The 2006 Honorees represent women creating community and sustaining dreams in countless ways and in myriad venues. Community comes in many forms, and dreams change, expand, and are sometimes fulfilled. This year’s theme, Women: Builders of Communities and Dreams, also provides a special opportunity to encourage our children and ourselves to honor women in our own families and communities.

The ten women we honor today were born in two different centuries, in three different countries, and in seven different states. Each has a unique and compelling story and yet they share an extraordinary calling as a community builder. Using cooperation rather than conflict as a tool for success and achievement, each found the courage to march forward through adversity. Our honorees have brought their individual communities together and restored hope, often defying impossible odds.

The 2006 Honorees are part of a long tradition of women’s participation in our history. Their courageous actions and steadfast determination in the face of opposition is part of a common heritage.

When it comes to building communities and dreams, the 2006 Honorees provide the bricks and mortar that hold the pieces together. Courageous, bold, inventive; each is a role model for taking action and assuming responsibility for the results.

These women do not know each other and yet each has a similar idea of the importance, worth, and potential of each individual. Community-building is a process of individuals working together for the greater good of the society and confirming the idea that individuals can be effective in building a better, more compassionate world. These women’s remarkable lives testify to the tenacity and determination needed to create communities and sustain dreams.

Their lives and work provide guideposts of hope for our future and for our children and remind us all of what the human spirit can achieve if our eyes are fixed on our greatest potential.

Juana Gutierrez was born in 1932 in Mexico. In her early 20’s, she and her husband, Ricardo, moved to Los Angeles where their nine children were born. Gutierrez, a mother and homemaker, worked to make the community safer by being involved in a network of parents who started neighborhood watch and sports boosters programs. The Gutierrez family had twice lost their home to highway construction projects. In 1984, when she learned that her family was to be uprooted yet again, she decided that she needed to take action. She began knocking on neighbors’ doors, asking them to join her in taking action to protect their community. It was the beginning of her direct and dynamic political activism which resulted in forming Madres de Este Los Angeles (MELASI).

MELASI translated in English is Mothers of East Los Angeles. It is named for the at-home mothers who were the only ones available to represent the East L.A. residents at public hearings, which were held during the day when others were away at work. MELASI appealed directly to mothers as part of their outreach strategy. Having MELASI in the courtroom made all the difference.

Before MELASI was formed, corporations found it easy to get rid of their company’s waste s products in the Latino community. MELASI became effective in defeating a proposed toxic dump and oil pipeline in the vicinity of thousands of residents. MELASI also helped with the problems of crime, unemployment, failing schools, dangerous working conditions, and pesticide-filled foods.

Under Gutierrez’s passionate leadership, MELASI has become a sustaining model for other mothers to form community environmental justice action groups throughout the country.

Like Gutierrez, honorees Cindy Marano, Aileen Clarke Hernandez, and Winona LaDuke focused their efforts on grassroots advocacy for social change and justice.

Cindy Marano worked for 35 years to build a vision of economic equity for women and low-income workers. A brilliant strategic thinker, Marano focused on public policy issues, built legislative and government support, and engaged a network of national, state, and local organizations to help women and low-income workers fulfill their dreams. To implement her vision she built a community of colleagues across the United States. Marano advocated for the development of federal policies that improved the quality and scope of women in job training, welfare-to-work, and vocational education. Many of her policies have been adopted into federal law and will have great impact for decades to come.

Her need to contribute to the world was inspired by her 8 th grade English teacher and solidified by her experience as a Peace Corps volunteer in Ecuador in the 1960s. In the villages of Ecuador, she witnessed the ravages of poverty in the swollen bellies of starving children and in the sense of hopelessness of their mothers. Working with these women, she established a distribution network for their hand-woven goods. This first success of helping women achieve self sufficiency laid the ground work for the extraordinary accomplishments of her life.

