My View
A Seat at the Table
Growing up, the center of home was our kitchen table where we ate dinner at the outrageous hour of 5:30 p.m. That dinner table is where I began to learn what kind of person I wanted to be. If I complained about how a teacher spoke to a student in a dismissive way, my dad would say, “If you don’t like it, what are you going to do about it?” At our dinner table there was no easy out. You had to look at problems from all sides and propose a solution.
We often had an extra guest at dinner — a kid with an absent parent, a neighbor who had lost a spouse, a friend from work who needed company. We were always welcoming people into our home; it was just what you did. I was taught early that everyone had something to say. If you saw someone pulling in our driveway around dinnertime, one of us got up to set a place at the table before the person even came to our door. I learned to appreciate others’ views and to always look for ways to help. I learned that my story was not the only story.
As high school came to an end, my town felt really small; I couldn’t wait to go away to school. Driving through the back entrance of UNH on move-in day freshman year, past the fields and farms, I began to panic: It looked a little too much like East Bethany! But within weeks, I was exposed to whole worlds that I didn’t know existed — women’s studies, African-American studies, journalism, art history. Advocacy organizations like the BSU and SHARPP changed me. I wrote for the school newspaper, the magazine, I marched for climate, women, LGBTQ representation and spent a semester abroad. I began to understand how tables are made. UNH taught me about systems, power and voice. Things got more complicated. The world wasn’t like my kitchen table. We couldn’t just pull up a chair. We couldn’t just slide over to make room. Sometimes it wasn’t that easy.
I moved to Baltimore after college and worked at various organizations focused on women and girls, trying to find my career. I noticed that the success or failure of an organization’s mission depended on who was at the top and in the room. Everywhere I went, it seemed there were often diverse voices missing from the table. Later, leading a recruiting firm placing leaders across the nonprofit sector was the vehicle that allowed me to spend my career diversifying rooms, amplifying voices and continuing to prioritize building new tables. With each new leader placed, I was re-creating what I had learned at home and at UNH, that you need to slide over to make room at the table and, when you do, your world view evolves. There are more voices at the table today than the day I arrived at UNH. But the truth is, the world is still built to make sure there are not enough seats.
That’s where my philanthropy comes in. My desire for more change leads me back to UNH, where my giving has been focused on making sure anyone who wants to be an inclusive leader, an entrepreneur, a changemaker — anyone with a purpose — can put that into practice. I work with students who have launched businesses, who are changing the workforce, saving the planet, who are fighting every day for the world they believe in. I look at them and I feel a part of something bigger.
I invite you to look around. Who is at your table? Whose story is missing? How can we make more room? UNH, at its best, is a community where we all have exposure to diverse ideas, world views and opportunities. We lose out when our table is too small. So set a place setting, slide over and pull up a chair, because you never know who might show up, sit down to dinner and change the world.