2020 Inland Northwest Women of the Year- September 20, 2020

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We asked, and the Inland Northwest answered.

We put out a call seeking nominations of impressive women, leaders in business, politics, arts, philanthropy and social services. We received nearly 100 nominations, and today we dedicate a special section to our 10 honorees, in addition to five other women honored for their lifetime achievements.

WOMEN OF THE YEAR

Ten women of distinction doing good works in the Inland Northwest

BETTY DUMAS, PAGE 2

SHELLY BOYD, PAGE 3

JENNYFER MESA, PAGE 4

VANGE OCASIO HOCHHEIMER, PAGE 6

TONI MEACHAM, PAGE 7

POPPY WHITE, PAGE 8

KATY ALLEN, PAGE 9

MELISSA HUGGINS, PAGE 10

GINGER EWING, PAGE 11

JAI NELSON, PAGE 12

LEGACY RECOGNITION

Five women whose lifetime of work has left an impact on the region

DIANA WILHITE, PAGE 14

BRANDIE EVANS, PAGE 15

JANE JOHNSON, PAGE 16

DEBRA SCHULTZ, PAGE 17

NADINE VAN STONE, PAGE 18

T2 • Sunday • September 20, 2020

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INLAND NORTHWEST WOMEN OF THE YEAR

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Coronavirus pandemic doesn’t slow down ambition of retired elementary teacher

‘UNSTOPPABLE’ MAMA D WON’T STOP FEEDING HOMELESS SPOKANITES

PHOTOS BY JESSE TINSLEY/THE SPOKESMAN-REVIEW

Betty Dumas, a retired elementary school teacher, now serves her community through the soup kitchen at Calvary Baptist Church in Spokane, where she is seen on Sept. 11.

Dumas taught second and third grade for the majority of her 46 years at Finch Elementary.

By Maggie Quinlan

THE SPOKESMAN-REVIEW

For more than 10 years, Saturdays at Calvary Baptist Church in Spokane meant serving soup for those who needed it. When the coronavirus pandemic forced the church to close the program, Betty “Mama D” Dumas found a way to keep serving food on Saturdays.

Dumas has been making soup at the kitchen since its second week in operation. That Saturday, she came to visit and saw they didn’t have any soup.

She appointed herself the soup lady that day and started learning recipes, as her soup-making experience had been limited to opening and heating cans of Campbell’s.

Dumas is “unstoppable” in her effort to help others, said Glenn Vaughn, who volunteers at the kitchen with Dumas.

“She’s just one of those people, you have to put your spiritual sunglasses on or it will blind you because it radiates off her,” Vaughn said. “It is the depth of her commitment. She could be bleeding out and she would be down there every single Saturday.”

After 46 years teaching, Dumas retired from Finch Elementary School in 2015, only to continue volunteering at the school from 8:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. four days a week.

COVID has kept her away from the “little people” she loves, she said, but she found a way to keep feeding the hungry.

Every week since March, she and her son Corey Dumas fix 60 brownbag meals at their home while another two women make about 100 meals together. One recent menu was homemade potato salad, fried chicken, barbecue sauce, a roll, grapes, Pepsi and a bottle of water.

Dumas said she goes through each bag and writes a little message like “Jesus loves you” to minister through the meals.

Because their makeshift meal program isn’t associated with the church, Dumas and the other volunteers pay for the food out of pocket, Dumas said. Then they take all 160 meals to the Goodwill parking lot near Dick’s Burgers.

To prevent a crowd from forming, her son and other volunteers take some bags and head down into down-

“

She’s just one of those people, you have to put your spiritual sunglasses on or it will blind you because it radiates off her. It is the depth of her commitment.”

Glenn Vaughn

Co-volunteer at Calvary Baptist Church

Dumas serves her community through the soup kitchen at Calvary Baptist Church in Spokane. town Spokane, where they pass meals out to homeless people.

She refers to the people who come to the soup kitchen as “our honored guests,” Vaughn said, and if anybody speaks negatively about those guests, they’ll hear from Dumas, he said.

Dumas said she feels called to help others by Jesus’ words in the Bible: “When I was hungry, you gave me something to eat.” Because, she said, no one can know what Jesus would look like today, “if you refuse that person, you might be refusing Jesus because those are his children.”

“When I ride around this town and I look at people, that’s somebody’s child, somebody’s daddy, somebody’s mother. You put yourself in their shoes and say, ‘Wow.’ ” Dumas said.

“You’ve got to look at it through God’s eyes. You can’t look at it through our natural eyes. You have to look from the heart.”

Her pay as a volunteer is others’ happiness, she said.

Dumas believes she was born spiritual – “It’s in my heart” – but her parents were also dedicated Christians.

Dumas’ father was a railroad worker who laid tracks in Georgia, where Dumas grew up under Jim Crow law. He was also a barber and a spiritual man,

she said.

Her mother and grandmother taught her the most because they were home, she said. Her mother raised Dumas and her seven siblings and always had more kids at the house, she said.

Later, she did housework to bring in money.

Growing up, she shared a bed with her two sisters, washed clothes by hand, walked about a mile to school every day and drank out of the “colored” fountain.

When her family moved from a rural town to Savannah, she said she watched as Black people moved into the cities, white people moved out to the suburbs. Then as Black “doctors and lawyers” moved into the suburbs, white people started moving back to the city.

Dumas moved to Spokane in 1963 for her husband’s work in the military.

Right away she started volunteering at her children’s school, Grant Elementary School, doing tasks like correcting papers and filling out paperwork she said.

While her husband was still overseas, she went to school part time and worked part time at Grant. From there, she moved to Finch Elementary School, where she spent the majority

of her 46 years as a teacher educating second- and third-graders.

For the past five years, she’s volunteered out of her small office, helping kids who need a little extra attention.

“My pay was knowing that I’m helping kids, and that they are learning and they appreciate my help, they did,” Dumas said. “When I go to the room, they say, ‘Take me! Take me!’ and I’d tell them, ‘Baby, I can’t take you, your teacher has to pick.’ ” She’d save the last few weeks of the year to work with the students who had been asking her to take them all year.

Now, she’s considering if she might be able to pitch in at a day care with enough social distancing measures.

She said she follows the governor’s orders and trusts the Lord to protect her from the virus, but if she’s not meant to teach this year, she’ll accept it.

She said in some ways, “things are better today,” but the world is still a “mess” with too much fighting.

“I don’t know if that’s ever going to change before we leave this earth,” Dumas said. “I wish it were better. As long as we have man in this world, it won’t be. Live and let live.”

Her best advice: “Show more empathy and less judgment.”

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September 20, 2020 • Sunday • T3

INLAND NORTHWEST WOMEN OF THE YEAR

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A lifetime spent defending the culture and language of her native people

SHELLY BOYD WORKS FOR RECOGNITION OF SINIXT TRIBE IN N.E. WASHINGTON

COURTESY OF BOBBY WHITAKER

Shelly Boyd, a member of the Sinixt/Arrow Lake band of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, is seen here in a 2020 photo taken on the Ferry County Rail Trail by advocate Bobby Whitaker. Boyd, who has worked for years to preserve the language and culture of her people through numerous avenues, is now involved in the legal fight for their recognition by the Canadian government.

By Kip Hill

THE SPOKESMAN-REVIEW

The fires that raged in the hills near Inchelium this month carry an additional warning for Shelly Boyd.

“There’s nothing like a fire to remind us how important the water is, and how important is to take care of the land,” said Boyd, a member of the Sinixt/Arrow Lake band of the Colville Confederated Tribe of Indians. “All of these things that bring attention to the wildlife, and our natural environment.”

Boyd, a graduate of Gonzaga University and co-founder of the Inchelium Language and Culture Association, took a break from preparing lunches for workers building fences around new ranch land for horses on Sept. 14. The work occurred several days after wildfires burned thousands of acres of tribal land in northeastern Washington.

The threat to the natural world posed by the fires, she said, mimicked the threat to the history of her people, a threat she has fought for years by supporting a battle for the tribe’s legal recognition, pushing for instruction of the Salish tongue of her ancestors.

“The reason that we don’t know our language, or you know, weren’t raised in our language, was because our grandparents loved us,” Boyd said. “They didn’t want us to go through the same kind of hardship that they had to endure while speaking their language.”

Those efforts were hardened following the death of Boyd’s stepson by suicide in 2006, and again following the death of her husband, the late singer-songwriter Jim Boyd, in 2016. At the time, he was serving as chairman of the Colville Business Council.

“He was a huge inspiration to my life, obviously,” Boyd said of her late husband, who performed several of the songs for the soundtrack of the 1988 film “Smoke Signals,” from a screenplay written by Sherman Alexie. “He was an amazing man.”

Her husband’s death thrust Boyd, who had worked to teach her tribe’s language and culture to younger students at the Medicine Wheel Academy in Spokane and the center in Inchelium, into an ongoing legal battle that’s reaching its apex this summer.

The Sinixt tribe is scheduled next month to make their argument before the Supreme Court of Canada in a case that is now a decade old. A member of the Sinixt tribe, in an effort to assert the tribe’s ancestral hunting rights in British Columbia, hunted an elk in 2010 and was then cited by the Canadian government

“

A lot of people don’t realize the Sinixt have been walking these trails for 10,000 or 15,000 years. Those trails, they’re still here. We need to respect that, and our decisions moving forward need to be informed by that.”

Bobby Whitaker

Shelly Boyd’s Woman of the Year nominator

for violating federal hunting laws.

In 1956, the Canadian government labeled the Sinixt tribe extinct and thus incapable of claiming their right to ancestral hunting lands. The tribe has prevailed in all levels of the court, but will have to make their argument virtually next month, due to COVID-19 and travel restrictions imposed by both the U.S. and Canadian governments.

“It’s really about our ancestors and future generations,” Boyd said. “I just don’t want our children to grow up being declared extinct.

“There’s nothing worse than feeling like you’re not important, as a person of color,” Boyd added.

A 30-minute documentary highlighting the case, called “Older than the Crown,” debuted at both the Garland Theater in Spokane and Gonzaga University this spring. Boyd, who is a producer on the film, also appears as both a supporter of Rick Desautel, the tribal member who received the hunting citation, and in a ceremony releasing salmon in the Upper Columbia River near Kettle Falls.

These salmon ceremonies, and historic trips in sturgeon-nose canoes this summer on waterways key to the Sinixt tribe, are an extension of the work to protect the Salish language, Boyd said.

“We’re river people, and we’ve been pushed off of our river,” Boyd said.

The work on the canoe trips, and a lifetime spent defending the culture and

language of her native people, prompted Bobby Whitaker, of the Ferry County Rail Trail Partners, to nominate Boyd for

the Women of the Year honor.

“A lot of people don’t realize the Sinixt have been walking these trails for 10,000 or 15,000 years. Those trails, they’re still here,” Whitaker said. “We need to respect that, and our decisions moving forward need to be informed by that.”

Whitaker said he was inspired by the breadth of Boyd’s work to support her people and their culture. He attended the documentary premiere in Spokane, in a packed Garland Theater earlier this year. Boyd stood on stage and asked how many in the audience traced their ancestry to the Sinixt. When most of the crowd raised their hands, Whitaker said, it brought tears to his eyes.

“She’s doing so much good. She’s spinning a lot of plates,” he said.

Boyd was quick to point out that the task of telling the story of the Sinixt/ Arrow Lake people extended beyond her own efforts, and that the work of the tribe in its legal case had larger implications than for just her own people.

“This case is huge, and it’s a landmark case. It affects every border tribe across this continent,” Boyd said. “It’s a big deal.”

Kip Hill can be reached at (509) 459-5429 or kiph@spokesman.com

T4 • Sunday • September 20, 2020

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She founded Latinos en Spokane and is a passionate advocate for the rights of immigrants

MESA HELPED BUILD THE COMMUNITY SHE NEEDED, ASSISTS OTHERS IN NEED

LIBBY KAMROWSKI/THE SPOKESMAN-REVIEW

Jennyfer Mesa, a 2020 Women of the Year selection, is seen in Spokane on Sept. 15. Mesa, who originally emigrated to the United States from Colombia, is an immigration activist who co-founded the grassroots organization Latinos en Spokane in 2017.

By Adam Shanks

THE SPOKESMAN-REVIEW

When much of the town of Malden burned to the ground on Labor Day, it didn’t take long for Latinos en Spokane to spring into action.

The grassroots organization launched an online fundraiser for Alfredo Castillo, who was at work on a local egg farm when the fire sparked. He was able to escape Malden along with his wife and two children, but they lost their home and a pet to the blaze.

The fundraiser is exactly the sort of work Latinos en Spokane was founded in 2017 to accomplish, supporting Latinos in and around Spokane and establishing a sense of community.

Jennyfer Mesa, one of its three co-founders, felt the absence of that connection and organization when she arrived in Spokane nearly a decade ago. So she decided to do something about it.

“Spokane is unique in that there has never been a space for immigrants, for Latinos, for different cultures,” Mesa said.

Until now.

Back in 2018, thanks to Mesa and other volunteers, travelers at the Greyhound bus station in Spokane, where Border Patrol would routinely search until the company prohibited agents from its grounds earlier this year, were handed “Know Your Rights!” cards produced by the American Civil Liberties Union.

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit the United States, Latinos received assurances, translated into Spanish, that they would not have to prove their immigration status or provide a Social Security card in order to safely be served by a food bank.

Others learned how to apply for citizenship, an exhausting and notoriously complex process that can cost thousands of dollars and take years to complete.

“We’ve created a trusted space and people ask us questions all the time,” Mesa said.

Tamber Price nominated Mesa as one of The Spokesman-Review’s Women of the Year because she’s offered a space “that’s really needed” in Spokane, she said. After meeting her at a local dance studio, Price got her first job babysitting one of Mesa’s two children.

“She is like one of my biggest role models, she’s like that for so many people,” Price said. “She puts everyone else before herself, to a point where it’s like she’s so passionate about advocating for everybody.”

It’s no surprise that Mesa would dedicate herself to helping others navigate the immigration system and life as a Latina in Spokane – she knows firsthand how “crazy-making” it can be.

“

People are living in the shadows and working in the shadows, and are not bring considered.”

