 Okay, so my name is Serena Otis St. Clair and I've been in the Rogue Valley since 1984. I came here to finish my geography degree. My partner was working at the Shakespeare Festival, and so I arranged for an internship at the City of Ashton Planning Department. And I did my last college term at SU, but I transferred down from Corvallis from Oregon State University. And when I was working at the City of Ashton Planning Department, there was this old building. Everyone knows it now as the Ashton Community Center. It used to be called the Women's Civic Clubhouse, and it's right on Wynburn Way. And so I was doing a project with them for the Solar Access Ordinance, and then my internship was over and they really wanted to hire me. So they said, hey, you want to make a community center out of the Women's Civic Clubhouse. So I worked with groups that were there. It was like World War I, Women's Veterans Auxiliary, Duplicate Bridge, the Ashland, Oregon State Ballet used to be there. Deanna and Eric Hurst, they used to be very famous people here in the Valley. Infamous, maybe I should say. And I started the community center. I took all those groups, and then we also created after-school programs, and we renovated the building to be more rentable. I did all this research into Jesse Wynburn, who is what Wynburn Way is named for. He was someone who used to, he had a big house up the parkway, up the street where the park is. He used to have these fabulous parties, and he loved women. He was like known as kind of a woman's man. He just loved women, so he built and dedicated this clubhouse to women, this civic clubhouse. And what was that for every, I don't know, how long, maybe a hundred years or so, and then it became, we made it the Ashland Community Center. And so I shepherded the transition of the building from some place that groups, the Ashland Folk Dancers were there every Friday night for like 20 years. So groups that had been there forever paying very little rent, and we made it more of a business so that the building paid for itself. Me, my, you know, my role there as a coordinator. I mean, it's really easy to say coordinator. This was where the whole women's pay equity thing comes in. I was actually a clerk one. You know, this will age me, but I was paid like $3.35 an hour. And I did everything for that building, not only from renting it, programming it. I helped run it through like a huge remodel through a community block grant. I wrote my very first grant to the Carpenter Foundation there. And we, the building, the room is really live, like it's a wooden floor and it's like a drum. And so you couldn't really have music concerts in there because the cusics were terrible. So I hired a couple technicians from the Shakespeare Festival and they consulted with us. And we ended up putting up these, really, these wedgewood blue theater curtains. And so I wrote the grant for the theater curtains. We did all this fundraising. We had like a huge garage sale from all the groups in the building. And it was, you know, it was big deals like, I don't know how many, $10,000 or something to put up the curtains. And that would then convert the building to be able to have like weddings and music where it wouldn't hurt people's ears. And so I remember this one day after, I mean, I had, we had just had this like, you know, two-day garage sale. I mean, I looked and I smelled and I was reeking and it was like this huge organizing mess. And I was like 23 at the time or something. And I remember being afterwards going to another famous watering hole in Ashland called Cook's Tavern, which is where I bless catwalk. Now it's some umami sushi, I think. I was sitting in there drinking a pitcher of beer with a friend of mine. And I was like, oh my God, I, you know, did this. I'm doing all this fundraising and, you know, writing grants and raising money to get curtains in the building. And we did a rededication ceremony. I wrote the speech for the mayor, who was Gordon Baderis at the time. I wrote the speech for the planning director, John Fragonacy, who was a wonderful man and mentor to me. And not even get to make a speech. I was just like, I, because I wanted all this history on the building. And, you know, and I put down my beer and I'm like for $3.35 an hour. And this friend of mine, who was a really, you know, great strong woman, she said, why are you doing that? Like, you know, it sounds like you should, you know, ask for more. Like you're doing more than, you know, they're getting a lot of really great stuff out of it. I was at the lowest paid, you know, totem pole. So I, we went back to the, the, my supervisor, John, went to the city administrator at the time and tried to upgrade my position to like a, like a, like a mid-level manager position. Because I had increased the revenue of the building, like five-fold in a short period of time, et cetera. And the administrator came back and said, Clutter, to you. So I quit. I quit respectfully and no bridges burned. I mean, city council people said they read letters of recommendation from me, but it was, it was a changing time in the valley. And so we, we kind of lost the Civic Clubhouse, but we gained a beloved community center that, you know, I think is still until COVID very much in play. And then the next three jobs I had, I really worked a lot with women. I left the city and I got a job a month later with crisis intervention services. That is now had, had merged and morphed into community works. But back then crisis intervention center was the Dunhouse helpline rate crisis center. I think it was rate crisis services. I can't remember exactly. And, and there was like a teen runaway program. And I was the volunteer coordinator for the helpline and I worked, did trainings for Dunhouse and rate crisis and worked a bit in the shelter and I, and I loved doing crisis work and I loved doing human services. But, you know, after a while it was very taxing because you just, when you see people in crisis all the time, you, you want to, I wanted to work more systemically. So I left crisis intervention services and I got a job at the job council, which at that point was, I think now it's called work source, Oregon. But at that time it was a JTPA, Job Training Partnership Act funded federal training program. And I ran the classroom training skills program, which was a program where I used money. I got, I always felt like this is the greatest thing ever. I get money from the federal government and I'm using it to pay people to go back to school. So I, I worked with people who were looking for jobs and employment and employment. And if they needed skills that we could purchase through Rowe Community College or like at Abdeel, you know, clerical school or phlebotomy classes. I would pay, I mean I wouldn't pay for it, but I felt like I was paying for it. And