmanCrook connected Bennett with Jon Guy Owens, director of the Hollins Outdoor Program. The two clicked right away.

“She’s one of my best friends now,” Owens says of Bennett, who trained sales staffs before becoming vice president of Mountain Shepherd Survival School, which was founded by her husband, Reggie.

In 2015, Owens and Bennett joined forces to lead a Short Term course called “Survival for the Modern World,” in which they taught the seven priorities for survival—positive mental attitude, first aid, shelter, fire, signaling, water, and food—and, according to the course

Jon Guy Owens, director of the Hollins Outdoor Program, team taught a Short Term class with Dina Bennett on survival skills. The course inspired the GEMS camp for middle-schoolaged girls.

22 Hollins

description, how to “identify parallels existing between wilderness survival techniques, university life, personal life and growth, and ultimately the business world.”

The course, which they repeated in 2016 and 2017, counts toward requirements for the Hollins Outdoor Leadership Certificate, but it isn’t only for students preparing for careers in outdoor recreation. It teaches students skills they can use in their day-to-day lives, says Owens. “It helps them break down situations so they realize what resources they have around them and how to maintain a positive mental attitude so they can persevere through a situation.”

Kayla Deur ’16 took the course her junior year at Hollins, right before leaving to study abroad in Cambodia and Vietnam. Already active in HOP, Deur planned on a career in the outdoor industry after graduation.

Early on, Deur admitted to her classmates she had never before traveled outside the United States, and she had big-time nerves about the upcoming semester. “Dina really supported that, and she took the time to help me find connections in the course that would help me prepare to study abroad,” Deur says.

Deur and Bennett kept in touch during Deur’s time abroad and afterward.

“When I got the idea to do the GEMS camp [for middle-school-aged girls], she was the first person I called,” Bennett says.

Owens

No matter a student’s cultural background or grade point average, most will be brand new to the outdoors, Bennett points out. “It’s an amazing equalizer,” she says. “It brings people into a common area, enjoying the same things and learning new skills.”

Deur enthusiastically signed up to help organize the first GEMS camp in the summer of 2016. She spent much of her free time her senior year helping Bennett create marketing materials and design the camp curriculum. Deur was the one who came up with the GEMS name. “I was trying to think of a name that would give us a good acronym,” says Deur, who majored in environmental studies and sociology. “I knew I had gained so much confidence from the similar experience I had with Dina in my J-Term class. Empowerment felt like the right word to try to fit in.”

A couple of weeks after Deur graduated from Hollins, Mountain Shepherd offered four five-day overnight sessions of GEMS camp, with four campers attending each session. Along with Bennett and Deur, Dani Derringer Zhang M.A.T ’13 (daughter of Professor of Chemistry Daniel Derringer), who had been active in HOP while at Hollins, served as a counselor. “We did it all,” Deur says. “We did the cooking. We did the bedtime. We did the wake-up.”

By being on hand 24 hours a day, the three women got to know the campers very well. “We were all able to build

Bennett

Left: Kayla Deur ’16 (on left) not only helped organize the inaugural GEMS camp, she also came up with its name.

Below: GEMS campers from summer 2017

really strong relationships with the girls,” Deur says.

In addition to the three counselors, GEMS campers often receive visits from guest instructors such as SchnurmanCrook, Owens, and his wife, Anna Copplestone ’06 (psychology), ’15 (environmental studies), who works on campus as the coordinator of the IT help desk.

Some campers, Deur says, struggle at first with going without a smartphone or tablet (staffers store campers’ cellphones for the majority of camp), but they adjust. “We’re teaching them a different way to connect,” Deur says.

“They’re learning to connect with nature. They’re learning to connect face to face with other people.”

At the end of that first session of GEMS camp, Bennett felt confident she’d found her dream career. “It’s the most fulfilling thing I have done,” Bennett says.

“Just to be able to make a difference, to engage in their lives and help them stay courageous and be confident in their choices.”

The experience also affirmed Deur’s belief that girls in this age group need time in the wild. “I really like to see them learn how to stay true to themselves and not feel the pressure to change and adapt and fit in so much,” she says.