Jennyfer Mesa

Talking about the history of immigrants in Washington state

Born in Colombia, Mesa migrated as a girl to the United States with her parents in 1986 or 1987 – she forgets the exact year. Like many other Colombians fleeing the drug-fueled violence and unrest of Pablo Escobar’s Medellín Cartel, Mesa’s family landed in Miami.

Her family was unable to apply for asylum despite having come to the United States to escape chaos in Colombia that several of her family members did not survive.

After their arrival in the United States, Mesa’s father returned to Colombia and she was raised by a single mother. She eventually dropped out of high school to work and help support the family. Mesa and her older brother were translators for things like apartment leases and car purchases for her mother, who could mostly get by in Miami with only Spanish and did not learn English until Mesa was in her early 20s.

But while her family laid down roots during those formative years in Miami, Mesa’s status was never permanent.

Although they arrived in the United States on tourist visas, Mesa’s documents had been lost or stolen with some of the family’s luggage en route to the United States. That meant the rest of her family could apply for residency, but she could not prove she made legal entry into the country.

“That affected the rest of my life,” Mesa said.

Years later, her father, by then living in Mexico, told her to come attend college there.

“I was naive, I didn’t know the risk of what would happen if I left. I was 17 at the time and I thought I could go and come back,” Mesa said.

But she couldn’t.

So Mesa spent more than a decade in Mexico as her mother, now a U.S. citizen, worked to help her daughter gain access

back into the United States. Mesa applied for visas over and over, if only for a temporary visit to see her mother, but was always denied.

“We were just constantly rejected, and it was heartbreaking,” Mesa said.

In Mexico, Mesa put her skills to work, leveraging her bilingual abilities to enter the banking industry. She parlayed that experience into a career as a commodity broker.

Eventually, Mesa and her son were finally able to obtain a visa at the U.S. consulate in Bogota, Colombia. After years of frustration and legal wrangling, Mesa said she was never asked for “one single thing” to prove her identification by the officer who handled their case. To that point, her family had invested $27,000 in the effort over the years.

“My case, even with its complexities, I am a lot more privileged than a lot of people,” Mesa said.

Mesa moved to Spokane in 2011 with her then-husband, who landed a job in the area.

Because her professional experience in Mexico counted for little in the United States, Mesa began working at a call center and got to work on her GED, which she received in 2012. From there, she went to Spokane Falls Community College and transferred to Eastern Washington University, where she studied urban planning.

Her research and career, focused on neighborhood and transportation planning, has taken a number of turns.

Most recently, she worked as a senior planner with the Kalispel Tribe of Indians until she was furloughed due to COVID-19.

Mesa’s culture bleeds into her professional work in development and planning, a field sparse with Latinos, she said.

As emphasis on public transportation and denser housing grows, Mesa said

Latinos have already been living that way for generations.

“We’re not used to living in sprawled environments,” Mesa said.

Many in the planning field view it as apolitical and neutral, but that’s not the case, she added.

“In reality, if we want to be advocate for communities,” Mesa said, “it also includes equity.”

As Mesa studied the history of Washington, she got angry. Immigrants have been brought into Washington communities for decades and allowed to work, she said, but “there’s no representation, at the city level, or county level.” Even, she added, as they drive economic growth.

“People are living in the shadows and working in the shadows, and are not bring considered,” Mesa said.

But if people are living and working in the shadows, Mesa’s life as an activist and work as a planner has been to shine a light on them.

At Latinos en Spokane’s annual workshop to help students apply for scholarships, Mesa asks how many have had a Latino teacher. Or doctor. Or political representative.

“Here in Washington, and especially in Spokane, those kids have never been represented. They don’t see themselves in leadership roles,” Mesa said.

Latinos en Spokane could help change that. It began as an online community through the texting app WhatsApp with about 70 friends and family members, and “it just blew up from that,” Mesa said.

As much effort as she and her fellow volunteers pour into Latinos en Spokane, Mesa said structural change will come only with real investment in organizations and efforts like those undertaken by Latinos en Spokane, “We’re starting to get there, but we’re a group of volunteers,” Mesa said. “We all have day jobs.”

Latinos, especially after the election of President Donald Trump, are being asked to be “many things at once,” she added.

“It’s hard for people to do their careers and also have to respond to need,” Mesa said.

For now, Mesa will continue to balance life as an activist and professional in Spokane, where she now feels at home with 6-year-old daughter Bianca and 17-yearold son Sebastian.

“Here, I was able to get scholarships, become more stable, put my son in school and have this quiet environment,” Mesa said.

The alternative, Miami, would have presented a different challenge.

“I would have been stuck in traffic,” Mesa joked.

Adam Shanks can be reached at (509) 459-5136 or adams@spokesman.com

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September 20, 2020 • Sunday • T5

INLAND NORTHWEST WOMEN OF THE YEAR

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THINGS YOU DIDN’T KNOW (OR FORGOT) ABOUT HOW WOMEN GOT THE VOTE

By Bonnie Berkowitz THE WASHINGTON POST

The origin of “suffrage” is not suffering, although plenty of people suffered in the pursuit of suffrage.

It derives from the Latin suffragium, meaning a vote or a right to vote. It can also mean a prayer of intercession, certainly an apt description given the many groups of people who have prayed for the right to vote.

Here are some other things you may not have known about how women got the right to vote: • A slight in London sparked a U.S. movement: The first Women’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, N.Y., in 1848, shaped the movement for decades. The event was the brainchild of abolitionists Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, who were furious after being barred from an 1840 anti-slavery convention in London because of their gender.

• Abolitionists and suffragists were intertwined: The women’s rights movement sprang from the abolitionist movement before the Civil War, but the relationship was often uneasy. Some felt women should be able to vote before Black men, or vice versa. Others insisted everyone get the vote simultaneously. And some wanted to bar African Americans from the women’s movement, fearing their involvement would turn Southern legislators against the cause.

“If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, these women together ought to be able to turn it back. … And now they is asking to do it, the men

better let them.”

• Lonely guys in Wyoming deserved a tip of the hat: Wyoming was the first territory or state to act after the 1848 Women’s Rights Convention to pass a women’s suffrage law, on Dec. 10, 1869. Some men truly wanted voting access for their wives and moms, but many legislators had other motivations, including the hope that the new right would attract more single women to that frontier, where men outnumbered women 6 to 1.

• Julia Ward Howe’s eyes saw the glory, but not the vote: Author and abolitionist Julia Ward Howe not only founded several major women’s organizations and suffrage groups, but during the Civil War, she also wrote the lyrics that became the activist anthem “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

• Susan B. Anthony was arrested for voting: At a time when women were mocked for speaking in public, Susan B. Anthony was a leading voice in the fight for equality in labor practices and pay. After voting in Rochester, N.Y., in 1872, she was arrested, convicted of voting illegally and fined, and the publicity attracted many people to her cause.

She died in 1906 and thus did not live long enough to cast a legal vote.

“All that we require of a voter is that he shall be forked, wear pantaloons instead of petticoats, and bear a more or less humorous resemblance to the reported image of God. He need not know anything whatever. ... We brag of our universal, unrestricted suffrage; but we are shams after all, for we restrict when we come to the women.”

• The Supreme Court

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Catherine Flanagan, left, and Gertrude Crocker are arrested in August 1917 as they protest outside the White House.

Crocker holds a banner that reads, “How Long Must Women Wait For Liberty?” Women demonstrated at the White House for months, pressuring President Woodrow Wilson to support a 19th Amendment. ruled against letting women vote: Women’s activist Virginia Louise Minor tried to register to vote in St. Louis in 1872 and was rejected. She and her husband sued, and the case rose to the Supreme Court.

The nine male justices declined to interpret the 14th Amendment’s “all persons” clause to include women, forcing suffragists to refocus on the Constitution.

• Men feared “petticoat rule”: According to a 1900s anti-suffrage pamphlet aimed at women, they shouldn’t get the vote because: 90% “do not want it, or do not care;” they would be competing with men instead of cooperating; “more voting women than voting men will place

the Government under petticoat rule;” and “it is unwise to risk the good we already have for the evil which may occur.”

• Ida B. Wells organized women of color: Death threats drove journalist Ida B. Wells from Memphis after she wrote a 1892 lynching exposé. She moved to Chicago, where she urged women of color to get involved in politics, and she led a group at the 1913 Women’s Suffrage Parade in Washington, D.C. Told by organizers to go to the back or leave, she emerged from the crowd halfway through the march and joined the Illinois delegation at the front.

• “Silent Sentinels” picketed the White

House for 18 months: Led by Alice Paul, who had helped organize the Washington march, more than 1,000 women in January 1917 began daily demonstrations at the White House gates, despite verbal and physical attacks from spectators. Paul was arrested, jailed and charged with obstructing traffic, and her hunger strike galvanized public support for women’s suffrage. “I am not one of those who believe – broadly speaking – that women are better than men,” she said. “We have not wrecked railroads, nor corrupted legislatures, nor done many unholy things that men have done; but then, we must remember that we have not had the

chance.”

• A pandemic helped the cause: The 1918 Spanish flu spread rapidly among soldiers in the last stages of World War I, creating a sudden shortage of men. As women surged into the U.S. workforce, they blew apart the arguments that they were delicate and intellectually inferior.

• Finally, women got the vote: On Aug. 18, 1920, the 19th Amendment, passed by Congress the previous June, was ratified by Tennessee, the last state needed to reach the threshold for becoming part of the Constitution. It was certified Aug. 26, and women had the right to vote.

Thanks for making a difference in our community Bank of America recognizes the 2020 Women of the Year honorees. Community leaders like you are a vital resource and inspiration to us all. Thanks to you, progress is being made and our community is becoming a better place to live and work.

Visit us at bankofamerica.com/local.

©2020 Bank of America Corporation | 2935478 | ENT-216-AD

T6 • Sunday • September 20, 2020

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Whitworth economics professor is also a board member for a number of local organizations

VANGE OCASIO HOCHHEIMER’S GOAL IS AN ‘ECONOMY THAT WORKS FOR EVERYONE’

DAN PELLE/THE SPOKESMAN-REVIEW

Vange Ocasio Hochheimer, an economics professor at Whitworth University, owns her own economic analytics firm and has come a long way since growing up in Puerto Rico and New York City as one of eight in a household led by a single mother. She is focusing on policy and how economics can help alleviate inequities in society.

By Arielle Dreher

THE SPOKESMAN-REVIEW

You could say that Vange Ocasio Hochheimer has hit her stride, but that doesn’t really begin to explain how the Puerto Rican economist came to be a professor, board member for various local organizations and a new business owner in the Inland Northwest.

At first glance, Hochheimer is a tenured economics professor at Whitworth University, and has taught there since 2011. She takes students to Costa Rica and Panama some years for a course, striving to help students gain understanding of poverty, wealth and how economics impacts everyone.

She is a wife and mother of two young boys. The family of four lives in north Spokane, and they have lived in the area for about a decade.

In reality, her involvement in the community runs deep and continues to grow. She opened her own independent firm, Grand Fir Analytics, early in 2020 before the pandemic set in. Hochheimer recently completed one of her first projects, a report on housing as a social determinant of health in Spokane completed for the Spokane Association of Realtors.

“It was a call to action to policymakers to pay attention to this issue because (housing instability) can definitely deepen poverty and deepen homelessness,” she said.

The report details how housing instability can lead to adverse health outcomes, including more poverty and homelessness when economic stability is threatened or destroyed.

Hochheimer’s work grows not only out of her love of economics, but also out of her own lived experience.

She was born in New York City but as a toddler, she and her twin sister moved to Puerto Rico to live with their grandparents. While her grandparents were not educated, Hochheimer remembers their work ethic and their commitment to other people as key to her upbringing. One of her formative memories occurred while living with her grandparents in Toa Baja, about 25 minutes west of San Juan.

It was some sort of promotion ceremony, Hochheimer remembers, maybe from elementary school to middle school. She received no additional recognition or awards for her school performance, and she felt shorted by herself.

“I remember on graduation day not receiving a medal or any kind of recognition and telling myself, ‘I can get recognition; I am smart enough,’ ” she recalled. “I remember thinking, ‘I need

“

I think we need to reassess the impact of the pandemic; it is disproportionately affecting people of color, indigenous populations and the poor.”

Vange Ocasio Hochheimer

Whitworth University economics professor

to work harder.’ I put myself to the test.”

Her hard work paid off, and she reached her goal of achieving a 4.0 grade-point average her next semester.

She learned a valuable lesson that day.

“If you put in the work, you will get really good results,” she said, although she acknowledges that’s not a consistent formula. “It doesn’t mean you won’t fail,” she added.

That determination remained a deep part of who Hochheimer is to this day.

“I owe everything I am first to God, then to my grandparents,” she said.

She and her twin sister returned to New York City when they were 12 years old. She recalls hard years, and even a point when their mother who worked constantly (and had eight children; she and her sister were the youngest) could not afford rent anymore, and they were evicted.

Hochheimer believes that growing up in two distinct settings and seeing how economics played a role in her environment led her to later make that her field of study.

“I became acquainted with income inequality and poverty and all of these issues with the economy,” she said.

“Sometimes the economy can work better for some than for others.”

Hochheimer said that those disparities she saw early on led her to questions of “Why are some people poor and why are others rich?” and “What aspects of their lives make them poor or rich?”

Hochheimer and her sister worked

hard in both school and after school at retail jobs. Eventually, after graduation, Hochheimer went to Binghamton University in upstate New York and her sister returned to Puerto Rico. After receiving her undergraduate degree in pre-law and philosophy, Hochheimer returned to New York City and worked on Wall Street for an investment bank, but eventually decided she wanted something different.

She settled on pursuing economics in the form of first a master’s degree, then a doctoral degree, focusing on economic development, international trade and sustainability.

“I decided that economics was a discipline that gave me a lens to where I can dip in and out of different branches of business while also considering social issues,” she said.

At Colorado State University, where she studied economics, she met her husband, Manny Hochheimer. They spent some time in Colorado, as she finished her dissertation and taught courses in Denver. They wanted to stay in the West, and after having their first son, Noah, and finishing her doctoral degree, Hochheimer applied for the position at Whitworth. They moved their family to Spokane about a decade ago, and added another son, Luca, to their family.

She was tenured a couple of years ago, and serves on multiple community boards, from the YWCA in Spokane to the Catholic Charities Housing Board of Directors in Eastern Washington.

