MONA YEZDANI GILLEN ’01

PARENT, ALUMNA, PHYSICIAN, CO-CHAIR OF THE PARENT-LED DIVERSITY AND INCLUSION INITIATIVE

BY MAURA CICCARELLI, FREELANCE WRITER

Sharing what makes us each unique as well as our commonalities with others is at the heart of the Tower Hill parent diversity and inclusion initiative called DISTINCT.

Second-year co-chair Mona G. Yezdani MD ’01 became involved two years ago when she was looking for a way to engage fellow parents in community service projects and outreach opportunities.

“I was also drawn by a desire to learn more from our diverse community to assist in reducing anyone from feeling like an outsider due to their cultural or religious differences,” says Yezdani, who is a urologic surgeon practicing with Brandywine Urology Consultants and was the first female board-certified urologist in New Castle County.

“If we as parents can care about diversity in our community, then hopefully our kids will as well,” she adds. “Today, kids want to share what makes them unique and what makes them ‘different.’ That’s so different from 20 years ago when you were trying to hide what made you different and highlight what made you the same. I really appreciate how important people from different cultures are.”

DISTINCT organizes social events throughout the throughout the year to bring together its members and celebrate various cultural holidays, such as National Hispanic Heritage Month, Lunar New Year and Diwali.

“In addition, we have parent coffees where different topics in diversity and inclusion are discussed so everyone can share and learn from various perspectives,” she says, adding that monthly newsletters promote the various events and highlight information about the holidays as well.

Community service events have included a cold weather clothing drive, making sandwiches for the Emmanuel Dining Room, a ministry that feeds the food insecure in Wilmington, pajama drives, Martin Luther King Jr. Day activities and more.

On the inclusion side, she notes that the group encourages anyone to join, including people who don’t consider themselves diverse.

“DISTINCT is a way for the whole community to come together and say we really want to support all the cultures and support everybody’s differences,” she adds.

Yezdani comes from a diverse background herself— her parents are from India and her mother is Hindu and her father is Muslim. She and husband Peter Gillen have two children at Tower Hill: third grader Caelen and kindergartener Isla.

She says it’s refreshing to hear how her children, who also have German-Irish-Polish heritage from their father, talk about cultural events they learn about in school.

“In my daughter’s class, one of the mothers spoke about Lunar New Year and that it was the Year of the Rabbit. Isla was very excited about it, telling me all about what Lunar New Year was,” she says.

“It’s just one of those opportunities for kids and parents to share those things. I think it helps when you learn about anything that’s different from yourself. It helps you empathize with others and learn a little bit more about the world,” Yezdani adds.

Tower Hill time

As an alum from the Class of 2001, Yezdani also sits on the Alumni Council, which most recently provided feedback on the candidates for Tower Hill’s new Head of School.

“The Alumni Council also is involved in bringing together the alumni community by having alumni sponsored reunions in various cities. We also invite alumni back to school with events like Hoops for Heroes where alumni get to play faculty and students in basketball or Homecoming Weekend. Plus, we link students with alumni in various career fields including a career day event,” she says.

As a surgeon and physician, she spends much of her time with both male and female patients tackling both simple and complex conditions. Her fascination with problem solving goes back to a Brain Teasers camp during her fourth grade summer at Tower Hill.

“I got really into problem solving,” says Yezdani, who later applied that passion to figuring out how the human body worked. As a surgeon, she has the opportunity to make a real difference in someone’s health and daily life with a procedure that takes only a few hours, which she finds very gratifying.

One of her most important lessons in life came from her fourth grade teacher, Laurie Edinger, who now teaches Middle School at Tower Hill.

“I see her often and we always talk about this,” says Yezdani, who was at Tower Hill from kindergarten through 12th grade. “I got my first bad grade—I think it was a D and she says it was a B—and I just lost it and was crying. She took me down to the cafeteria and gave me a cookie and said, ‘You’re going to learn more from the moments when things don’t go your way. You are not always going to be perfect, and that’s fine. You will be stronger from these moments than from those that come easily.’”

Later, when she found AP Biology difficult in her senior year, she totally revamped her studying style, realizing that she needed to see something three or four times before she could remember it properly.

“I learned so much from just that one moment of doing poorly,” she says.

When it came time to decide where to send her two children for school, she says Tower Hill was the natural choice.

“The wonderful teachers who educate and guide our students make Tower Hill stand out,” says Yezdani. “The core strengths and opportunities at Tower Hill have not changed, and through groups like DISTINCT and Alumni Council we can keep improving upon those opportunities for our children and help support the common goal to raise kind, thoughtful, well-rounded and motivated children.”