 My name is Mary O'Keeffe, I was born in Ontario, Oregon in 1952. My dad was an attorney, my mom was a housewife, had seven children. I was the oldest girl, but I had three older brothers. So three older brothers, three girls, and then the baby was a boy. So, that's how I came to be. What? Just let you go. I don't know, you have to be more directive. Being raised in Eastern Oregon, it was a very conservative community for the most part. My parents were not conservative. But we were not a political family. I went to public school through the 12th grade, and then I went to a Jesuit university in Spokane. And there was a lot going on, of course, during that period. And I was never very political. I ended up graduating, getting a master's in counseling, and ultimately going to Portland. Had a hard time finding employment in Portland, and I went to work for a grassroots organization called Oregon Fair Share. Oregon Fair Share had concerns with the statewide disparities in the economy, and also organized around neighborhood issues, anything that the neighborhood identified as problems. So lousy streets, putting in stop signs, safety, whatever the neighborhood identified. So we did a lot of training on how to be your own advocate, and the whole principle being there was strength in numbers. The statewide issues were cost of living issues like utility rates and things like that. I started as a canvasser, was the canvass director, worked nonstop, and met my to-be wife, and decided to move to Southern Oregon. I did a variety of jobs in Southern Oregon. I started as the campaign worker for Jay Mullen, who was running a state senate race, and his campaign manager left the campaign, and I got tagged to be the campaign manager. None of this stuff was really in my wheelhouse, but it was a really good experience. He lost to Lynn Hannon, which is a name that you're probably familiar with. But from there I went to work for the Dunhouse, and Molly Owens and I were co-directors for the Dunhouse. They came to us because the shelter had run out of money, and we had a lot of fundraising experience. So that's what we did. We worked really hard, and we did a variety of fundraising activities. What year was that? That was 1982 to 1983. I only know this because I have a resume. Then the Dunhouse merged with all the crisis-oriented organizations and became CIS, Crisis Intervention Services. They decided that there was really only room for one director, and Molly became the director of Dunhouse. Then my next job was to work for Head Start, and I got hired as a family advocate. I did that for a time, but due to the very poor wages at Head Start, I went to work for United Way. I did United Way for about three and a half, four years, and I was the associate director for United Way. From there I went to work for the job council, which no longer exists, but it was the Employment and Training Organization. It largely had federal grants to do various employment and training services for youth and adults. My job was really program development, which was fabulous, because really what I'm best at is start-up. That's really what I'm most interested in, and so I did a variety of projects for them. I think one of my first tasks was a four-county economic development initiative. The state, I think it was Governor Goldschmidt, had a bunch of money, and they did economic development activities around the state. We were asked to regionalize, so we worked with Josephine County, Klamath County, and one other county. I can't remember, maybe Douglas. Anyway, so I was charged with helping them develop their plan. The next project I got was welfare reform, so that was a multi-agency effort to basically redesign how we were offering welfare services. And largely what we tried to do was open up training opportunities for people on welfare who had been prohibited to do so. And so the idea was to, if they got training, they would find decent employment and they wouldn't have to fall back on welfare. A thing that I was able to do was work with a group of women to look at economic issues affecting women. And that group did a lot of planning. We did this analysis of where women were working, what kinds of jobs were they getting, and what kind of income were they making, and what were their barriers. That's what really inspired this sort of strategic analysis of the kinds of services that were needed to lift women out of poverty, to lift women into better-paying jobs, to give them more opportunities in entrepreneurial adventures. And one of the things that we were really looking at was micro-enterprise development. So we decided to form a board that would try to develop essentially a set of services and also to secure funding. I basically had to kill our task force because it was becoming something that everything that we came up with, I got charged with developing, and I could only do so much. So I said, okay, people, if you guys want to continue on, that's fine, but I have enough on my plate. That's about what I can handle. So I left the job council. I became the executive director of what we called Southern Oregon Women's Access to Credit. And so for four years, I think, from 1990 to 1994, roughly, I was at the job council. I was volunteering on the SOAC board with a number of terrific women. A woman, the director of the Small Business Development Center, a local attorney, a local financial planner, several women entrepreneurs, Molly Owens was on the board. And we came up with a set of services that included a micro-enterprise development training program, a mentorship program in which we paired local women entrepreneurs with our students, and also a lending program. So we had all these great services on paper, and we actually had started a little bit of training. But it was really hard work to be working full-time and then be starting a nonprofit on top of that. And we decided as a board, look, we either have to get a grant and get this thing self-funded and get staff. Or we can't continue this. This is going to kill us. So fortunately, we got a big grant from the Mott Foundation, and we were able to hire a director. We couldn't find a director we wanted to hire. And so I decided, well, we'd work this hard. I would just leave my job at the job council and I would become the director. And so I did that. And about three months into the job, I thought I was completely insane. But I just really buckled down and figured out everything that we needed to do as an organization. And I think when I left, they had almost a half a million dollars in the bank. And we had six staff, and we were serving Jackson, Josephine, and