Her love of economics is inclusive,

and understanding what keeps certain communities and people from accessing jobs, housing or education is integral to understanding how the economy works for her.

“Everything I do is connected to this perspective of: making the economy work for everyone,” she said.

Her graduate research focused on sustainable development, focusing on development respecting the environment and people it will impact. In a way, her research became her work, and is also reflected in the boards she is a part of.

She sits on the Inland Northwest Land Conservancy board as well as the state Department of Commerce Community Economic Revitalization Board, representing Spokane on a state board that helps allocate funding for development projects.

The question she focuses on asking and answering is, “How can the economy develop successfully while at the same time preserving the well-being and dignity of people and the environment?”

Hochheimer, who has primarily played the role of researcher, is looking to aim that work toward policy implications moving forward. Of course, the Spokane economy post-COVID-19 could look very different.

Before the pandemic, Hochheimer had analyzed available jobs in the state and found that there were labor demands for technological jobs but a shortage of workers to fill those roles.

While those problems will persist after the pandemic, she is concerned about the inequities illuminated by the coronavirus.

“I think we need to reassess the impact of the pandemic; it is disproportionately affecting people of color, indigenous populations and the poor,” Hochheimer said.

After the pandemic, “that will deepen, the housing crisis will deepen,” she said, noting that if the eviction moratorium is lifted, homelessness could become a reality for many local families.

“I think the reopening should strike to reach a balance between all the different demographics that were affected and think strategically, because if we neglect certain populations, that could create a host of impacts,” she said.

As for her future? She’s just getting started.

“Policy work is what I will be pursuing very heavily going forward, and seeing how my contributions can help our community thrive,” she said.

Arielle Dreher can be reached at (509) 459-5467 or arielled@spokesman.com

Special Section

September 20, 2020 • Sunday • T7

INLAND NORTHWEST WOMEN OF THE YEAR

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‘Tenacious’ litigator gives a voice to legal issues faced by Inland Northwest farmers

ATTORNEY MEACHAM BLENDS HER LOVE OF THE LAW WITH LOVE OF RANCHING LIFE

DAN PELLE/THE SPOKESMAN-REVIEW

Toni Meacham is an attorney from Connell who represents ranchers’ interests. She recently worked with a rancher who had a legal battle with the U.S. government over a property line dispute on the Snake River.

By Thomas Clouse

“

THE SPOKESMAN-REVIEW

When 73-year-old rancher Walter “Sonny” Riley faced federal officials in 2018 who alleged he was allowing his cattle to graze on public land, he knew the attorney he needed to call: Toni Meacham.

With documents filed against him in federal court, the Snake River rancher said he needed a lawyer who understood what a cow was – and how government officials and folks in agriculture don’t always see eye to eye.

“She’s just great,” Riley said of Meacham. “I would say she’s done more to help ranchers and agriculture than any lawyer in business.”

Meacham runs her own legal office when she’s not helping her husband, Troy, raise about 150 head of cattle and 90 registered horses on their family ranch near Connell.

Raised on the farm, she earned her associate degree while at Connell High School as part of the Running Start program before graduating from Washington State University in only two years with an animal science degree.

Meacham, 40, then attended the University of Idaho College of Law, because it was more affordable than Gonzaga and close enough for her to return home and help out at the ranch.

While she has nearly zero time for herself, the payoff is that Meacham gets to pursue her two great passions.

“It’s super rewarding and allows me to grow as a human,” she said. “I don’t know that most ranchers have the perspective that I have, and not many lawyers do either.

It allows me to be grounded and relatable.”

Jack Field, the executive director of the Washington Cattle Feeders Association, said he has worked years with Meacham on various boards and in legal fights over water.

“There are a lot of talented attorneys out there,” Field said. “But there is only a small group who are talented and who are ranchers and livestock owners. Toni understands what a landowner is facing and the concerns they have when they get a letter from

I would say she’s done more to help ranchers and agriculture than any lawyer in business.”

Walter ‘Sonny’ Riley

Snake River rancher who turned to attorney Toni Meacham in public lands suit

a regulatory agency.”

Field has tracked Meacham’s work for Riley, the rancher near Pomeroy, which continues despite at least four attempts

by Riley to purchase land to trade the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for the disputed ground near the river.

“Toni is just as tenacious today as the first day she started that case,” Field said.

“She doesn’t let her foot off the gas. She will continue to work that issue until she gets a resolution that her client is satisfied with.”

Field, who also served with Meacham on the Washington Cattleman’s Association, said Meacham is “very intelligent and highly skilled.”

“She’s not afraid of a fight, that’s for sure,” Field said. “I’m very happy to call her a friend and glad to have her in my corner if I ever need anything.”

Fifth-grade inspiration

Meacham said her family has been ranching for generations. Her grandfather, Bill Bennett, always talked about the challenges ranchers and farmers face.

When Meacham was in fifth grade, her grandfather introduced her to Mary Burke,

a generational rancher from Cle Elum.

Meacham said on that day she met the person she wanted to become.

“She was considered one of the best water-law experts in the state,” she said.

Burke “would always check in with me.

She would tell me, ‘Go forth and do good.’ ” Burke died in 2016 at 80. She was named trailblazer of the year in 1999 by Beef Magazine. Meacham keeps a copy of that magazine in her office.

“She was a very strong woman who had gone out and educated herself and fought for the good of agriculture both on the state and national level,” Meacham said.

On the homestead

Meacham’s home, which doubles as her legal office, has a window with a view of the pasture.

She spent Sunday working in thick smoke with post-hole diggers as the family built barbed-wire fences.

Her husband, Troy, also has a “first job” in addition to ranching. He’s an agronomist, who helps develop methods and soil management to increase food production, for the J.R. Simplot Company’s french fry plants in Othello and Moses Lake.

The couple often relies on other family to help out with the cattle and horses.

But the Meachams also found time, before the pandemic, to take their two boys to as many as 16 fairs and events to show their cattle, in addition to whatever sports they happened to be playing.

“It’s very personal, what she does,” Troy Meacham said. “She enjoys agriculture a lot. It’s a passion to her. She doesn’t want anyone in agriculture to fail.”

Both her husband and Field said Meacham will often work hours for clients that don’t get added to the final bill.

“She enjoys people and will bend over backwards to make things right,” Troy Meacham said. “It definitely means a lot to her. That’s why she does as well as she does.”

Riley, the rancher near Pomeroy, would agree.

He worked with Meacham even before federal officials kicked off the public land dispute that remains unresolved.

Meacham said she traveled to Riley’s River Ranch when he met with representatives from the Washington Department of Ecology over concerns about cattle polluting a nearby stream.

Riley picked up a stick and started poking the state official in the chest to make a point.

“I did not step in and intervene,” Meacham said, laughing.

Like most ranchers in the area, Meacham’s families have intertwined histories.

And, each year, there are fewer and fewer of them left to follow that way of life.

“We’ve got to do a better job of telling our story and documenting our story,” Meacham said. “We have to show that we are part of American history. Ag is a huge portion of what makes America great. We have to remind people why we are great.”

As farmers become less of the overall population, their issues also have fewer voices, she said.

“That is why I sit on as many boards as I do, because my parents taught me that we have to give back,” she said. “We have to make sure this lifestyle is available to our children and our grandchildren.”

T8 • Sunday • September 20, 2020

Special Section

INLAND NORTHWEST WOMEN OF THE YEAR

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She’s a tireless advocate for all kids, regardless of who they are or where they come from

WHITE CREATES AN INCLUSIVE CAMP EXPERIENCE, EVEN AMID A PANDEMIC

PHOTOS BY TYLER TJOMSLAND/THE SPOKESMAN-REVIEW

Woman of the Year nominee Poppy White, at Manito Park in Spokane, keeps camping inclusive as director of camping and program services at Camp Fire Inland Northwest.

By Laurel Demkovich

THE SPOKESMAN-REVIEW

If there is one person in the community who is an advocate for all kids, regardless of where they come from, it’s Poppy White, her colleagues say.

When one camper at Camp Fire Inland Northwest felt uncomfortable using gendered bathrooms, White, director of camping and program services, created a gender-neutral one. A camper who was recently experiencing homelessness had lice, so White and her team educated the child and their grandparents on how to treat it. A young camper decided to change their pronouns, so children at White’s camp chose food-related names to use all summer, instead of their given names that might not match their pronouns.

“That’s Poppy’s commitment to kids,” camp nurse Wendy Williams-Gilbert said. “She’s always meeting them wherever they’re at.”

White knows how important camp is to every kid regardless of class, race, gender or sexual orientation.

So when COVID-19 hit in March, she had to find a way to keep camp going, no matter what.

When most people were shutting down, White started asking, “How can we get these opportunities to kids?”

With added sanitation crews, beds farther spread out, health screenings and masks, both Camp Dart-Lo and Camp Sweyolakan looked a little different this summer. But White and her staff knew they needed to find a way to safely keep camp open and inclusive this summer.

“I didn’t see it as negotiable,” White said. “For me and my team, the risk was worth it all.”

White started at Campfire as a Bluebird, a program for young campers, while her mother was a camp leader. She spent 12 years as a camper, counselor and staff member before moving on in 1995.

She grew up in a lower-income family and found it was hard to find a place within the social structures of her school.

“Summer camp really provided to me in my younger years an equalizing space,” she said.

Twenty years later, the Campfire Inland Northwest director of camping and program position opened up.

White applied, seeing an opportunity to promote social emotional learning and inclusion for kids who might not get it otherwise.

“

It was very clear this year that they needed an outlet to talk to.

They hadn’t had their teachers or coaches for three months.”

Poppy White

Talking about children enrolled in camp amid COVID-19 pandemic

White, a former camper herself, is a Woman of the Year nominee for 2020.

She got the job, becoming the leader at Campfire’s overnight Camp Sweyolakan on Lake Coeur d’Alene and Camp Dart-Lo, the program’s day camp on the Little Spokane River.

Campfire’s diversity and inclusion statement is robust, White said, but she knew it something she wanted to a part of.

“I’ve been committed to all of that not just in raising of my child, but in everything I do,” she said.

She wanted to provide a space where kids could try new things and learn and fail without the stigma of a social class.

That’s why it was so crucial that camp continue this summer, White said.

White, who has a 12-year-old daughter, saw the effects of keeping her child at home for so long. Her only experience with her peers was over a screen, where it’s difficult to have a personal connection, White said.

She knew if she could provide a safe environment for kids, camp must go on.

Although they did see a slight decline in the number of sign-ups, White said the parents who chose to bring their kids back were grateful.

“The kids we saw overall were resilient,” White said. “Things were weird and different, but they took it all in stride.”

When campers first arrived, they were quiet for about 45 minutes, White said, and then the giggling

started. Kids who were likely only with their siblings for the past few months were finally around other people, she said.

Many of them forgot how to play instead of argue, White said.

White and her team put on a camp that gave hundreds of campers some normalcy, without any known coronavirus outbreak, Williams-Gilbert said.

The biggest surprise that White saw was the amount of disclosure campers gave this year compared to others. White allows campers to share deep issues at home with staff, such as parental abuse, neglect or substance abuse.

“It was very clear this year that they needed an outlet to talk to,” White said. “They hadn’t had their teachers or coaches for three months.”

White has always created a safe space for kids, regardless of where they come from, Williams-Gilbert said.

Williams-Gilbert, who nominated White for Women of the Year, has worked with White as a lead nurse for the past five summers. Her kids also attend Camp Sweyolakan.

One of their programs, called “You Bet I Can” weeks, allows kids with disabilities or special needs to come to camp. Many other camps refuse to bring these kids, WilliamsGilbert said, but White hires staff who specifically understand how to work with them.

“Poppy is still doing that work in

the middle of everything when people are shutting down,” Williams-Gilbert said.

White said it’s important to her that kids are open and willing to work with anyone from any background.

She’ll never get it right 100% of the time, White said, but she can always strive for it.

When a camper decided to change their pronouns to they/them, White said she saw how supportive other campers were. Many of them stood up to anyone who was not as accepting, she said.

It was incredibly heartening for White to see this generation is one that will move forward and be accepting. It’s the culture she said she wants to create at camp, which is why it was so important that they stayed open this year.

During a camp season, staff members work long hours and can often end the day frustrated and exhausted.

But Williams-Gilbert knows exactly where to go if that’s the case: White’s office.

She always has a smile, Williams-Gilbert said, and she is always positive.

“You can’t not be happy when you’re around her,” Williams-Gilbert said.

Laurel Demkovich can be reached at (509) 416-6260 or laureld@spokesman.com

Special Section

September 20, 2020 • Sunday • T9

INLAND NORTHWEST WOMEN OF THE YEAR

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Previous public-works experience in Spokane, San Jose prepared her for current responsibilities

LIBERTY LAKE ADMINISTRATOR ALLEN NAVIGATES GROWTH, PANDEMIC CHALLENGES

TYLER TJOMSLAND/THE SPOKESMAN-REVIEW

Liberty Lake City Administrator Katy Allen is seen March 8 at Liberty Lake City Hall. “I like finding innovative solutions that are affordable,” she says.

By Tyler Wilson

“

FOR THE SPOKESMAN-REVIEW

As a surveyor, city engineer, public works manager and city administrator, Katy Allen’s extensive career in public service is built on a reputation of getting things done.

Currently serving as the city administrator for the community of Liberty Lake, Allen tackles challenges both expected (population growth) and unpredictable (the COVID-19 pandemic) with equal parts nuance and decisiveness.

“I love working with people, I love solving problems, and I like finding innovative solutions that are affordable,” Allen said.

Her professional career began as the survey chief for the City of Spokane Water Department, and she would go on to become the city’s director of public works.

“Whatever I assigned to her, she didn’t balk,” said George Miller, the former chief engineer for the Spokane water department who managed Allen at the start of her career.

“She never walked away from a challenge. Decision-making was one of the things I really appreciated.”

That experience led her to the position of director of public works and city engineer for the city of San Jose, California. She oversaw bond-funded projects, an airport renovation, the construction of a new city hall and numerous capital improvement projects.

She spent nine years working in San Jose, but never officially moved there. Instead, she remained an Eastern Washington resident and “commuted” to work.