Thirteen-year-old Mitchem observed a difference in herself after spending a week at GEMS camp, too. “When I first arrived, I was not very good at talking and meeting people and stuff,” she says.

“After going to that camp, I felt a lot more comfortable talking.”

Campers like Mitchem told camp organizers they wanted to come back the following year. The girls, Deur says, “really challenged us to build more and give them more.”

Last summer, Mountain Shepherd Survival School offered four five-day overnight sessions of GEMS camp for 35 new campers, plus a week of GEMS camp 2, for 10 returning camp veterans to focus on backpacking and caving skills.

After that first summer of camp, Deur signed on as assistant manager of education programs at the Chesapeake Bay Foundation’s Brock Environmental Center, so she wasn’t able to attend GEMS camps in summer 2017. But she has already coordinated her schedule for the coming summer to be able to attend some of the GEMS offerings.

“In typical Hollins fashion, I just want to do everything,” Deur says.

The summer 2018 sessions will include a GEMS camp 3, which will emphasize canoeing and rock climbing for GEMS veterans, as well as a session for high-school girls. “I want to be able to still bring them in and catch them up,” Bennett says of the older students.

About 35 percent of the campers from the last two years hailed from the Roanoke Valley, according to Bennett.

She would like to attract more local students and is working with Owens on a plan to pair local GEMS campers with Hollins students once a month for activities. “We want to go a little more year-round,” Owens says. Campers would be able to continue polishing their outdoors skills by doing things like visiting the Hollins climbing wall and then eating with their mentors in Moody. The goal, says Bennett, is for the GEMS campers to be able to picture themselves in a college environment. “Ideally, as we build on this, and they’re doing more outside, they’re becoming leaders, and then they want to become Hollins students,” she says. “That’s the grand master plan, right? We want them at Hollins.”

Beth JoJack is a Roanoke writer and frequent contributor to Hollins magazine.

Winter 2018 23

this is how S

we roll d Women’s Studies After Professor of Gender an

LeeRay Costa saw how transformative a rock ‘n’ roll

it to Roanoke. camp was for her daughter, she brought

24 Hollins

BY JEAN HOLZIN G E R M . A . L . S . ’ 11

ometimes a punctuation point can make all the difference.

Consider, for example, the difference between Girls Rock.

And Girls Rock!

The first implies a quieter relationship between girls and rock ‘n’ roll—maybe even a sidelines role.

The second injects some energy into the equation, making it clearer that girls can play a more active role by composing, playing, performing—and even promoting—their music, starting from a young age.

LeeRay Costa, the mother of a musicloving daughter, envisioned this kind of experience for her child. A professor in the gender and women’s studies department, she stumbled across the Girls Rock! program, which originated in Portland, when Tallulah was only five, too young to participate. Still, Costa filed the idea away, and when Tallulah turned nine, Costa and her husband, Andy Matzner (who teaches in Hollins’ M.A.L.S. program), traveled to the nearest GR! camp, in Durham, North Carolina.

Inspired by her daughter’s rave reviews and by her own conversations with camp directors, Costa returned to Roanoke determined to start a Star City version of Girls Rock! “I talked to my good friend Kim Bratic [vice president of marketing at ALCOVA Mortgage in Roanoke], who has two daughters,” Costa remembers. “Immediately she was on board and willing to work with me to make it happen.”

Although GR! camps exist all over the country and around the world, each develops its own curriculum. For the Roanoke camp (GR!R), Costa and Bratic began with a vision: “We wanted to use music and creativity as a vehicle to teach self-confidence, self-efficacy, healthy risk taking, and conflict negotiation,” Costa says. “We wanted to create a positive, uplifting environment for girls who in many ways in our society are being taught to compete with one another, to judge one another, to isolate from one another.

“We wanted to show there are other ways to be in the world.”