Klamath counties. And we had graduated several small business, micro-enterprise businesses. We had also developed a program for Latinos. And so we had Spanish-speaking staff. I think I have always had a little bit of an entrepreneurial strain in me. I've done a few different little things, including a making and selling jewelry. And when I was working on that, I was talking to a community member here in the Rogue Valley about that I was doing jewelry and how enjoyable it was developing this teeny business. And he, it was a man who said to me, there's a place called Southern Oregon Women's Access to Credit. So I went there and took their class, their business plan development class. And this would be in the early 90s, all the bases of financial record-keeping, financial management, marketing, product development. It was a good class, absolutely. That aspect of the SOAC program, it had to have been going through the class. It wasn't part of the loan thing, so it was an end piece to the class. You were assigned a mentor and a successful business person. She owned a successful spa in Ashland. And I know in the years since she has written a book and a wonderful woman. And we would meet, I'm going to, it was a few years ago so I want to be accurate here. It feels like it was slightly more than once a month. It certainly wasn't weekly, but it feels like it was maybe every three weeks or something. We would meet generally at her place. I would come to her house and I would present, here's what I want to work on. By the way, this was not with beanbags. It was with my jewelry business because that's what I went through the class for. And they also made sure there was some relevance to her experience and my needs. And there was, she sold products at her spa and she was so familiar with the kind of customer that is my customer. So it was a perfect fit, just absolutely perfect. And so I have thought many times over the years how wonderful that was of her to give these, you know, hours to me to come in. Okay, let's talk about display. And I have a memory of her in, in action, kind of maybe with a scarf or something, literally showing me, okay, and you could do this with this because the subject was display at that moment. And I was like, oh, yeah, that's an idea. And but then there was also financial, you know, assistance with financial management. So it was, you know, wonderful community of other entrepreneurs, many, the majority women, but not quite exclusively, but the majority women. And one day there was a, an event which was kind of a fair showcasing the businesses of, I'm going to pause for a moment and say that the acronym for Southern Oregon Women's Access to Credit is SOAC. So I'll be calling it SOAC and wanted to make that acronym clear. So this was a fair showcasing SOAC businesses. And I, you know, knew some of the people and there was a woman there who I was friendly with named Corey. And Corey suddenly came to me like rushing towards me and said, Mona, we, you know what we have to do, we have to make gift bags for coffee and tea. And what she meant was those kind of insulated bags with the fold over tabs that we get in a grocery store. But the idea was have them covered with artistic pictures to celebrate the holidays, celebrate birthdays and kind of just because, you know, for no special occasion. And the impetus had been that she had seen someone's packaging. She thought they were gift bags for coffee and tea. When she got closer, she saw that it was packaging for like, right, specialty rice. And so that's when she got the idea came to me. And in that instant, something I had never even thought of doing. In that instant, we were off to the races to towards developing this business idea, which meant, you know, various, it meant a lot of details, a lot of work to do, finding the vendor for the bags, choosing the artist. We had a contest at Corey's home. We set up like a gallery of local artists pictures had people come and vote. And out of that we chose our initial 12 designs, and then I'm finding a printer. And of course, the ultimately we reached the point where it was time to truly get this underway, and that meant getting funding to do the printing to get the bags to do the marketing. And we went to SOAC, because in addition to the business, the business classes, they had a small business loan fund, and made it more accessible for people who were small whose businesses were small, whose needs weren't that big, you know, didn't need a big loan, but needed a place to go. And we were quite honestly, Corey and I were at the level that a bank would not have been very interested in looking at us for a, you know, typical business loan. So it was wonderful to have this place that was giving loans in the $10, $15,000 area to up to 2025, I think. It was tough for women to get bank loans. It wasn't that they couldn't. It was difficult. So that's why we had a micro lending program. We would lend up to $10,000. We had a number of successes. I mean, and they were small businesses. It was like a jam and jelly company went through our program. A woman who engraved rocks. I mean, there's one over rocks right there. Just a variety of projects that women, we had a woman, this didn't ultimately become a successful venture, but it was a brilliant idea. It was a matchmaking service. And she kind of got edged out just by bigger funded projects that were already online. It was unbelievable, really. The local economic development interests, I think, felt like, why are you doing this? They really had no awareness or no consciousness of how little they were doing to support women entrepreneurs. And they just kind of thought we were upstarts and we had no business doing their business. It was hard. It was hard. It was hard to convince people that we were necessary. And so we would just have women tell their stories. And once you heard their stories, how could you argue with the need for our services? And, you know, local communities like out in the Illinois Valley, it was completely obvious to poor impoverished community why this service was necessary. So we would take our training out to the Illinois Valley, for example. We would take it up to the upper rogue. So our whole impetus was to go where people lived rather than ask them to come to Medford or ask them to come to Ashland. And so we partnered with libraries, with different community organizations that would provide us with a free space. And we tried to do it on the cheap as much as possible because we didn't have a lot of money and we weren't charging a lot of money. Our whole philosophy was if you