“We kept our house, and I flew back and forth,” Allen said. “The commute was very manageable because of technology, and I feel like I was spending less time commuting than many people in the Bay Area.”

As the capital program in San Jose neared its end, Allen began a push to work in her hometown. In 2012, she became city administrator for Liberty Lake. Though a different community compared to San Jose, Allen made it her focus to understand the specific needs of Liberty Lake and the demands of its citizens.

“Every city has its own personality, and policies that work in one city will not work in another city, and as public servants, we have to understand the values of our city and our city’s story,” Allen said. “(Liberty Lake) is a community very committed to a healthy lifestyle. … It’s very acces-

(Liberty Lake) is a community very committed to a healthy lifestyle. … It’s very accessible. Our transportation, our parks and trail system, and our access to cable and underground utilities are part of our story. Many cities would die to have the infrastructure we have, so we don’t have a lot of deferred maintenance, and we are not having to fix a lot of things that are broken.”

Katy Allen

Liberty Lake city administrator

sible. Our transportation, our parks and trail system, and our access to cable and underground utilities are part of our story. Many cities would die to have the infrastructure we have, so we don’t have a lot of deferred maintenance, and we are not having to fix a lot of things that are broken.”

With three golf courses, convenient access to Interstate 90 and short commute times to Spokane and North Idaho, growth management has been a key challenge for Liberty Lake.

“She’s been a great asset for that area, helping the city grow and doing things the right way,” said Barry Baker, president and chief executive officer of Baker Construction. “We’ve done a lot of land development in Liberty Lake, and Katy is always the voice of reason, as in, ‘How do we get this through and how do we get this right?’

“If a developer can work in concert with the city, it turns into a win-win situation, rather than what we’ve seen in so many other communities, where developers can get into a fight with municipalities,” Baker continued. “I could not speak more highly of her and her approach in how she views development.”

Allen said growth management is about striking a balance for the city’s

residents.

“There are people who don’t like the growth, and there are people who are here because we planned for the growth with schools, the golf courses and lots of outdoor space,” Allen said.

Allen’s steady hand in Liberty Lake has influence in more than just city-specific projects. Part of her responsibilities include partnerships with the community’s other public service entities, including the Central Valley School District and its development of new schools in Liberty Lake in recent years.

“Katy brings people together to accomplish tasks that would not have been accomplished alone,” said Benjamin Small, superintendent of the CVSD. “She leads with a common sense, steady and calm demeanor. It is this leadership style, along with a deep commitment to the community she loves, that has allowed the city of Liberty Lake to navigate these uncertain times.”

The COVID-19 pandemic presented an entire set of new challenges in Liberty Lake.

“We had to shift gears … we had to adapt and we chose to focus on what was most important, and not chase foul balls,” Allen said. “We needed to provide for the safety of our citizens and businesses.”

Efforts have included providing personal protective equipment and protocols for reopening local businesses, as well as recurring mask distribution for Liberty Lake residents.

“I like simple and fast, so instead of filling out applications for things, if you have a business license you can come to city hall and pick up PPE,” Allen said. “For distribution of masks, if you have Liberty Lake listed on your driver’s license, come to city hall and pick up your masks.”

Summer in Liberty Lake is typically filled with events and movies in public spaces such as Pavillion Park, and residents always look forward to the city’s dedicated weed management team of goats. Last December, the Winter Glow holiday light show was installed at the city’s new Orchard Park. Winter Glow is expected to return this year, and Allen said the canceled or postponed events of 2020 will return post-COVID-19 in large part because of dedicated community organizations and support.

“The bucket of volunteers we have … I’ve never seen in my life,” Allen said. “This community is the community it is because of our volunteers.”

Katy and her husband Randy have been married for 46 years. They have two sons, Paul and Jeff, and four grandchildren.

T10 • Sunday • September 20, 2020

Special Section

INLAND NORTHWEST WOMEN OF THE YEAR

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She’s keeping the local arts scene thriving during a pandemic and economic slowdown

HUGGINS REACHING OUT TO ARTISTS TO SEE HOW SPOKANE ARTS CAN HELP

COLIN MULVANY/THE SPOKESMAN-REVIEW

Melissa Huggins, executive director of Spokane Arts, has been chosen as a 2020 Women of the Year nominee.

By Azaria Podplesky

THE SPOKESMAN-REVIEW

It was easy to find Melissa Huggins as a young girl: She was where the books were.

The executive director of Spokane Arts said she was always buried in books and essentially read through the library as a student at Roosevelt Elementary School.

“I finished reading the Nancy Drew series and I finished reading the Hardy Boys, and my school librarian was like ‘Sweetheart, you’ve read them all. There aren’t any more,’ ” Huggins said.

Maybe all those hours spent with teenage sleuths solving mysteries in River Heights and Bayport helped prepare her for the great mystery 2020 presented: How to keep the arts alive during a pandemic and economic slowdown.

Huggins, nearly four years into her tenure as director of Spokane Arts, has spent much of the year reaching out to artists and arts and culture organizations and asking, simply, “How can Spokane Arts help?” She has created an artist relief fund and has doubled down on promoting virtual events and artist opportunities.

“From the boring but important work of collecting data on lost revenue, to creating innovative new programs and opportunities to our local artists and arts institutions, she has stepped up as a resourceful and dedicated leader in our arts community,” Spokane Arts Program Director Mika Maloney, who has worked with Huggins since 2018 but known her much longer, said in her nomination letter.

Growing up in Spokane, Huggins has seen the city evolve from a place many thought they’d have to leave if they wanted to pursue a creative career or hobby to one in which its art community has become a point of pride.

While the pandemic has put much of that community on hold, Huggins hopes that when things return to normal, people will have a greater appreciation for art after reading books, watching movies, and listening to music and podcasts while quarantined at home.

“I hope they realize how significant arts and culture are to their everyday lives, aesthetically, emotionally, intellectually,” she said. “Arts and culture is woven into everything we are as humans and I hope people come out of the pandemic recognizing that.”

From reader to writer

Throughout her childhood, Huggins kept reading. She didn’t, however, start writing until much later, as a student at Pacific Lutheran University. After taking a couple creative writing classes, a professor encouraged her to pursue creative writing.

After graduation, Huggins spent a couple years in Tacoma working at Planned Parenthood and for a bankruptcy attorney while applying to grad schools. She was accepted into four programs but chose to return home to attend Eastern

“

Arts and culture is woven into everything we are as humans and I hope people come out of the pandemic recognizing that.”

Melissa Huggins

Spokane Arts executive director

Washington University’s MFA program in creative writing.

It was as a grad student that Huggins got her first taste of working on Get Lit!, EWU’s annual literary festival.

As an intern for Get Lit!, Huggins worked alongside then-director Danielle Ward. In her second year in the program, Ward hired Huggins as the assistant coordinator for Get Lit! When Ward’s wife’s position in the Navy took Ward to San Diego, Huggins applied for the Get Lit director position.

“I applied for the job right after graduation and spent a very nervous few months waiting for that process to play out,” Huggins said. “Luckily, I did end up getting hired.”

During her five years with Get Lit!, plus two as a grad student, Huggins collected her her fair share of notable moments.

Meeting Kurt Vonnegut during a meetand-greet at Catacombs, which is now the Gilded Unicorn, is a big one.

“I’m 99% sure that at the time you could still smoke inside bars so he was smoking up a storm, sitting in this booth, and one-by-one or two-by-two, we went and talked to Kurt Vonnegut,” she said.

“He was charming and sweet and very funny, and it was incredible.”

The energy and excitement of Pie and Whiskey events, which were created by Sam Ligon and Kate Lebo, also stand out in Huggins’ mind. She can also still recall all the ways the community and local authors rallied behind Get Lit! over the years.

“That is really what sticks out to me, all of the times that someone said yes to Get Lit!” she said. “That someone said ‘Hey, I’ll offer this to you.’ ‘I’ll sit on this panel.’

‘I’ll do this reading.’ ” After seven years working with Get Lit! in one capacity or another, Huggins felt it was time to try something new.

When former Spokane Arts director Laura Becker accepted a job in California, Huggins threw her hat into the ring.

For one, she knew the position would allow her to do more of the interdisciplinary work she loved as part of Get Lit! “There were a number of events as part of Get Lit! where it wasn’t just about writers, it was about writers and visual artists together or artists and musicians or writers and theater folks,” she said.

“Those collaborative pieces of the festival were always really enjoyable and fun for me, and I think the Spokane Arts job appealed to me in the sense that I knew I would get to work with a much wider range of artists.”

She also felt like the position with Spokane Arts would give her an opportunity to have an impact on the city in a broader, more significant way.

Huggins had also known, since before grad school, that she wanted to work in nonprofits and “work in that capacity where you’re doing meaningful work to support your community.”

In other words, becoming executive director of Spokane Arts was a natural fit for Huggins.

New hat, similar goals

Through Spokane Arts, Huggins and the rest of the team work to support art and artists in any way they can, including the Spokane Arts Grant Award.

When Huggins was hired at Spokane Arts, funding for the grant from city council had already been established, so it was up to Huggins and then-grants administrator Jennifer Knickerbocker to create the program itself.

“One of the true delights of taking on the Spokane Arts job was getting to work with Jennifer and to build the grant program together from the ground up,” Huggins said. “To be able to learn from her expertise in grantmaking and also to be able to thoughtfully work on that together and listen to what the community was telling us.”

Huggins and Knickerbocker held round tables and created surveys to en-

sure the SAGA was as simple and accessible as possible, knowing from their own experience that if an application was too long or complicated for a small amount of money, it wouldn’t seem worth it to an artist or organization who was considering applying.

“I also got very, very lucky in that sense that after a year and a half or two years, Jennifer’s husband landed his dream job in Ohio and they were set to move and I was fortunate enough to hire Shelly Wynecoop, who is our current grants administrator,” Huggins said. “She was able to take the strong foundation that Jennifer had built and really take it to the next level.”

Huggins is also proud that Spokane Arts’ mission revolves around celebrating and uplifting everyone in the cultural community via grant making, professional development and advocating for the arts at the city and state level.

“If she didn’t work for Spokane Arts, I think she still would be that sort of art supporter for music and visual artists and other art and cultural things that are happening because she’s a super fan that is involved in creative work closely enough,” Maloney said. “She gets it and does it. She sees it all at work. She understands the work that goes into it, paying people for their work, advocating for their support and celebrating their accomplishments.

That’s really important.”

Growing up in Spokane, Huggins has seen the city evolve from a place many thought they’d have to leave if they wanted to pursue a creative career or hobby to one in which its art community has become a point of pride.

While the pandemic has put much of that community on hold, Huggins hopes that when things return to normal, people will have a greater appreciation for art after reading books, watching movies, and listening to music and podcasts while quarantined at home.

“I hope they realize how significant arts and culture are to their everyday lives, aesthetically, emotionally, intellectually,” she said. “Arts and culture is woven into everything we are as humans and I hope people come out of the pandemic recognizing that.”

Huggins also envisions a future for the Spokane art community which is equitable and accessible. Huggins cites the Spokane Theatre Arts Council’s work to bring equity to the stage and accessibility goals like free passes for events available at libraries, free transportation to and from cultural events, and ASL interpreters.

“One thing that I know about the arts community in Spokane is how resilient and resourceful and creative they are...” she said. “This community has already demonstrated how they will come up with creative solutions and pivot, and I’ve been marveling at their resourcefulness and how our community has responded.”

Azaria Podplesky can be reached at (509) 459-5024 or azariap@spokesman.com

Special Section

September 20, 2020 • Sunday • T11

INLAND NORTHWEST WOMEN OF THE YEAR

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Woman who co-founded Terrain also brought us multi-artist Black Lives Matter mural

EWING STRIVES TO KEEP SPOKANE’S CREATIVE ENERGY ALIVE AND VIBRANT

LIBBY KAMROWSKI/ THE SPOKESMAN-REVIEW

Ginger Ewing, a 2020 Women of the Year honoree, sits for a portrait on Sept. 15 in Spokane. Ewing is thoroughly embedded in the Spokane art scene as co-founder of Terrain and founder of Window Dressing, among other projects in her role as an art educator and coordinator.

By Amy Edelen

“

THE SPOKESMAN-REVIEW

For Ginger Ewing, art is not only expression – it’s about creating a sense of place, sparking conversation and connecting the community.

Ewing is the executive director and co-founder of Terrain, a nonprofit dedicated to creating a vibrant arts community through events and programs.

Ewing founded Window Dressing in 2014, Terrain’s storefront gallery program that fills vacant spaces with art installations. She also serves as a commissioner for Spokane Arts and the Washington State Arts Commission.

Earlier this summer, Ewing collaborated with two local digital design agencies, 14Four and Seven2, and recruited 16 artists of color to create a Black Lives Matter mural in downtown Spokane. Each artist painted a block letter in the mural that shares their voices and stories.

“I would love for Terrain to do more of that. It’s just such an important way to start conversations and to start hard conversations,” Ewing said. “I think that art as a tool – whether it’s for activism or starting important, hard conversations – is really needed and really important. To me, through that process, it was also incredibly important to be able to have those voices be heard and I want more of that. I will fight like tooth and nail for Terrain to be able to do projects like that because they are so vitally important to the health and well-being of citizens in our community.”

Creating a sense of community

Ewing was raised in Cheney and graduated from Whitworth University in 2001. During college, Ewing was set on becoming a forensic anthropologist. But after receiving a certification in forensics, Ewing realized there were only two forensic anthropologists in the state and to remain in the field and in Spokane, she would need to teach at the collegiate level while occasionally picking up work on cases.

That’s when she began thinking about other career paths.

Ewing began volunteering at the Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture and was offered a contract position as curator for cultural literacy in 2007.

“It is through that work that I started to really fall in love with the cre-

I’m seeing a more inclusive community, more indigenous and Black artists – more BIPOC artists in general. You are starting to see that open up in a way that wasn’t as clear at least, for me, 12 years ago.”

Ginger Ewing

Talking about how creative community has changed since starting Terrain

ative community here in town,” Ewing said.

Around that time, Ewing; her husband, Luke Baumgarten; Patrick Kendrick; Sara Hornor; and Mariah McKay all recognized a trend of young and creative people moving away from Spokane, Ewing said.