Their first GR!R camp launched in the summer of 2013, with full enrollment of 30 girls ages eight to 12—and with a waiting list. “It was an amazing experience,” Costa says, “so we decided: Roanoke seems interested.” After two years, they added a second camp for teen girls, ages 12 to 16. All girls are welcome, and an active fundraising program insures that no girl will be refused admittance because of an inability to pay. No previous music experience is required, either. The camp supplies it all: instruments, including keyboard, drums, bass guitar, electric guitar, and ukelele; instruction on singing and performance techniques; rehearsal time; and work-

Left: On the last day of camp, the girls perform an original song.

Above: Campers collaborate on their band’s name.

shops on everything from poetry to dance, from mindfulness and social justice to self-defense. At the end of the week, each band performs an original song in front of a live audience.

Certainly the girls are connected to each other through the music, but the sum of the experience is greater than its parts. “I think that girls are not necessarily used to being in a really supportive environment,” says Costa, “so many activities during the week are about building community. At the end of the week, they feel connected and valued.

There’s a lot of tears and a lot of love.”

Costa, who has served in every role (except music teacher) in the organization, has seen firsthand the profound

impact the camp has had on participants.

What she didn’t expect was a similar kind of impact on the adults. “We are an intergenerational organization,” she explains. “The youngest campers are eight, and the oldest volunteers are in their 60s or 70s. So we have this community of people working together, across backgrounds and across generations.” Watching the campers grow in courage and confidence over the week seems to inspire in them a similar reaction. “Learning how to speak up for ourselves, take risks, learning how to try things that scare us, [figuring out] how can we be good friends and create community together—all of those things are happening for the adults as much as for the girls,” says Costa. “It provides support and confidence for each of these people to go out and do other things in their life that maybe they wouldn’t have done before.”

And that goes for Costa herself.

After the second or third summer of GR!R, she and several other camp volunteers attended a women’s rock retreat in North Carolina to see for themselves what it was like to compose, play, and perform music. What Costa found was that it was “really hard and really scary, especially if you’ve never played an instrument before.”

She also discovered how empowering the experience can be. She played bass in a band called Throwing Heat, and

Parv inder Sethi

LeeRay Costa singing lead in a song she and her band mates wrote during a women’s rock retreat in Nor th Carolina.

sang lead in a song the women wrote and titled “Hormone Whiplash.” “It was a punk song,” she says, “and it was very cathartic.”

Now that GR!R has its feet firmly on the ground after five summers of camps and an expansion to year-round programming, Costa is taking more of a backseat role. Having studied nonprofit organizations for her doctoral dissertation, she knows they can suffer from “the founder problem” when the person who started it all has trouble “stepping away and letting go. From my perspective, for the organization to continue to grow and evolve, we need new energy and people and ideas,” she says.

Costa credits GR!R volunteers— the workshop leaders, the roadies, the fundraisers, the board members— with the organization’s success. Their participation is vital, she says, because “we want our campers to see women filling all of these roles. So often in the music industry, it’s a boys’ club.

Music spaces are not necessarily inclusive of girls and those who may be just learning new skills and the language that goes with it.

“We want to provide girls with a foundation that will encourage risktaking, and for them to see women involved in all aspects of music making, from the technical to the performance.”

Jean Holzinger is guest editor for this issue of Hollins magazine. n singing truction o ceive ins re rs e p Left: Cam ance techniques. rm and perfo Photos by Siobha

n Cline, DrumzandSpace Photog raphy

Winter 2018 25

T U R N I NG the PAGE on E A R LY L I T E R AC Y Partnering with a Roanoke nonprofit that promotes reading to children, three Hollins professors transformed a manuscript by Margaret Wise Brown ’32 into an interactive tool for parents and caregivers.

B Y J E F F H O D G E S M . A . L . S . ’ 11

Photos by Sharon Meador

Baynum and Pempek

Sanderson

26 Hollins

A

pproaches to childrearing may have shifted through the years, but the dedication of mothers and fathers to encouraging early literacy remains a core component of parenting. “One of the most important things parents can do, beyond keeping kids healthy and safe, is to read with them…starting when they are newborns and not even able to talk,” said On Parenting editor Amy Joyce. Citing lead author Pamela C. High’s 2014 study, Literacy Promotion: An Essential Component of Primary Care Pediatric Practice, the American Academy of Pediatrics stated that “parents who spend time reading to their children create nurturing relationships, which is important for a child’s cognitive, language and social-emotional development.”