could pay, you know, as little as five dollars, you could take our training. But we felt it was important that they paid something. I know that we ultimately influenced government because state economic development recognized our organization. And we helped start other micro-enterprise organizations around the state of Oregon. We formed an association. We worked very collaboratively with the state economic development department that funded each of our organizations. And we were also funded by the federal government in the small business administration. I'm pretty sure we got county grants as well. So, well, our loan fund was established through federal money from the micro-enterprise program through the SBA. There was a specific women's micro-enterprise program funded through the small business administration. And so the only way you could qualify for a loan is that you'd have to go through our ten-week business plan development. And we had a loan officer on staff and we would have those business plans reviewed by other entrepreneurs and our loan officer. And people could qualify for up to ten thousand dollars. And then the loan repayment was based on a schedule and it would vary from business to business based on their business plan. We prepared our business plan and we had both been through the SOAC class. So we had a head start on how to prepare it and worked on that on, you know, making a marketing plan and projections on where we would sell, how much we would sell, you know, the distribution channels through which we would sell. And then met with a loan fund committee, which as I recall was all female, and I'm pretty sure of that. And they approved it. And so we got a loan, which again, this was Cori and I and her name as Cori Cooper at the time, her married name. And so it was, we were splitting it. It was twenty thousand, so it was we reached taking ten thousand dollars debt. And then and the new process of the loan. Yeah, it didn't, it didn't feel, it didn't feel easy. It felt that they were, you know, that we were really under review that we might not get this that we hope we did. We hoped we were doing good enough in our responses, but we had no sense that, oh, this is, this is nothing we'll, you know, let's just answer these few questions and waltz out of here. It was like a real meeting with banker, you know, in a sense with bankers like it would have been. Got ramped up for, or got production going, got the bags from the source, got the printing done locally at a place called Mustard Press, which is still in business. And very and connected with local graphic designers and accountants and even an attorney to do some basic. We decided, and I'll tell you why I paused, because it was so unnecessary, but we incorporated and just for the whatever the heck of it, I will share, although it's such a small detail, I will say an expense that I later looked back on and thought what a waste of money that was. But anyway, but we did do that and on. And we did our launch at a coffee industry fair in Seattle in the fall of 1996. And it was, it was wonderful, the whole experience. There's so much good that came out of it. It did lead me into this counseling and teaching. I'll just mention that teaching, for instance, at the time I started beanbags. And then a few years later went to work for SOAC. You couldn't have gotten me to just get up in front of a group of people and teach if you had threatened me with something. It was like, oh no, I'm too scared. And I came to love teaching and I was happy in that environment, but I totally, I will, some women were really doing important things, helping women. And it's that SOAC, before I got there, there was that moment in time when it was formed. It was being formed by this group of women who saw a need and came together and worked on making it a reality. We never excluded men from the program, but by virtue of our name, it tended to be women. But then, you know, we saw the inequities happening for Latino people. And so the board felt strongly that we needed to branch out and also serve that population. And that did tend to be more men than women, although there were some Latinas in the program. It was a great organization. Unfortunately, four or five years after I'd left, they had run out of money and they didn't have the capacity for whatever reason to generate grants to keep it going. It was hard work. It was really hard work. I left, I left SOAC in 2000. I went to work for the community college. I continued to always have an interest and a desire to support the programs that benefited females. My job there was largely grants development. So I continued to write grants for our child care program. For programs, I wrote a very large health care training grant. And because if you look at employment, as I've said many times, health care is an arena that tends to be better paying. And so that was, I think, really important to both the college and to myself to really help students, you know, train and qualify for better paying jobs. That's a real strong area of interest of the community college as well. So, I mean, I did a lot of stuff. I did a lot of construction grants and a lot of stuff that benefited all the students, but clearly women was a big interest of mine. Would you like to say anything to sort of wrap this up or bring it forward about changes that still might need to be made, be mentioned before some disappointments? I don't know. I mean, I left the college in 2017. I retired, but I also had got cancer. So that kind of waylaid me for a while. And now I'm volunteering and I help the OLLI program at SOU, so lifelong learning for seniors. And I volunteer for the Jackson County Cultural Coalition. I'm on their board. So I try to, you know, continue to serve the community. And I'm in awe of what's happening politically. There's a lot of tremendous work and passion going on today. And so it gives me hope for the future. And, you know, I do think that a lot of what we did formed the foundation for what's happening today, because activism and advocacy, I think we formed a really strong base and really helped position women to go forward. One of the things I did at the community college is I served on the diversity board at the college. And I was fascinated by how little students really knew the history. And I'm sure that's true today. But in a way, it doesn't really matter. Because, you know, that foundation was there for them. That launching pad was there for them. And they're taking advantage of it and it's going forward. So the work continues. And if they can't look back over their shoulder, that's okay.