They formed an organizing committee for what they thought would be a one-night only event, Terrain, to showcase local artists’ work and foster a sense of collaboration and community.

Terrain has since evolved into a nonprofit organization that hosts events and programs. The organization also operates a permanent gallery and From Here, a storefront that acts as an incubator space for artists to test ideas and sell goods in River Park Square.

Since launching Terrain, Ewing has noticed an increase in collaborations among artists and more spaces dedicated to the creative community.

“I’m seeing a more inclusive community, more indigenous and Black artists – more BIPOC artists in general,” she said. “You are starting to see that open up in a way that wasn’t as clear, at least for me, 12 years ago.

Another really interesting thing that’s taking place is people are choosing to stay here because they feel there’s a creative community they can belong

to.”

Coronavirus and the arts

As the coronavirus pandemic has forced events to shut down and venues to close, it’s had a devastating impact on Terrain and local artists, Ewing said, adding the organization is expected to lose $326,000 this year due to COVID-19.

Terrain’s annual flagship event typically draws 10,000 to 13,000 people in a single evening and last year, the organization generated $532,000 to support artists, she said.

Terrain is balancing how to remain afloat while finding ways to support artists amid coronavirus-related restrictions, Ewing added. It’s continued to operate, hosting online gallery shows, events and art auctions.

“We had people from across the nation purchase artwork (in the online art auction), so a silver lining in all of this is that our local artists are being exposed to a wider audience because now we are online,” Ewing said.

Terrain also built a website for its retail store From Here. It took nearly six weeks to photograph inventory and create an online system for the store, Ewing said.

The organization reopened its gallery space this past month with very limited access, allowing 15 people in

the space at a time.

Ewing works closely with Terrain’s operations director Jackie Caro on day-to-day operations of Terrain that include fundraising, evaluating existing programs and launching new programs and plugging into what’s happening in the community.

Ewing also participates in several Zoom calls, some of which involve discussing statewide policies affecting artists, and serves as a mentor to emerging artists wanting to start programs.

Ewing aims to continue advocacy work for mixed use space, affordable housing and studio space for artists to support Spokane’s creative community.

“Art and creativity are at the heart of who we are as a community … I think art is a lens to see the world through somebody else’s perspective. It helps us connect with each other on a visceral, spiritual level and I am witness to that on almost a daily basis. I certainly could have chose a much easier field to dedicate myself to but again (art) just makes me whole. It makes us whole and I can’t step away from that.

I just really believe in the transformational power of it.”

Amy Edelen can be reached at (509) 459-5581 or at amye@spokesman.com.

T12 • Sunday • September 20, 2020

Special Section

INLAND NORTHWEST WOMEN OF THE YEAR

Brought to you by

Masking advocate looks beyond politics in quest to protect community from coronavirus

NELSON STANDS UP FOR PUBLIC HEALTH INTERESTS ON PANHANDLE BOARD OF HEALTH

PHOTOS BY COLIN MULVANY/THE SPOKESMAN-REVIEW

Woman of the Year Jai Nelson is a member of the Panhandle Heath District Board.

By Carolyn Lamberson THE SPOKESMAN-REVIEW

When Jai Nelson joined the Panhandle Health District Board of Health in 2011, she brought with her an interesting résumé.

She was in the first year of her term as a Kootenai County commissioner. She was a single mom and also a small-business owner, having run her own interior design firm for more than 15 years.

But since 2005, she also has been a registered nurse, specializing in cardiovascular care, making her the second practicing medical professional on the board, along with Dr. Richard McLandress.

Lora Whalen, a former Army nurse who has served as the health district’s director since 2010, said having a board member with Nelson’s varied background has been a real benefit.

“She has a great business acumen from a county commissioner standpoint,” Whalen said. “She clearly understands budgets and ... she has a heart for public health and the things we do. She’s fiscally conservative and she holds us accountable.”

And in the ensuing nine years of her membership on the board, she and her fellow board members, which include representatives from Kootenai, Bonner, Boundary, Benewah and Shoshone counties, never saw anything like the novel coronavirus that has infected nearly 7 million American and killed more than 200,000.

Nelson said she started paying attention to this new virus when there were just a handful of cases in China.

As cases mounted in Kootenai County this spring, and after Gov. Jay Inslee issued a mask mandate for residents of Washington, the Panhandle Health District began contemplating a mask mandate for the most populous county of the five-county district.

The idea was instantly controversial.

The county sheriff announced his deputies would not enforce a mandate. Two board meetings held to discuss the mandate were heavily attended by people opposed to the proposal. Pranksters at one point hacked into the Zoom call, and scribbled “No masks” on the screen.

“I did a lot of research on the efficacy of face coverings and masks,” Nelson said. “I looked at a study in Colorado and why they did a statewide mask mandate.

It was based on two data points. One they had a 20 percent increase in (wearing of ) masks and face coverings with a mandate, which lowered the rates of spread in the areas that had a mask order. Significant to me in looking at those data points was in none of those areas did

“

She’s a strong female. She’s been in government and she understands how it works. She’s responsive. Like many women leaders, she’s a multitasker. She has a lot on her plate and always has.”

Lora Whalen

Fellow Panhandle Health District board member

A former member of the Kootenai County Commission, Jai Nelson bucked her party and faced withering criticism for her vote in support of Kootenai County’s mask mandate.

they have law enforcement.”

After the mandate passed on July 23, the blowback was intense. Angry residents lobbied for Nelson and McLandress to be removed from the board, a move the current Kootenai County Board of Commissioners, which appoints members to the health board, has so far declined to take up. Nelson said she received some threats, but she also received many notes of support and thanks. She shared a letter from one mother who had struggled since March to get her children to wear masks in public. The mandate, she wrote, changed everything.

“Now they are proud to wear their unique masks. You took the burden off of us parents,” the woman wrote. “Now I realize you carry the burden now. Thank you.”

“I’m more than willing to carry that burden,” added Nelson, who now runs an eye care practice with offices in Coeur d’Alene and Spokane Valley. “There’s a reason in health care through the decades that doctors and nurses and health care providers have worn face coverings. ... It’s not only to protect ourselves but to protect our patients.”

As the lone woman on the Board of Health, Whalen said Nelson sets a good example.

“She’s a strong female,” Whalen said.

“She’s been in government and she understands how it works. She’s respon-

sive. Like many women leaders, she’s a multitasker. She has a lot on her plate and always has. ... I like that she is a producer. She gets results.”

Nelson’s path to public health has been winding. Her father, R.G. “Bob” Nelson, was a noted Coeur d’Alene architect who designed both the Coeur d’Alene Resort and the headquarters for Hagadone Hospitality. She followed a similar path. She started out in architectural design, and worked for a couple of firms in Spokane before going to work for her father. She came to realize that she wanted more flexibility in her schedule, so she branched out and started her own interior design firm.

After her son was born, she had an epiphany.

“I wanted to do something more meaningful than the superficiality of interior design,” she said. “Anytime you change careers, its a tremendous challenge, especially as a single mother, and I was general contracting my own home when I started nursing school.

“I thought at the time, ‘How hard can it be?’ It was the most difficult thing I’ve ever done besides raising my son.”

As a Republican who grew up in Coeur d’Alene, Nelson said it’s been dismaying to see masks and public health become political.

“It’s been a distraction, but not a deterrent,” she said, adding that she draws

strength from her Christian faith and memories of her grandmother, who immigrated from Sweden, by herself, at 18.

As a public health district, “We’re mandated by Idaho statute to do all things.

It’s very broad powers for the preservation and protection of public health. And I think the most important thing it to be proactive. And is see this nation being reactive and chasing this virus instead of getting ahead of it. ... I wanted to protect the citizens of Kootenai County. This is my hometown.”

Whalen said she has been “surprised and saddened” by the chasm that has developed over coronavirus and masking.

“There is no gray,” she said. “Communication has been difficult because there is no give and take. If you’re pro-masking or anti-masking, you can’t have a conversation because everyone is angry. It makes me sad that people would threaten someone who looked at the data and did research and is following the science.

It’s not pleasant, and it would upset anybody.”

Nelson’s term on the Board of Health is up in June. While the distraction of this summer has been a challenge, she would be honored to be appointed to another term.

“I try to be true to myself and to my community in all my decisions,” Nelson said. “It’s been a journey, and we’re still on this journey.”

Reach the writer at carolynl@spokesman. com or (509) 459-5068.

Special Section

September 20, 2020 • Sunday • T13

WOMEN’S SUFFRAGE

By Charles Apple | THE SPOKESMAN-REVIEW

The 19th Amendment, guaranteeing women the right to vote, was ratified a century ago last month. However, before 1920, women had already won the right to vote in 15 states, including Idaho, Washington and Montana.

Here’s how women’s suffrage fared at the state level before the Constitution was amended: State ballot measures for women’s suffrage before ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920: RESULT

1867

Kansas

1871

Nebraska

1874

Michigan

1875

Minnesota1

1877

Minnesota2

1877

Colorado

1882

Nebraska

1884

Oregon

1886

Wisconsin1

1887

Rhode Island

1889

Washington

1889

Wyoming

1890

South Dakota

1893

Colorado

1894

South Dakota1

1894

Kansas

1895

Massachusetts2

1895

Utah

1896

California

1896

Idaho

1897

New Jersey1

1898

Minnesota1

1898

South Dakota

1898

Washington

1900

Oregon

1903

New Hampshire

1906

Oregon

1908

Oregon

1910

Oklahoma

1910

Oregon

1910

South Dakota

1910

Washington

1911

California

1912

Arizona

1912

Kansas

1912

Michigan

1912

Ohio

1912

Oregon

1912

Wisconsin

1913

Michigan

1914

Missouri

1914

Montana

1914

Nebraska

1914

Nevada

1914

North Dakota

1914

Ohio

1914

South Dakota

1915

Massachusetts

1915

New Jersey

1915

New York

1915

Pennsylvania

1916

Iowa

1916

South Dakota

1916

West Virginia

1917

Ohio3

1917

Maine

1917

New York

1918

Louisiana

1918

Michigan

1918

Oklahoma

1918

South Dakota

1919

Texas

✗ ✗ ✗ ✓ ✗ ✗ ✗ ✗ ✗ ✗ ✗ ✓ ✗ ✓ ✗ ✗ ✗ ✓ ✗ ✓ ✗ ✓ ✗ ✗ ✗ ✗ ✗ ✗ ✗ ✗ ✗ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✗ ✗ ✓ ✗ ✗ ✗ ✓ ✗ ✓ ✗ ✗ ✗ ✗ ✗ ✗ ✗ ✗ ✗ ✗ ✗ ✗ ✓ ✗ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✗

Suffrage at the state level became somewhat of a moot point when Congress passed the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution on May 21, 1919. At that point, efforts by sufferage activists changed from amending state constitutions to winning ratification for what some were called in the Susan B. Anthony amendment.

How states in the Pacific Northwest voted for women’s sufferage 1884 Oregon Suffrage Amendment

✗

1889 Washington Suffrage Amendment

✗

11,223 (28.49%) YES NO

28,176 (71.51%)

The Washington territory had come within one vote of granting women the right to vote in 1854.

In 1869, sisters Mary and Emily Olney attempted to cast votes in White River — much as Susan B. Anthony would do three years later in New York. Emily Olney would organize a group of women and try it again in Grand Mound in 1870.

In 1871, Anthony and Abigail Scott Duniway traveled to Washington to help organize a state suffrage association. This would pay off in 1883, when a bill passed the Territorial Legislature granting full voting rights to women. This lasted only four years before the Territorial Supreme Court overturned the law. The legislature tried it again in 1888 with the same result the following year.

16,613 (31.86%) YES NO 1896 Idaho Suffrage Amendment

✓

35,527 (68.14%)

By 1896, though, the political stars aligned to bring women’s suffrage on the same ballot as Republican presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan, who favored changing the nation’s money policies to favor the silver industry. This guaranteed a huge turnout in Idaho.

The effort in Idaho to extend the vote to women started as early as 1870 when a bill to do so failed to pass the territorial legislature on a tie vote. Idaho became a state in 1890, but efforts to write women’s sufferage into the new state constitution also failed.

12,126 (65.87%) 1898 Washington Suffrage Amendment

✗

The measure passed by a huge margin, but less than 20,000 men voted on the suffrage amendment — while about 30,000 had voted in the presidential race. This raised questions about the validity of the vote. The state Supreme Court ruled the vote would stand.

YES NO

Near the turn of the century, suffrage proponents made another run at it. This time, the legislature passed the bill with a two-thirds vote but as it was handed to the governor for his signature, one senator noticed that the paperwork had been switched with a dummy document.

So, why had Washington had such seesaw results in the effort for women’s suffrage? Part of the reason was the region’s liquor and gambling industry. Many women in Washington opposed alcohol and gambling, so leaders of those industries developed powerful lobbying efforts against suffrage and against even allowing women to serve on juries.

15,986 (32.08%) YES NO

1910 Oregon Suffrage Amendment

✗ ✗ ✗ ✗

1910 Washington Suffrage Amendment

✓

1900 Oregon Suffrage Amendment 1906 Oregon Suffrage Amendment 1908 Oregon Suffrage Amendment

36,858 (38.58%) 35,270 (37.39%)

47,075 (56.06%)

YES NO

58,670 (61.42%)

YES NO

59,065 (62.61%)

YES NO

The National American Women’s Suffrage Association held its annual convention in Seattle during the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition in that same city in 1909. Women pushed their agenda, sold cookbooks, posted banners — at one point, Hutton delivered 80 cherry pies to an encampment of Civil War veterans to help win their support.

52,299 (63.80%) 1912 Oregon Suffrage Amendment 1914 Montana Suffrage Amendment

Wash.

States Mont. where Ore. Idaho women Wyo. had full voting Utah Colo. rights Calif. before Ariz. passage of the 19th Amendment

✓ ✓ S.D.

Sources: Ballotpedia, Washington Secretary of State, Crosscut.com, Idaho Women in Leadership, Idaho Public TV, “Suffrage: Women’s Long Battle for the Vote” by Ellen Carol DuBois

Kan. Okla.

The correct bill was located, the governor signed it and the proposed state amendment was once again put before the state’s voters ... who once again overwhelmingly voted it down.