Marano credited the mentorship of Tish Summer and Laurie Shields, the founders of the Older Women’s League, with the necessary training for her work. She created and implemented effective strategies that improved the lives of low-income people, particularly women. She used her skill, talent, and enthusiasm to build a vision of economic equity for women and low-income workers.

The next honoree, Aileen Clarke Hernandez has worked tirelessly for labor rights, women's rights, civil rights, and human rights for over 50 years, seeing all these issues as interconnected. Her life of service includes public appointments and innumerable projects at local, state, national, and international levels. She has received almost every humanitarian award given. Yet, she proceeds through her life with a grace and humility that makes her accessible to people of all ages and all cultures. Her parents were Jamaican immigrants, but she grew up in Brooklyn, New York, in an almost exclusively white neighborhood. Her mother and father served as strong role models teaching her lessons about courage and determination that she has used throughout her life. An outstanding student, she received a scholarship to Howard University in Washington, DC. Arriving in DC to attend Howard in 1943 she had her first experience of Jim Crow and the racial segregation of our nation’s capitol. During her education at Howard, she began her life-long work of confronting racism and sexism and working to promote respect for all people.

A pioneering and committed feminist, she was elected in 1970 as the second national president of the National Organization for Women and in 1973, was a co-founder of Black Women Organized for Actionin San Francisco. Currently, she coordinatesBlack Women Stirring the Waters and chairs the California Women's Agenda (CAWA), a state action alliance of over 600 organizations in California, working together to implement the 1995 Beijing Platform at the grassroots level. CAWA is linking more than one million women and girls in collective action through real and "virtual" networks.

Another national leader, Winona LaDuke , has worked for nearly three decades on the land issues of the White Earth Reservation in Minnesota. LaDuke is using her formidable leadership skills and her amazing talents as writer, speaker, organizer, and activist to build a self-sustaining community for her people. Her work is not limited to American Indian issues. Instead, her vision is of a world community where all cultures are valued and where her children, and all children, will be empowered to follow their dreams.

She was born in Los Angeles, California. Her father is Anishinaabekwe (Ojibwe) and her mother is Jewish. As a young girl, she attended powwows with her father and civil rights marches with both her mother and her father. She grew up on the West Coast and was one of the few people of color in her school. Although academically bright, she had to overcome her high school counselor’s recommendation to steer her to vocational-technical institutions and discouraged her from accepting Harvard University’s offer of admission based on her excellent scholastic test scores. She ignored this advice and attended Harvard. In 1982, after graduating from Harvard with a degree in native economic development, she packed her bags and moved to White Earth, the ancestral lands of the Anishinaabekwe (Ojibwe) people, located in a poor rural county of northern Minnesota. Today, she is the founding director of the White Earth Land Recovery Project. The goals of this Project are to facilitate recovery of the original land base of the White Earth Indian Reservation, while preserving and restoring traditional practices of sound land stewardship, language fluency, community development, and strengthening spiritual and cultural heritage.”

Honorees Mary Aloysius Molloy and Mary Tsukamoto worked tirelessly as educators to inspire others and promote change.

Mary Aloysius Molloy used her unswerving sense of purpose, and inspired personal leadership to build a community of educators to promote the possibility of countless dreams for women. Molloy became one of the most successful educators during the era when higher education was opening up its doors to women."

Born in 1880 in Sandusky, Ohio, Molloy grew up an only child in a sheltered family environment. From her earliest years, she excelled at every level of her education. Drawn to academia, Molloy defied many of the social conventions of her time to make the dream of higher education a reality for thousands of other women.

She faced much resistance and a history of failures in establishing colleges for women. M olloy did not shy away from the difficult issues of the time. All women seeking higher education faced prejudice from a society that was still debating the capability of a woman’s brain. Catholic women often faced a double prejudice because of religious bigotry in society and opposition to education of women even within the Catholic Church. As an outspoken opponent of religious bigotry, Molloy’s leadership within national educational organizations did much to increase the acceptance of higher education for all women.