Early literacy initiatives are looking for ways to make it easier for parents to read to their kids. Turn the Page, for example, is a Roanoke organization whose twofold mission is to increase awareness of the benefits of reading with children from birth and to provide every child born in the Roanoke Valley with his or her own home library of books during the first three years of life. Turn the Page’s goal, in part, is to give books to every mom who delivers a baby at Carilion Roanoke Memorial Hospital (CRMH).

Last fall, their efforts to achieve that objective enjoyed a significant breakthrough. Three Hollins faculty developed and printed a children’s book for the organization, with support from a faculty scholarship IMPACT grant provided by the office of the vice president for academic affairs.

In partnership with Hollins, Turn the Page gave CRMH 5,000 free copies of Four Fur Feet by Margaret Wise Brown ’32, the author of such beloved

children’s classics as Goodnight Moon and The Runaway Bunny. Four Fur Feet’s journey from the archives of Hollins’ Wyndham Robertson Library to the pediatric unit of a Roanoke hospital began roughly three years ago. Associate Professor of Education Anna Baynum, a Turn the Page board member, and Associate Professor of Psychology Tiffany Pempek discovered a shared interest in creating resources to support child development.

“My doctoral dissertation involved a project in collaboration with Sesame Workshop to assess the effectiveness of their infant videos in which parenting tips were included and high-quality parent-child interactions were modeled.

I love this concept because it is such a practical way to get information to parents who may be too busy to find time to read parenting information on their own,” Pempek recalled. “While reading to my own sons when they were infants, I had this idea of expanding on this research by writing a children’s book that included tips about reading to children integrated into the pages of the story.”

“Tiffany’s research parallels the work I do in preparing Hollins students for pre-K through sixth-grade teacher licensure,” Baynum added. “Students in our courses learn why reading with children from birth to age three is developmentally appropriate and how early dialog exchange helps them progress along the literacy continuum in elementary school,” she continued.

“The amount of time parents, caregivers, and preschool teachers talk to and with babies and toddlers during their early childhood years has a tremendous impact on their development as readers.

Our students learn strategies to use while reading aloud with children, so embedding recommendations

regarding how and why to use those evidence-based strategies in an actual picture storybook has always seemed like a natural next step in my work.”

At about the same time the two Hollins faculty members were discussing resource development for their courses, Turn the Page was becoming “an incredible driving force for getting books in the hands of new mothers and building personal libraries for children in their own homes,” Baynum said.

The organization was investigating the possibility of producing a book of its own to distribute in the hospital.

“While on a walk with [Professor of English] Julie Pfeiffer, I began talking about this project,” Baynum recalled.

“We were brainstorming possibilities when Julie mentioned that Hollins maintains manuscripts written by Margaret Wise Brown that we may be able to utilize.”

Through an intermediary with Brown’s estate, Baynum and Pempek were granted permission to choose a manuscript they thought would be appropriate. They deemed Four Fur Feet to be the perfect text; then came the challenge of finding an illustrator.

Pfeiffer connected them with Ruth Sanderson, codirector of Hollins’ M.F.A. program in children’s book writing and illustrating, for advice on finding the best fit. An accomplished children’s book writer and illustrator in her own right with more than 80 published books to her credit, Sanderson was so taken with the idea that she offered to create

the artwork. “I was very excited by the concept Anna and Tiffany were proposing.” Sanderson said. “This had never been done to my knowledge.”

“Ruth helped us decide where to place the tips on the pages, and she adapted her artwork to complement the tips,” said Pempek. “The creativity and thoughtfulness she brought to this project helped bring our vision to life.

With Ruth’s help, every page of the book was deliberately designed to enhance parent-child interaction during reading.”

Baynum and Pempek also praised Sanderson for her efforts to establish the Early Literacy Project Book Award.