28,402 (51.96%)

YES NO

In 1906, proponents of women’s sufferage tried once again to win the right for women to vote in Washington. This effort was led by Oregon activist Emmy Smith DeVoe and May Arkwright Hutton of Idaho: A former cook who had struck it rich by investing in an Idaho mine and then became a labor activist in Eastern Washington.

6,282 (34.13%)

33,850 (67.92%)

26,255 (48.04%) 36,902 (43.94%)

Washington became a state in 1889. An effort to amend the state constitution to guarantee women the right to vote was soundly defeated.

YES NO

Another suffrage amendment was introduced in the state legislature. Again, it passed both chambers and was signed by the governor. This time, voters approved giving women the right to vote in Washington.

29.676 (36.20%)

61,265 (51.76%)

YES NO

57,104 (48.24%)

41,302 (52.35%)

YES NO

37,588 (47.65%)

Mich.

N.Y.

On Aug. 18, 2020, Tennessee became the 36th state to ratify the amendment.

Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby certified that ratification eight days later.

While women had finally won the right to vote, voting in the United States still wasn’t universal. Native Americans became U.S. citizens with the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924. The last state to allow Native Americans to vote did so in 1962. And while Blacks had been guaranteed the right to vote by the 15th Amendment in 1870, many were still disenfranchised until passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965.

NOTES: 1 Suffrage only in school affairs and/or library measures 2 Suffrage only in local option elections or referendums 3 Referendum on women’s suffrage for presidential elections only

T14 • Sunday • September 20, 2020

Special Section

INLAND NORTHWEST WOMEN OF THE YEAR

Brought to you by

LEGACY: HONORING FIVE SPOKANE-AREA WOMEN FOR THEIR HISTORY OF COMMUNITY SERVICE AND GOOD WORKS TO THE BENEFIT OF OTHERS

From the Valley’s incorporation 17 years ago, her leadership has been wide-ranging

WILHITE AN INFLUENTIAL FORCE IN SPOKANE VALLEY POLITICS AND BUSINESS

PHOTOS BY JESSE TINSLEY/THE SPOKESMAN-REVIEW

Diana Wilhite, seen on Sept. 11, works as a consultant helping clients manage their money. She has been the mayor of Spokane Valley and served on the first City Council after the city was incorporated in 2003.

By Rebecca White

THE SPOKESMAN-REVIEW

When Spokane Valley first incorporated in 2003, and dozens of candidates for the first city council came forward, Diana Wilhite noticed a troubling trend: No women declared they would run.

While Wilhite had been a fixture in Spokane Valley politics for decades and had worked for elected officials for longer, her work had always been contained to positions within the Republican Party, or managing other candidates’ campaigns. Fearing the fledgling city could end up being governed by a council of seven men, Wilhite filed to run a day before the deadline. She said she remembered telling her husband about her concerns, and he challenged her to act on them.

“I said to my husband, ‘I know some of the guys who are going to run, but no women are going to run. We need a diverse council,’ ” she recalled. “He looked at me and said, ‘What are you going to do about it?’ ” According to The Spokesman-Review archives, she was the only female candidate out of 27 people the day she filed. When the deadline passed, four of the 49 candidates were women.

In the 17 years since her first run for office, the number of women to sit on the Spokane Valley City Council has grown substantially, and so have Wilhite’s own ambitions. She served a couple of years as Spokane Valley mayor, and sat on the council until 2009, after losing a race for re-election. She later ran against Rep. Matt Shea the first time he ran for office, and against Rep. Bob McCaslin, Jr. She lost both races and has since focused on mentoring other young leaders in both politics and business, and her own consulting business.

She said her love of politics, people and the political process was instilled into her far before she arrived in Spokane Valley.

Wilhite grew up in Cambridge, Idaho, working in her parents’ lumberyard. Her parents voted and encouraged her to do the same, and her mother urged her to get the education she never had the chance to pursue.

Wilhite met her husband, Rick, while they were in college at University of Idaho. After they married and he joined the Navy, they traveled the country together for his career.

Her college degree stretched over 10 schools, and she eventually completed a degree in history at the University of Maryland.

She said her love of American his-

“

I said to my husband, ‘I know some of the guys who are going to run, but no women are going to run, we need a diverse council,”’ she recalled. “He looked at me and said, ‘What are you going to do about it?’ ” Diana Wilhite

Longtime Spokane Valley City Councilmember

Wilhite was chosen for the Women of the Year series for 2020 because of her lasting legacy in the region. tory and government inspired her to seek work on Capitol Hill, which was challenging at first. As an outsider, she struggled to find employment and worked as a temporary employee until she was hired to work in the office of Robert A Roe, a newly elected congressman from New Jersey who won a seat in the U.S House of Representatives in 1969.

With the help of more senior workers in the office who were willing to take her under their wing, Wilhite said she soaked in the experience, which helped her gain the insight and political savvy she needed to assist other campaigns and elected officials in the future.

Her stint in Washington, D.C., only lasted two years, and her family continued moving around the country for her husband’s career in the Navy, and later public relations. She tried to work at satellite congressional offices, but eventually had to take a job as a high school history teacher. She stayed involved in local Republican politics wherever the family ended up moving.

She said gender defined many of the challenges she faced in both business and politics, so she sought out mentors and supporting positions in politics to prepare her for leadership.

“Though the men were in control, I listened to what was going on,” she

said.

After a decade of moving around the country, the Wilhites moved to the Spokane area to be closer to family. They could have ended up in the city of Spokane, but ultimately chose Spokane Valley because of the available child care.

She said politics was a way to connect with the community. She has been a Republican precinct committee officer since she moved to the area, and served in the leadership of both the Spokane County Republican Party and more recently the Republicans of Spokane County organization, club, which consists of a group of more moderate Republicans.

Wilhite said she’s now focusing her political energy on mentoring the next generation of leaders. Last year, Wilhite was campaign manager for Brandi Peetz, who won re-election and is now deputy mayor, and she has sat down with current Mayor Ben Wick to offer advice.

“We need to give the younger generation the chance to step up to the plate and lead,” she said.

These days, she also has been more focused on her business. Wilhite and her husband previously owned a business, Safeguard Business Systems, that helped other businesses with financial forms, but they sold it in 2011.

She now owns a business called Re-

tirement Nationwide, helping people plan for their retirement. Wilhite is also chair of the Board of Directors for Vera Water and Power, which provides services for much of Spokane Valley.

Wilhite also has been involved in the business community and has mentored many women business owners through the National Association of Women Business Owners’ Inland Northwest chapter, which she founded. Wilhite, who served as the first president of the organization, has spent years connecting women-owned businesses, and has done training to teach women business owners how to get a loan, how to advertise and other skills needed to make a business successful.

Wilhite has received leadership or advocacy awards from the Small Business Administration and the Greater Spokane Valley Chamber of Commerce.

She said in her career, she’s tried to do what she can to help women find opportunities in business and politics, and make sure their perspective is included.

“I always felt it was important for women’s voices to be heard,” she said.

Rebecca White can be reached at (509) 459-5039 or rebeccawh@ spokesman.com

Special Section

September 20, 2020 • Sunday • T15

INLAND NORTHWEST WOMEN OF THE YEAR

Brought to you by

LEGACY: HONORING FIVE SPOKANE-AREA WOMEN FOR THEIR HISTORY OF COMMUNITY SERVICE AND GOOD WORKS TO THE BENEFIT OF OTHERS

Educator, small business owner picks up the PACE in Spokane Valley and the West Plains

EVANS’ WORK BEHIND THE SCENES REVEALS GOOD CHARACTER

TYLER TJOMSLAND/THE SPOKESMAN-REVIEW

Legacy Woman of the Year and PACE board member Brandie Evans is seen Sept. 15 in Liberty Lake.

By Julia Ditto

FOR THE SPOKESMAN-REVIEW

She’s nothing special. To hear Brandie Evans tell it, she’s just a regular person with some run-of-themill skills that she’s happy to put to use when she sees a need arise. A little organizing here, a little note-taking there – it’s really not a big deal, she insists. And yet, if you talk to her colleagues at Partners Advancing Character Education in Spokane Valley and the West Plains, she’s an indispensable force for good.

“I think a lot of the success of the PACE organization can be in large part attributed to the work she’s done,” said Cheri Hollenback, who has served on the PACE Board of Directors with Evans since 2017 and nominated her for The Spokesman-Review’s Women of the Year recognition. Her work has helped “grow the organization from a grassroots partnership to a 100-plus consortium of businesses, schools and faith communities working to promote character in young people.”

PACE began in 2009 in Spokane Valley as a way to promote the importance of good character in schools, businesses, and other community or-

ganizations. Each month, PACE features a character “trait of the month” on which schools and organizations throughout the community can focus.

Respect, responsibility, citizenship, fairness, diligence, gratitude, and many more character traits all get their due. Students at PACE-participating schools who exemplify specific character traits are recognized on a monthly basis, and one PACE Student of the Year is chosen from each school at the end of the school year to be recognized at an awards ceremony.

For Evans, being involved with the PACE program was a fit right from the start. As a former middle school science teacher and a small business owner (she and her husband, Jared, own KiDDS Dental in Liberty Lake), “it was an intersection of my (training) as an educator and my role in the community as a business owner,” says Evans.

Since joining the board as a founding member of PACE in 2009, Evans has volunteered on various committees for the organization, doing everything from marketing, to helping with teacher workshops, to assisting in putting on the annual PACE Awards. Since 2011, she has served as

PACE secretary, a behind-the-scenes job that has demanded thousands of hours of work over the past nine years.

“I actually don’t like being in the spotlight,” Evans said, laughing. “I’m not in the schools. I’m not where [the recognition of students) happens. I’m on the back end, organizing meetings and taking notes and storing documents, so I’m not at the front lines where the educators are, where they’re seeing the fruits of the program.”

But that’s where she insists she shines.

“Citizenship is important to me, and I’m not in a position to do anything big, but I can work in my community, I can work in my family,” said Evans, a mother of four. “There are many ways to serve, and I’m fortunate to have found an organization that can benefit from my interests and abilities.”

While she’s modest about the contributions she’s made to the success of the PACE program, her tireless work has paid off for countless students throughout Spokane Valley and the West Plains, where the two PACE chapters exist.

“We’ve had a lot of different kinds

“

of PACE winners over the years: outgoing leaders, quiet observers, and everything in between,” said Lindsay Kent, principal of Greenacres Elementary School in Spokane Valley. “In every case, being recognized for their character has been a confidence-boosting, motivating experience.”

“It’s good to be involved in an organization that recognizes children who might not get recognized for their academics or for sports or for talent in some sort of art,” says Evans.

“It’s rewarding to recognize kids for their character.”

And that sentiment is exactly why she was nominated for the Woman of the Year recognition, says Hollenback.

“It’s not something she would ever seek out on her own,” Hollenback says. “She herself is a person of great moral character and has a very strong value system, and recognizes that that’s a critical component for our community. She’s just a bright, shining example of an engaged community member that really helps make things better.”

Reach the writer at dittojulia@ gmail.com

“She herself is a person of great moral character and has a very strong value system, and recognizes that that’s a critical component for our community. She’s just a bright, shining example of an engaged community member that really helps make things better.”

Cheri Hollenback

PACE board member, talking about colleague Brandie Evans

T16 • Sunday • September 20, 2020

Special Section

INLAND NORTHWEST WOMEN OF THE YEAR

Brought to you by

LEGACY: HONORING FIVE SPOKANE-AREA WOMEN FOR THEIR HISTORY OF COMMUNITY SERVICE AND GOOD WORKS TO THE BENEFIT OF OTHERS

After returning, Pacific Northwest native poured her energy into Spokane for 50-plus years

JOHNSON LEFT HER MARK ON COMMUNITY COLLEGES OF SPOKANE, EXPO ’74 AND THE MAC

COLIN MULVANY/THE SPOKESMAN-REVIEW

Jane Johnson, being honored as a Legacy Woman of the Year, was one of the first women to become a community college representative and the first from the West Coast to chair the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education, an international organization dedicated to supporting colleges and universities.

By Azaria Podplesky

“

THE SPOKESMAN-REVIEW

If you attended a community college in Spokane, you have, in part, Jane Johnson to thank. If you attended Expo ’74 or benefit from the event’s lasting impact, you have, in part, Jane Johnson to thank. If you’ve visited the Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture at its current location on First Avenue, you have, in part, Jane Johnson to thank.

Johnson grew up in the Pacific Northwest and attended high school in Sandpoint, but her impact on Spokane began practically without her knowing it, when she was living in Scottsdale, Arizona, with her husband and two daughters.

Johnson’s mother, after hearing about the creation of the community college system, marched into the office of then-Spokane Community College president Walter Johnson (no relation) and said, “I think you need to meet my daughter.”

The younger Johnson had graduated from Arizona State University with a degree in communications, with an emphasis in broadcasting. She then earned a master of arts in communications from UCLA. “She was my agent,” Johnson said with a laugh. “When she read about the community college starting up as a comprehensive institution, the merger of the technical/vocational and the academic side of the educational system, she thought, ‘That’s something I think my daughter might be able to do.’ ” Johnson interviewed for the position during a trip to Spokane to escape the Arizona summer, then went back home. She was offered the position in early August and started at the college when it opened its doors in 1963.

“I feel like sort of a pioneer,” Johnson said.

Johnson created the speech program and worked as a speech instructor before moving into administration in 1967 as head of the communications and development program.

In 1972, she helped for found the Community Colleges of Spokane Foundation, and after several years with the Community Colleges of Spokane, Expo ’74 came knocking. Or

Of course, there were lots and lots of challenges along the way. Sometimes when you look back on it, you wonder that we were ever able to pull it off.”

Jane Johnson

Speaking on communications and publicity work

rather, the board of Spokane Unlimited, which was tasked with determining how feasible the event would be.

Johnson took a one-and-a-half-year leave from the Community Colleges of Spokane and worked on communications, publicity and events. She traveled with gymnasts and basketball teams from the Soviet Union and U.S., building excitement for what was happening at the world’s fair.

“Of course, there were lots and lots of challenges along the way,” Johnson said, ticking off things like start-up costs, gathering community support and battling negative press, primarily from East Coast outlets. “Sometimes when you look back on it, you wonder that we were ever able to pull it off.”

