About Betsy...
I grew up in small towns in the segregated old south. As a teenage high school student in 1960 in a small east Texas town, my first political act was to organize our high school mock election campaign for John F. Kennedy, who was running against local hero Lyndon B. Johnson. No surprise, LBJ won. However, President Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King inspired me to have dreams and to believe that it is not what my Town does for me, but what I can do for my Town that matters.
I went on to Tulane University in New Orleans, and was involved in civil rights activities as managing editor of the college newspaper, where my advisor was Hodding Carter, a wonderful man, founder of the Greenville, Mississippi Delta-Democrat-Times, and a Pulitzer Prize winning writer on social and racial justice. I met my husband Dennis over a teletype machine reading breaking news during the Cuban missile crisis. New Orleans was within missile range and nuclear annihilation felt imminent. In 1965 we moved to Philadelphia where Dennis went to graduate school in architecture at Penn and I was a librarian in the Annenberg Graduate School of Communications. We opposed the Vietnam War and worked to Dump LBJ. I became a state coordinator for Gene McCarthy's presidential campaign and we got our whiff of tear gas in Chicago at the 1968 Democratic convention. I returned to Philadelphia as Assistant Director of the local chapter of Americans for Democratic Action, where I helped run campaigns for reform candidates for City Council. In 1970, Dennis and I went off on the trip of a lifetime, traveling 50,000 miles in Europe from the arctic circle to the boot of Italy, towing a very small camping caravan (trailer) with an orange VW convertible while researching a book on modern architecture, which we reckoned began around 1750. We returned in 1972, and moved to Somerville, where Eric, our first son was born in 1975. While Dennis was at Research Fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, I went house hunting throughout Greater Boston with my reluctant 2-year old. When, after nine months, we first entered what is now our home, Eric climbed onto a bed with the resident cat and refused to leave. That confirmed our decision that Brookline was where we wanted to live. Unlike Eric, we had chosen Brookline for its urban amenities and excellent schools. We moved here in September 1977, and our second son Iain was born just in time for the Great Blizzard of '78. Eventually our two sons would go through Lincoln School— little Lincoln, as it then was, and old Lincoln— and Brookline High School, where both were in SWS. As an involved parent I became PTO President at Lincoln School, where the teachers were great and the old buildings in two sites were in desperate need of repair or replacement. I believe in strong neighborhoods and in neighborhood schools. I worked on the Campaign for a New Lincoln School, which is now the center of our neighborhood. The old school has a new life as the temporary home for schools and eventually for Town Hall, as other buildings are renovated. II was first elected to Town Meeting from Precinct 5 in 1984. I joined the Advisory Committee in 1988, serving on several subcommittees including chairing the schools sub-committee. In 1994 I became chair of the Advisory Committee. In 1998 I ran for Selectman, and lost to Deb Goldberg. After that race, I withdrew from political activity, other than Town Meeting, because I felt that heading the evolving Brookline Community Foundation (BCF) needed all my attention. Under my leadership as Executive Director, BCF formed a partnership with the Town and The Country Club after the Ryder Cup golf tournament to create the Brookline Youth Fund, with an initial gift of $500,000. BCF also partnered with the Town to raise $50,000 for nonprofit organizations to celebrate Brookline 300. BCF has been giving more than $200,000 annually in grants to Brookline nonprofit organizations for more than 10 years, and has made major capital grants for the Brookline Senior Center, the Library Renovation, and for the Coolidge Corner Theatre. Many Brookline families have been helped by the Brookline Safety Net Fund, which has provided $20,000 per year in emergency assistance grants for more than 20 years. I was also President of the Brookline Improvement Coalition (BIC), a community housing development organization chartered under the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development. BIC has developed nearly 50 units of affordable housing in Brookline since 1996. When I began thinking about my retirement from the Community Foundation, I intended to focus on volunteering as President of BIC, and on having time to see distant family members. Our sons are working towards PhDs in Neuroscience at NYU and Georgetown in Washington D.C. When people began asking me to run for Selectman in 2006, I realized that I could put all my Brookline experience to work for the Town, and that I have the knowledge, time, and commitment to do the job well. As a community volunteer, I am an advisor to Steps to Success, an after school program to help low income Brookline kids prepare for higher education. It is a large collaborative involving the Public Schools, Housing Authority, Health Department, local colleges, and many others. In 2008, 25 Brookline High School graduates from Steps to Success went on to various colleges including Brown University. |