At the beginning of the 20 th Century, Molloy challenged the stereotypes that defined women’s intellectual capacity as inferior to that of men. She instituted a rigorous four year undergraduate curriculum and set the highest of standards and expectations toward scholarship and/or public service. Today, nearly 8,000 College of Saint Teresa living alumnae, inspired by the ideals of the College, serve others in their communities, their families, and their professions.

Mary Tsukamoto, the next honoree, wasthe consummate educator who knew the power of learning from experience, knowing our history, and sharing the stories of our lives. Her family was interned in a rural prison camp when fear, panic, and racism resulted in the mass evacuation and internment of over 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, Hawaii and the United States entered World War II. The hardship and humiliation of the internment experience fueled much of her passion for justice as a teacher, community leader, and civil rights activist. She wrote about her life in her book, “We the People: A Story of Internment in America” in which she discusses the courage, resilience, and patriotism of the people interned. She is also recognized for her tireless effort for Japanese American civil liberties and for her crucial role in the grassroots effort which led to the enactment of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988. This legislation helped rectify the injustice of the internment and authorized the U.S. government to apologize and to provide compensation for the incalculable human suffering caused by the violations of basic civil liberties and constitutional rights to Japanese Americans.

In 1982, her 26 years as outstanding teacher and innovator in the Elk Grove Unified School District in California was recognized when the Mary Tsukamoto Elementary School was named in her honor. Currently, Tsukamoto’s Time of Remembrance program continues at the California History Museum in Sacramento, California, educating future generations to learn from the mistakes of the past. The motto is “never again” should citizens lose their fundamental rights.

Honorees, Mary Taylor Previte and Betty Reid Soskin, have concentrated their inspiring work and advocacy in poor communities.

Mary Taylor Previte has been a role model for the troubled and the disadvantaged for over 30 years.Her extraordinarywork and talent as an educator, writer, and public official demonstrate a variety of successful ways in which she has built communities and encouraged the fulfillment of dreams.

Born in China in 1932, the daughter of missionary parents, she was imprisoned for three years during World War II in a Japanese concentration camp. Separated from her parents for 5 ½ years, she learned survival at an early age. .

When she was ten years old, she moved back to the United States with her family. She decided to become a teacher and taught in one of the poorest and most dangerous schools in New Jersey. Because of her experience working with at-risk students, she was appointed as the Director of Camden County Youth Center, a pre-trial juvenile detention center, which at the time was an institution festering with violence and hopelessness.

She poured hope into her teenage charges by listening to them and by encouraging them to tell their stories through words and artwork. Her profound belief in humanity and her ability to communicate positively with youth made the Camden County Youth Center for ages 14 to 17 a national model. She was elected as the first woman to serve as President of the New Jersey Juvenile Detention Association. A writer and lecturer, she inspires audiences across America. Her book, “Hungry Ghosts”, chronicles her story of working with troubled youth. This hope-filled memoir preaches her commitment to serving the underserved.

As the next honoree, Betty Reid Soskin’s deep, ingrained sense of culture, place, and purpose are obvious in the way she lives her life. Her Creole-African American family was displaced by the New Orleans Hurricane of 1927, but family and community continued to be the compass of her life. The rich diversity of her ancestry encouraged her to become a bridge between cultures and races. Yet, she was unprepared for the hostility and danger she and her family faced when in the early 1950’s they moved to a northern California suburb. Against this milieu of brutal racism, she found support from people who were part of the Unitarian-Universalism religious community. Over the next 20 years, this community, beginning with 25 families meeting in living rooms and then growing to a congregation of over 300, encouraged, sustained and supported her values and beliefs.