After Expo ’74, Johnson returned to the Community Colleges of Spokane, where she worked in total for 25 years. “(Community Colleges of Spokane is) going to celebrate 50 years in 2022, and as of the end of our fiscal year for 2019, because of what she started, we’ve given almost $19 million in support to students,” said Heather Beebe-Smith, executive director of the Community Colleges of Spokane Foundation. “She did so much to establish the foundation as a trusted place for the community to invest

in the future of the community. She wants to create pathways for community members to give back 50 years from now. Yes, for right now, but also 50 years.”

After her time with CCS, Johnson worked at Eastern Washington University as the vice president for university advancement. A decade later, Johnson retired, though that only lasted for about six months before she joined with the Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture, helping raise funds for a new facility.

“I have loved every moment of my career,” Johnson said. “I feel so lucky to look back on the years, and there are a lot of years to look back on. I really had a great career. Whatever assignment I had, I was working with a tremendous bunch of professionals.

Wherever I went, it was really a team effort, and I’m very grateful for the tremendous career I had. I had a great family that was supportive, and I’m thankful for God everyday for the absolutely fabulous time I had over the many years.”

Johnson is proud of the work she’s done over the years, and is especially proud of all the students whose lives were improved by their time in community college, but she is now officially

retired and is enjoying spending time with her family, which now includes grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

But Johnson’s impact on Spokane will last, as Beebe-Smith said, for years to come. Not just at home, but nationally. Beebe-Smith pointed to Johnson’s role with Council for the Advancement and Support of Education, an international organization dedicated to supporting colleges and universities. Not only was Johnson one of the first women to chair the organization, she was among the first community college representatives and one of the first from the West Coast to lead the group.

“She’s a really, really cool person who’s worth emulating and who has given so much, yes, to Spokane, but also to our state and clearly through her service with CASE, to national and now international higher education advancement,” Beebe-Smith said.

“She’s one of those people that her name is not going to show up in history books, but she’s one of the ones who creates history.”

Azaria Podplesky can be reached at (509) 459-5024 or azariap@ spokesman.com

Special Section

September 20, 2020 • Sunday • T17

INLAND NORTHWEST WOMEN OF THE YEAR

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LEGACY: HONORING FIVE SPOKANE-AREA WOMEN FOR THEIR HISTORY OF COMMUNITY SERVICE AND GOOD WORKS TO THE BENEFIT OF OTHERS

A challenging, rewarding life centered around her love of nature and need to nurture

SCHULTZ DIGS DEEP INTO SCIENCE, EDUCATION, BUSINESS AND PHILANTHROPY

PHOTOS BY TYLER TJOMSLAND/THE SPOKESMAN-REVIEW

Legacy Woman of the Year Debra Schultz is seen Sept. 11 at Manito Park. “Spokane is a community where it’s very easy to be involved,” she says.

By Nina Culver

FOR THE SPOKESMAN-REVIEW

Debra Schultz has never been one to be idle. She was one of the first women to be a soil scientist in the state of Michigan. She spent 20 years teaching middle school in Spokane Public Schools. She’s served on district and state curriculum development and assessment committees.

And she also co-founded the Inland Northwest Land Trust, now called the Inland Northwest Land Conservancy.

“You give back to the community that you live in,” she said. “Spokane is a community where it’s very easy to be involved. It’s easy to feel like we can make a difference.”

Schultz grew up in a cooperative community outside of Chicago. Her parents, who were social justiceoriented, taught her the importance of education and being involved in her community. “My parents were very progressive people,” she said.

“They were union organizers and very much of the belief that all people have the opportunities to support their family and have a job.”

When she first went to Grand Valley State College in Michigan, she was considering a career in geology.

But one of her professors was a soil scientist, and she began to consider that as an option. She loved being outdoors and was also interested in agriculture. “I was very much involved in the early environmental movement,” she said. “Soil combined all of my interests.”

Her professor would become a mentor and helped her find a job mapping soils in Michigan with the USDA after she graduated. She was one of two women who were the first in the field in the area. There were some difficulties at first, including the fact that her colleagues always seemed to expect her to make the coffee. She would reply, honestly, that she didn’t drink coffee and was fine without it.

“That was the culture,” she said.

“I had a great boss. That makes a big difference. I was tough. I was having a good time. We were doing really good work that had meaning.”

There were always people who

“

If there’s a way I can run interference, because of my age and experience, I will run interference. I’ve always been someone who is willing to fight a fight if I see something wrong.”

Debra Schultz

Legacy Woman of the Year

Since retirement, Schultz has joined the boards of the MAC, YWCA and the Johnston-Fix Foundation.

supported and encouraged her, something she has tried to do for others during her career. She also worked in Colorado and Wyoming mapping soils and doing consulting before she signed up for graduate school at Cornell University to study in the geomorphology program.

But then she heard about the environmental resource management program at Washington State University and decided to apply there.

When she arrived, she was thrilled to see the rolling hills of the Palouse.

“This is one of the most unique landscapes in the United States,” she said.

She was also impressed with WSU .

“It was a forward-thinking program,” she said. “The people involved in that program were big thinkers.”

It was here that her life took a turn. She had always been involved in dancing. She did folk dancing and contra dancing, and taught swing and basic ballroom dancing. She met Penn Fix, who would become her husband, at a dance in Moscow, Idaho.

After graduating from WSU in 1985, she took a six-month consulting

position in Massachusetts, but came back to the Northwest because of Fix. “I had several job offers at that point that were not in Spokane,” she said.

“I really wasn’t interested in traveling anymore. I didn’t want to be one the road.”

She went back to school and earned a teaching certificate from Gonzaga University. She hired on with Spokane Public Schools, then called District 81, as a middle school teacher.

“I actually found great joy in teaching middle school,” she said. “Kids in their middle school years are in transition times.”

She made good use of her scientific background while working in the district. She developed a curriculum to study the Latah Creek watershed, for which she won a national award for environmental education. She was also the science department coordinator.

In 2008, she left education. She and her husband took over Dodson’s Jewelry when her brother-in-law retired. The couple ran the business for 10 years before retiring and closing

the business in 2018.

Schultz has not let retirement slow her down. She is president of the Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture board of trustees. She’s also on the board of the YWCA and the Johnston-Fix Foundation, which supports local arts, education and the environment.

But Schultz said she doesn’t see herself as a leader or a role model.

“I would classify myself as an includer,” she said. “I don’t necessarily want to be in the spotlight. I see myself as an encourager.”

While her goal is to nurture people to do their best, she’s also not afraid to speak up when necessary. She said that she tries to live by the words of the late civil rights icon John Lewis, who advocated causing “good trouble” as a way to bring about change.

“If there’s a way I can run interference, because of my age and experience, I will run interference,” she said. “I’ve always been someone who is willing to fight a fight if I see something wrong.”

Reach the writer at nculver47@ gmail.com

T18 • Sunday • September 20, 2020

Special Section

INLAND NORTHWEST WOMEN OF THE YEAR

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IN MEMORIAM

LEGACY: HONORING FIVE SPOKANE-AREA WOMEN FOR THEIR HISTORY OF COMMUNITY SERVICE AND GOOD WORKS TO THE BENEFIT OF OTHERS

Gone too soon at 63, she was a quiet leader whose impact was significant and meaningful

VAN STONE MADE THOUSANDS OF AREA FAMILIES’ LIVES BETTER THROUGH CATHOLIC CHARITIES

COURTESY PHOTOS

Nadine Van Stone, left, is seen with Donna Hanson, former director of Catholic Charities. Van Stone, who recently passed away, is a 2020 Legacy Woman of the Year.

By Dan Thompson

THE SPOKESMAN-REVIEW

For more than two decades, Nadine Van Stone helped serve nearly 4,000 families through Catholic Charities Eastern Washington.

She helped open St. Margaret’s shelter in 2000, and then started CCEW’s Rising Strong program 16 years later. Through both organizations, Van Stone helped families in crisis access housing and other community services.

In all those pursuits, Van Stone, who died Sept. 9 at 63, led quietly, her sister Jody Nelson said, with an instinct for knowing what people needed.

For all that she poured into her work, she was most at home in her garden or on the family farm in Medical Lake, where Van Stone, Nelson and their four sisters grew up. “(As children) we had little rows we could hoe,” Nelson said. “Nadine was more the helper. She was often my dad’s outdoor go-to person.

When the cows were born, she was out there with Dad.” “Farming carried with her, her whole life,” Nelson said.

As the middle daughters, Nelson said she and Van Stone, who was two years older, were particularly close.

After high school they hitchhiked from Spokane to New York, and then went their separate directions – Van Stone to San Francisco, Nelson to Texas – for a time until both returned to Spokane.

“We had a certain role as connectors between the olders and littlers,” Nelson said of her sisters’ birth order. “I always admired her.”

When Van Stone joined Catholic Charities in 1999, she started designing the new St. Margaret’s facility for the homeless women and children who would live there. She received numerous awards for her work, including the Donna Hanson Award, named after a former director of

“

I’ve always felt called to use my talents to make the world a fairer place for those who had less access to the things they needed to have a better life.”

Nadine Van Stone In her eulogy recording

Van Stone, who died on Sept. 9, is a Legacy Woman of the Year.

Catholic Charities in Spokane.

She began more projects there, too, such as The Pearl, which offers used clothing and retail work experience for those in the program; the Food For All Program; and the CCEW Furniture Bank that Nelson said began “as basically a giant ‘free’ box.”

Five years ago, Van Stone became Vice President of Crisis Response and Stabilization for CCEW and formed the Rising Strong program, which aims to support families with children at risk of entry into foster care, as the families recover from addiction and heal from trauma.

“I’ve always felt called to use my talents to make the world a fairer place for those who had less access to the things they needed to have a better life,” Van Stone said in her eulogy, which she recorded in April. “Everyone has their own calling for work in their life; I can honestly say that

was mine, and I was lucky to find it and be supported in carrying out that work.”

But amid all that, Van Stone always had a passion for food access for all, Nelson said, and that guided many of her efforts. She helped establish the Vinegar Flats Community Garden of St. Margaret’s, as well as the Perry Street Market. After moving to north Spokane, she continued to tend a garden.

“She was kind of an introvert, and it gave her space where she could connect with her thoughts and keep busy and figure things out,” Nelson said. “The garden was her creative space.”

But she wasn’t always alone: Van Stone would welcome others, and she enjoyed helping people learn how to garden and how to preserve food, Nelson said.

“She wanted to serve the most vul-

nerable people, not just in her work life,” Nelson said. “People would come work in her garden just to be around her and visit with her.”

Van Stone was diagnosed with brain cancer in July 2019, and it was “a very heavy diagnosis,” Nelson said.

Since, Van Stone devoted herself to finishing projects that she could and spending time with family, frequently visiting her daughter in Seattle until her deteriorating health kept her at home, Nelson said.

She also wrote poetry and kept a daily journal, a practice Van Stone said was “a culmination of that day, those thoughts, a life lived and loved.”

“Life is precious and no matter how long, not long enough for all the connections one would want,” Van Stone said in her eulogy. “There is too much love to share, too much to think about and see, and too much to write about.”

Special Section

September 20, 2020 • Sunday • T19

INLAND NORTHWEST WOMEN OF THE YEAR

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WOMEN OF THE YEAR: AND THE NOMINEES ARE...

The Spokesman-Review We asked our readers to send us the names of women they would pick as Women of the Year for 2020. And did they deliver! While it was a real challenge to pare down the list to 10 women who accomplished great things in 2020, and five women recognized for years of dedication and hard work, we don’t want to leave anyone out. Below is the list of all the women who were nominated, and the kind words said about them.

Ashley DeMonville

Spokane Falls Community College professor and local theater director Nominated by Kemuel DeMoville As an instructor I have seen Ashley DeMoville work tirelessly to ensure the success of the students in her classes. Ashley is an instructor who genuinely cares about her students, and she takes an enormous amount of pride in their growth and success. Not only does she mentor student performers, designers and technicians in her free time, but she helps to find them employment in the industry. ... Her leadership is also evident in the way she has worked toward inclusion and representation at the Spartan Theatre. Over the past two years Ashley has established a Season Recommendation committee made up of SFCC faculty, students, and community members, and have produced shows by playwrights of color, hired outside directors and designers of color, and has instituted a policy of color/gender blind casting at the Spartan Theatre since she arrived in 2017.

Rebecca Cook

Filmmaker Nominated by Mira Whitehead Rebecca has worked tirelessly to help keep film in Washington. She also works directly in efforts to increase women in film in the INW. She’s astounding and very committed to the INW in general and Arts specifically.

Also nominated by Alena Schoonmaker Rebecca is an incredible part of the film and theater community in Spokane. She is a phenomenal director, actor, and she is the Vice President of the Pacific Northwest IATSE union, President of the Spokane Film Project, and a Spokane rep to Washington Filmworks (always fighting for those working in the arts). Everyone who works on film in Spokane has gotten a chance to experience her generosity in sharing her knowledge and wisdom; I got my start on one of her short films. A local treasure!

TYLER TJOMSLAND/THE SPOKESMAN-REVIEW

Bette Largent is seen in February at the Looff Carrousel in Riverfront Park. She was a Women of the Year nominee.

Amber Hoit

Artist, business owner Nominated by Katie Wilson She’s an amazing artist who did the Angela Davis mural for BLM downtown that was defaced.

It really broke her spirit when that happened. But nevertheless, she still plans to repaint it. And at the height of COVID she started her own business AOD painting. She’s just an all-around lovely human being that’s extremely talented as well and deserves to be recognized.

SPOKESMAN-REVIEW PHOTO ARCHIVE

LaRae Wiley sings and beats the “Horse Song” on her “pumin” (drum) for children and adults at the Fairfield Library in 2011. She is a member of the Colville Confederated Tribe, the executive director of the Salish School of Spokane, and one of only a few speakers of the language. She was a Women of the Year nominee.

Mary Stover

Suicide prevention activist Nominated by Mira Whitehead She founded a Suicide Prevention nonprofit and engages in Suicide Prevention walks and activities all over the INW. She’s amazing.