Students in Hollins’ graduate programs in children’s literature are invited to submit both text and illustration for

tiveness of their parent materials by comparing reading techniques used by parents who are given books with and without embedded tips. Down the road, they plan to undertake a large-scale intervention study following children whose families received books and informational material on language development from Turn the Page.

“We’re open to whatever the research shows,” Pempek explained.

“Are there differences in reading techniques used by parents who receive a book with embedded parent tips such as Four Fur Feet versus a traditional children’s book? Can this type of parent intervention promote the development of language and reading skills as children grow? What do

Here’s how! Point to and say “ fox,” “ frog,” and “fish” in this picture.

This tip, pictured above, is designed to enhance parent-child interaction during reading.

consideration, and if their work is selected they will be eligible to receive tuition grants. The first student team has been chosen for the second book in the series: Writer Jen Wood and illustrator Lucy Rowe are developing a multicultural book about the interaction between caregivers and babies that is scheduled to be published in late October 2018.

Baynum and Pempek plan to conduct their own research to assess the effec-

parents think of our tips? We plan to use the results from our research to continuously improve the books we develop in the future with our student authors and illustrators.”

“Our favorite aspect of this project,” said Baynum, “has been working together and with each of our wonderful collaborators from across campus as well as our local community to support the amazing cause championed by Turn the Page.”

Winter 2018 27

TIME TO TRY ON SOMETHING

Different SHORT TERM 2018

Short Term presents students with interesting dilemmas: Should they take a class, travel to a different country, play a sport, do an internship, undertake an independent study? Here’s a pictorial display of some of the things they chose to do during J-Term.

Professor of Biology Renee Godard (far right) led students on Winter Wanderings, even when the temperatures dipped well below freezing.

Keyazia Taylor ’21 on defense during an ODAC game with Shenandoah University.

64 Hollins

In the Introduction to the Healing Arts class taught by Professor of Music Judith Cline (back row, far right), students spent a day with guest Angela Wiley (second row, fourth from left), a dance and drama therapist.

Four of the students who traveled to Rome on a trip led by Genevieve Hendricks and Elise Schweitzer, assistant professors of art, show their drawings in the Musei Capitolini.​

Morgan E. Donelson ’19 used colored pencils to create this drawing for her Fur, Feathers, and Scales class taught by Visiting Lecturer in Art Carol Schwartz.

Hollins THE

EXPERIENCE

Robertson

Mahan Photos by Sharon Meador

Jamia Robertson ’20 HIGHLIGHTS: - Phonathon caller - J-Term internship in the Cromer Bergman Alumnae House

- Ring Night - Early Transition Program - Resident of the Sandusky Service House

Casey Mahan ’20 HIGHLIGHTS: - Member of the tennis team - Captain of the volleyball team - Student Athlete Advisory Committee representative

HOMETOWN: Durham, North Carolina MAJOR: Biology AFTER GRADUATION: Plans to attend medical school

HOMETOWN: Virginia Beach, Virginia MAJOR/MINOR: Biology major, minors in

chemistry and business

- Planning a J-Term internship in an optometrist’s office - Planning to spend her junior year in Ireland

AFTER GRADUATION: Plans to attend optometry school

THE HOLLINS FUND Supporting Outstanding Students By giving annually to the Hollins Fund, you support the education of exceptional Hollins women like Jamia and Casey.

Three ways to give: - Online through our secure website at www.hollins.edu/ giveonline - Via check to the Hollins Fund, Hollins University, Box 9629, Roanoke, VA 24020 - By calling us with your credit card number: (800) TINKER1 (800-846-5371)

Elise Schweitzer, Summer Riders. Oil on linen, 48 x 66 in.

In April 2017, Hollins riders won the Old Dominion Athletic Conference (ODAC) championship during competition at the Kirby Riding Ring. Last fall, Hollins continued its strong showing, finishing in a tie for third place in IHSA competition. Assistant Professor of Art Elise Schweitzer has been drawing and painting Hollins riders and horses for more than two years. She collected her work for an exhibition titled Hunt Seat and Equitation at the Gatewood Gallery at the University of North Carolina–Greensboro this March.