These beliefs were challenged by the extraordinary poverty and every growing sense of hopelessness she saw in a neighboring community. She decided to leave the safety of her world to work as a black social activist and small merchant in the disadvantaged community of South Berkeley, California. To address the problems of this high-crime, drug infested welfare community she organized a housing development corporation with an all community board. The result was the razing of a two-block, crime infested, slum area and in its place the construction of 41 units of market rate and subsidized housing. In recognition of this amazing accomplishment, Betty Reid Soskin was named a 1995 “Woman of the Year” by the California State Legislature.

Honorees, Nancy Nordhoff and Marian Van Landingham, have made outstanding contributions to their communities in a variety of contexts, including contributions that have greatly benefited and enhanced the arts community.

Nancy Nordhoff’s philanthropy is a testament to how vital an individual’s support can be to empower individuals and organizations. She grew up in the Seattle area in Washington State in a family with a long history of generous philanthropy. In 1954, Nordhoff graduated from Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts. Carrying on her family tradition of community service, Nancy Nordhoff became a hands-on philanthropist and has been a funder and advisor for the Women’s Funding Alliance of Seattle for over 25 years. Nordhoff generously puts her money, time, and energy into visionary projects. Her sense of achievement comes not only from funding and building, but from having an idea and taking action to make it happen.

In 1985, to help empower women to find their voices and to write their stories, she built and founded Hedgebrook Writers Retreat on Whidbey Island in Washington. This beautiful retreat center, nestled on a hillside forest facing Puget Sound provides women of all ages and cultures with space and time to create significant work, in solitude and community. Hedgebrook celebrates the diverse voices of women from around the globe and provides food, accommodations, travel stipends and other support to writers whose work is transforming our world.

Nordhoff’s sense of community is also reflected in her high regard for taking care of the land, for preserving the environment and historic sites. She built and donated a downtown park to the city of Langley on Whidbey Island, restored a turn of the century Finnish farmhouse to serve as a conference facility for the Whidbey Institute,and bought anddonated 24 acres of wetlands for salmon restoration. In 1999, to help foster this work, she founded Goosefoot Community Fund, a not for profit corporation, which works to sustain the rural character of Whidbey Island through historic and environmental preservation, sustainable development, affordable housing, and the support of the rural economy.

The last honoree, Marion Van Landingham, is an artist, activist, and elected official, Van Landingham, with her belief that artistic expression is central to the health of a community, convinced the City of Alexandria, Virginia, to renovate a decrepit leaky, drafty, pigeon infested, former military factory storage area into a community center for art and discovery. Artists went in, cleaned out the rats and pigeon droppings and set up studio spaces. What was created became the, Torpedo Factory Art Center, a thriving art colony and innovative partnership between the city and 140 artists. Since 1974, the center has served as the anchor of Alexandria’s revitalized waterfront just outside Washington DC, and a beacon of culture and community as well as a magnet for tourism.

Building on the success of her community work, Van Landingham decided to run for state office. She has served with distinction in the Virginia House of Delegates for 24 years and is Virginia’s most senior female delegate and the first woman to chair several important committees. Her commitment to educating all the students of Virginia is obvious in her expansive and innovative legislative agenda, which includes teaching English as a second language, dedicating lottery money to public schools and reducing class sizes, funding for the handicapped and homeless and for child care for poor families. Her colleagues praise her as a straightforward and poised public servant, who maintains her moral compass along with her strong commitment to those most in need

The lives and work of these 2006 honorees -- Women: Builders of Communities and Dreams, celebrate passionate citizenship and the promoting of dreams in a democratic society.

The accomplishments of these honorees are a testament to Margaret Meade’s famous quote

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.”

Written by: Molly Murphy MacGregor, Executive Director and Cofounder, National Women's History Project. For women's history information, resources, and materials see www.nwhp.org.

The National Women’s History Project (NWHP) is a non–profit organization dedicated to recognizing and celebrating the diverse and historic accomplishments of women by providing information and educational material and programs. For more about NWHP, as well as to find out about National Women's History Month events in your area, please see their website at www.nwhp.org.