Kate Burke

Spokane City Council Member Nominated by Eva Silverstone Kate is fearless! She is young but she sets her sights on goals to make Spokane a better place and does not stop until she has found the way to do that. She is also honest and human. She has been forthright and honest about the struggles of being a young woman in politics and that honesty is so welcome and needed if there is hope for change. The old boys club has existed for so long and Kate’s honesty and work is helping open doors for women. I think she’s an inspiration to so many young women. Students could look to her and say, “Yes, I could do that too.” That kind of inspiration is so important to ignite the spark of learning and desire to engage in civic action. I met Kate years ago when she worked at my son’s preschool and was impressed then and am triply impressed now. I don’t think I ever had her kind of courage and I am so pleased to see her go after things that are important to her. ... She is willing to learn on the job and make mistakes and make amends for them. She listens to citizens regardless of their party affiliation or position in life. For these reasons, I think she should be recognized.

Davy Jones

dozens of hours every week with the local Civil Air Patrol cadet program. She is quiet, humble and always there.

Mable Dunbar

COLIN MULVANY/THE SPOKESMAN-REVIEW

Mable Dunbar is the director of the Women’s Healing and Empowerment Network, which was founded in 2008 and provides a place for battered women to recuperate and get back on their feet. She was a Women of the Year nominee.

Artist and activist Nominated by Oscar Parsons Davy Jones is a mixed-race transfeminine artist, activist and educator who moved to the Inland Northwest almost a decade ago and has been tirelessly advocating and fighting for justice here since then. They donate their time and expertise to teach seminars and workshops on critical race, gender, social justice and poetry all over the country and especially the Northwest. They are recognized and known by the arts community here and in many other cities. They are an example of how strong Spokane can be when things get hard.

Volunteer Glenda Mendoza, left, and plant sale coordinator Norma Gavin talk about re-potting thousands of small plants at a Manito Park greenhouse plant sale. Gavin was a Women of the Year nominee.

Laura Steininger, DPT, CAPP-OB

Physical therapist Nominated by Meg Bateman Laura recently took a massive leap and opened her own Pelvic Floor Physical Therapy practice, Inland Pelvic Health & Physical Therapy, in Hayden.

She is extremely passionate about helping women recover from hidden & painful conditions like endometriosis, prolapse, pelvic congestive syndrome, painful bladder syndrome and more.

Conditions that most women suffer from silently, feeling them “too taboo” to speak up and get help for. ... Not only does Laura provide them care with her physical therapy practice, but she goes beyond to provide them with resources for their conditions. Whether it’s giving them a call after hours to check in on them emotionally or letting them know about online resources – she does it because she cares for their mental and emotional health, not just the condition of their pelvic floor.

LaRae Wiley

Martha Domitrivich

Food security activist Nominated by Amanda King One of the most talented women I know.

Started the Supper Club providing low cost meals for families that are delicious while also donating to people in need. Does her own first aid up to and including stitches, used to be a massage therapist, always willing to help people even if she doesn’t know them.

Tana Mae Tenold

Entrepreneur Nominated by Allison Tenold I nominate my mom, Tana Mae Tenold, in recognition of her work and dedication to improve life in the Pacific Northwest. Tana is a leader in business because she is an entrepreneur who gave up her beloved teaching career to start a mortgage company with my dad, and in place of formal training or experience she possessed a powerful drive and devotion to run the company and assist families with the American Dream of homeownership ... We need more people like Tana who are willing to take a chance and who have the grit and determination to be successful. For over 25 years, Tana has helped spread the business to an extensive network of consumers across all of Washington and Idaho. A great leader will discover what they do best and where their weakness lies. While my dad makes the sales and is the face of Jack Tenold LLC (located above Auntie’s Bookstore), Tana applies her organizational and customer-service skills and remarkable work ethic to her roles as marketing manager, production manager, office manager, purchasing agent, art director, receptionist, webmaster, and blogger, to name a few. She is a workhorse, and never takes any credit or receives any accolades.

Shauna Kennedy Carr

Cancer survivor, volunteer Nominated by Kirsten Schierman Shauna has blessed our community in so many ways – turning tragedy into fierce and tenacious proactive action. From beating breast cancer twice, to helping at Race for the Cure, to starting the non-profit Stop the Silence after the tragic murder of her sister, Shauna shines a light around her in every dark corner. She personifies the strength and resiliency we women recognize and dig deep to find when we need it. I nominate her wholeheartedly for this honor and recognition.

Barbara Miller

Silver Valley environmental health advocate Nominated by Betty Hill Barbara Miller has worked to provide data and documentation for the ecological recovery for the Bunker Hill Superfund site she has also worked with nation and international medical professionals to create the Children Run Better Unleaded project. ... Throughout her years of activism Barbara helped to pass legislation for

Founder and President of the Women’s Healing and Empowerment Network Nominated by Shannen Talbot The Women’s Healing and Empowerment Network is a Spokane County nonprofit organization that provides healing and empowerment to individuals, families, homes, churches, schools, and other organizations through education, counseling, healing centers, resources and other support services in the areas of domestic violence, sexual abuse, and related abuse, particularly within the faith community.

WHEN consults with and assists religious and secular organizations in establishing policies and procedures that can help prevent child abuse, protect victims and hold perpetrators accountable for their actions. Mable has a Ph.D. in family mediation, a Master’s in education and counseling psychology, is a certified cognitive behavioral therapist, and clinically certified domestic violence counselor. ... Mable is the heart and soul of WHEN, which operates the only domestic violence shelter on the West Plains, which allows women and their children to stay for six months or more while receiving counseling, therapy, and other resources to help them escape intimate partner violence.

WHEN also operates Cleone’s Closet Food Pantry in Airway Heights, which distributes thousands of pounds of food for families in need each month. For many years, Mable has been the one to respond to crisis phone calls in the middle of the night and helped panicked domestic violence survivors navigate the complex web of resources available to them. She is a compassionate haven for survivors and a galvanizing force for advocates.

JESSE TINSLEY/THE SPOKESMAN-REVIEW Personal Care Services allowing elderly the choice to remain in their own homes vs. costly nursing homes. The Silver Valley is holding on due to the grassroots action of the Silver Valley Community Resource Center the nonprofit organization she help found and the local job hiring for the cleanup jobs which put millions of dollars into the local economy. In 2007 with news from Cd’A tribal members and the Kootenai Environmental Alliance that EPA was planning a toxic waste site at the Old Mission at Cataldo, a National Historic Landmark she set to work gathering facts and informing thousands of affected citizens as well as national groups to oppose the location. ... She is on the board of the Northwest Toxic Community Coalition, Community Action Partnership, the Silver Valley Rock Painting Group and Monarch Butterfly resurgence effort. She attends Mass at St. Rita’s Catholic church in Kellogg.

Julie Garcia

Founder, Jewels Helping Hands Nominated by Barbara Weber Julie ... organizes showers, meals, clean-up of Spokane and connects the houseless to services to help get them off the street. Twice a night she organizes groups to go out and look for individuals and families recently homeless and helps them find shelter. There is a growing need for her services because of COVID-19. Every day she sees more and more individuals who have lost a place to live.

Also nominated by Candace Smallfoot Julie ... is the most giving kindest one of a kind that this community needs to advocate for our homeless in Spokane. She ran the Jewels Helping Hands shelter and when that contract ran out “no problem.” She took it to the streets to help our homeless with endless and innovative outreach.

She not only helps our homeless, she cleans up our community. ... This community is so blessed to have such a positive giving person who is selfless.

Josephine Keefe

Theater artist, founder of the Spokane Theater Arts Council Nominated by Sid Al-Thumali Josephine has consistently been at the forefront of spreading awareness of diversity and inclusion not just within Spokane’s theater community, but to other parts of the community that are marginalized. Josephine was recently diagnosed with COVID-19. Her willingness to share gruesome details about her diagnosis and the aftermath was truly inspirational and fit her mission of developing a better community, especially during a time when the American people consistently underplay the Coronavirus pandemic. Under STAC, she continues to fight for diversity within Spokane’s theater community. ...

She is also a teacher at Gonzaga University and is

admired by all her students. As an alumni I never got the chance to be under her tutelage, however she has mentored and offered me advice as a young and emerging theater artists.

Mariah Rose McKay

Business leader Nominated by Jackie Treiber I admire Mariah because of her commitment to Spokane. She’s a 5th generation Spokanite who has worked hard to build relationships w/local/ small business owners to champion their progress.

She is an endless “connector” who works hard to keep community members interested in activism and more, connected. She is a force of nature who loves this city so much.

Germs

Artist Nominated by Morgan Walters She is an outspoken artist in our community and an artistic leader. Not only has she taught at the Corbin Arts Center, she organized an event called Art on the Go, as well as the Indian Trail Night Market. She continues to inspire and amaze with her watercolor techniques and how much of herself she gives to this community.

Jenni Spedick

Outreach pastor, Sun City Church Nominated by Lola Lile She is so passionate about helping kids and going the extra mile to make sure their needs are met.

Lisa Diffley

Women & Children’s Free Restaurant Nominated by Evelyn Hopkins Lisa’s leadership of the Women & Children’s Free Restaurant and Community Kitchen is very well deserving of this recognition. She led the organization’s ability to dramatically increase the number of meals provided during the pandemic from an average of 7,000 a month to 85,000 in June of 2020. There is so much incredible work to describe that she has accomplished with the organization since becoming Executive Director.

Prior to this she was the ED of the Women Helping Women Fund. She is a long time leader of Spokane’s philanthropic community.

Lisette Alent

Executive director, Inland Northwest Farmers Market Association Nominated by Robert L. Allen As executive director of the Inland Northwest Farmers Market Association, Lisette writes contracts and raises funds for 10 markets and helps keep them operational during these challenging economic times. Previously working for WSU and SCC, she has now secured a total of $40 million to be used to advance food

security and agriculture in the Inland Northwest.

Recently, Lisette secured the local federal U.S. Department of Agriculture contract that has opened the door for 400 food boxes to be delivered to homes weekly by Spokane Food Fighters and Share Farm.

Suzy Dix

Dishman Hills Conservancy, Nature Conservancy Nominated by Allen T. Miller Suzy is a life-long Spokane resident and has been instrumental in creating and expanding the Dishman Hills Natural Area in the heart of Spokane. She has been a board member of the Nature Conservancy and the Dishman Hills Conservancy for many years. Her expertise as a realtor has helped us purchase and conserve acres of property that will enjoyed by the public for recreation and wildlife habitat in perpetuity.

Another reason to honor Suzy Dix as Woman of the Year is her years of philanthropy supporting the Ronald McDonald House with fundraising through the Spokane Polo Club Classic annual event. Through her involvement over $1 million have been raised for Ronald McDonald House.

Laurel D. Hansen

Scientist, science professor Nominated by Diana De Felice Hansen is a world-renowned expert on carpenter ants who has published in science journals and taught at SFCC for over 50 years.

Her research, done in Spokane and all over the Northwest, has benefited people here and around the world, helping to limit damage to homes done by these insects and still respecting the environment.

Michelle Girardot

Chief Executive Officer, Spokane Habitat for Humanity Nominated by Tess Welliver Spokane’s Habitat For Humanity has emerged as a leader in permanent affordable housing, in offering opportunities to low-income people to build wealth for themselves and their kids.

The housing crisis needs to be attacked from a variety of angles – from emergency shelters to home ownership, which in a unique way targets structural/generational poverty. Under Michelle, Habitat has become a top-tier organization working on this issues in Spokane and beyond.

Janeen Graham

Entrepreneur, volunteer Nominated by Donald F. Morgan Janeen may be the busiest woman in America. She is a wife and mother, a nurse, a serial entrepreneur, a critical link in the local homeschooling community, a teacher and a missionary with an annual mission to Haiti. If that isn’t enough, she and her husband Ben volunteer

Educator, founder of the Salish School of Spokane Nominated by Jessika Ladig LaRae is a Native woman who started an entire school to revitalize her language (Salish School Of Spokane). She is like a mother to everyone who works or has children there and is like a grandmother to all of the children. She had a fall about a year and a half ago and still never stopped working hard to preserve her language while still following her doctors recommendations. She is the sweetest person i have ever met. She works tirelessly to preserve her language and culture.

Norma Gavin

Community volunteer Nominated by Susanna Fries At 88 years young, Norma Gavin shows no signs of slowing down from decades of volunteer work and dedication to improve life in the Inland Northwest. She has been an advocate for bridging cultural differences, showcasing the beauty of nature in the area, as well as welcoming/helping all ages and ethnic backgrounds, and she always does it with enthusiasm and a smile. Norma was born and raised in the Philippines and came to the United States through the Exchange-Visitors Program in 1956, eventually making Spokane her home. She always wanted to share and preserve her Filipino heritage through humanitarian, educational and cultural activities and events.

Following Expo ’74, Norma was encouraged by a friend to start The Filipino America Association of the Inland Empire. In 1987, the first meeting was held with 28 attendees. Over the years, the organization Norma founded has grown and thrived, and more than fulfilled its mission by being involved in numerous charitable, cultural and education events. Norma is also an incredible gardener who served the Associated Garden Clubs of Spokane up til this year for years as its annual Plant Sale Coordinator and a board member.

Bette Largent

Carrousel caretaker Nominated by Don Largent Bette was responsible for the restoration and maintaining the horses and other antique wooden carvings on Spokane’s 1909 Looff Carrousel from 1991 to 2019. She oversaw the complete restoration while it was down during the building of a new home for the carrousel. In addition to working on the Spokane Carrousel, she painted at least 10 other carousels around the United States. She has served on the Board of Directors of the National Carousel Association and served as President from 2004 through 2018.

She is recognized as one of the foremost carousel restorationists and historians of carousels around the world. She is recognized throughout the Spokane Community as the person who has taken care of one of Spokane’s most recognized iconic piece of history.

Hailey Landrus

Attorney Nominated by Kyle Nolte She is a top-notch attorney, focused on helping people, she served as President of Executive Women International Spokane, she was just selected to fill the only Court of Appeals Commissioner position in Spokane.

Reach the writer at carolynl@spokesman.com or (509) 459-5068.

T20 • Sunday • September 20, 2020

Special Section

Thanks for making a difference in our community Bank of America recognizes the 2020 Women of the Year honorees. Community leaders like you are a vital resource and inspiration to us all. Thanks to you, progress is being made and our community is becoming a better place to live and work.

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