get them trained and, and into a job. And during that time I met Mario Keith and Malio and Stevenson and Kathy Berkey and a couple very strong women who were interested in. This was the very late 80s and the very late 1980s. They were interested in women's economic equity. And so we started a task force where people from a variety of different organizations, we would meet at lunchtime. It was completely volunteer. We would like try to strategize how we could help women do better than just getting jobs in childcare or receptionists. Or, you know, at that time there was a lot of really low skilled electronics work, you know, soldering and stuff at this place called ESAM and Grants Pass. So we met and it was just like this powerful group of women. They, many of them became my mentors. I mean I was just like in awe of what they knew and how they were thinking. It was like, it was definitely an education for me. And I, and I volunteered, you know, I took notes and I convened meetings and, and it was during one of those meetings that my future and very significant person in my life, Kathy Berkey, he was a counselor and department chair at Rogue Community College and the counseling department approached me and she said that she had a program at Rogue Community College called Moving On. That was a displaced homemaker single parent program and she asked me, you know, if I would be interested in applying for a job there. And I was, I got, yeah, sure, absolutely. I, working for the college would be great. I had the right degree, you know, I have, well, I just have a degree in geography, but you needed a bachelor's degree. And, and so I got this and I applied and, you know, here's the other thing. Between the time that she talked to me and then the, when I applied, I got pregnant with my second kid. And by the time the college got around and I went to my interview six months pregnant. So I had to address in, I felt like I had to address in my interview my pregnancy and what my plans were, you know, for maternity leave or whatever. Because in, anyway, and, and, and rightfully so the college said, hey, if we are going to discriminate against a pregnant woman who we want to run a women's program then, you know, we're out of integrity. So they, they hired me. I had a, yeah, I had a really short maternity leave, but nonetheless the baby cooperated. My, this was my, my one, I have three kids at an old, I have an oldest daughter and a young daughter. And then this child was the boy and I used to call him the little boy with a woman's agenda. Because when he was little, I brought him everywhere with me. I mean, he got held, he went to Ms. Foundation Conference, he went to conferences all over the country actually when he was still little enough to go to come with me. And he got held by like the department, the secretary of labor, like the, the assistant secretary of labor. I can't remember a name. I feel bad. I can't, it was in early 1990. But, you know, anyway, he was, he, he cooperated and he's, you know, a feminist man now. And I think a lot of it was because he was raised by, he was always around women who were like empowering themselves. So what was, so what I really wanted to, to talk about, and that really, that kind of gets me to, to this place. And is that working in the displaced homemaker kind of movement, it was, it was all very exciting around then for women. You know, women had been displaced homemakers for time immemorial, you know, married and all of a sudden they get a divorce or they're widowed. And, you know, there is no unemployment for women. They get, they get a divorce. If they had been a homemaker, there's nothing that's going to pay them if they're lucky enough to get alimony. But, you know, alimony was actually not that common. It's a really low percentage of women that are awarded alimony, maybe child support. So there was a real need. And the, I did, I did a little research on it in terms of, it was like in the 70s that the term displaced homemaker became recognized in the federal government. And then in 1984, there was a piece of legislation called the Carl D. Perkins Vocational Education Act. And in that act, it was really to support what we would now call career technical education. Back then it was like voc tech. We've worked really hard to lose those terms because it tends to track students. You know, I did this work for a long time. If I heard one more teacher say, yeah, he really likes working with his hands. I'm going to put him in voc tech. It's like, no, actually, there's, you know, now we use it as career technical. It's a T and STEM for science, technology, engineering and math. So it was a time where we were trying to elevate that, you know, the look at career technical ed. Anyway, the Perkins Act was funded to support technical ed in both community colleges, but also primarily in K-12, like in high school. And in 1984, the legislation indicated that there would be a 3% set aside for every state to have a sex equity coordinator, and then 7% set aside for assistance to displaced homemakers and single parents. This was huge because it gave us, it gave every state money that then had to decide how they wanted to spend it because they had, according to the legislation, if they wanted, you know, the millions and millions, hundreds of millions of dollars for vocational education, they had to spend 10% of that on bringing women along, and that was huge. So that Perkins Act has been reauthorized, I think, five times now. We're in Perkins 5 at this time. And gender equity, like there was, the set aside went away after about 10 years. Many colleges and states continued to support the concept of women doing nontraditional work. And so funds still remain for nontraditional work, and now, again, it's morphed into more, we would call that, maybe STEM, getting women into STEM. So why that was significant at that time was because women were, you know, women were beginning to hit the workforce in droves, but there was, you know, a bit of a, there was, we weren't even at the glass ceiling level yet, you know, women had gone into work during World War II because all the men were off to, off to war, but then when they came home, you know, women went back into the home, and you know, there's, you know, tons of videos that depict how Rosie the Riveter then became like Rosie the Homemaker once the men came home. And in the 50s and 60s, you know, this, you know, kind of middle America played this very Donna Reed role, but the reality is, is women were still being abused, they were being, you know, left by husbands, they were having to be single heads of household, and they really needed some assistance, they weren't GIs, they didn't have a federal GI bill, you know, all those kinds of things. So the Dispaced Homemaker programs, many of them seated in community colleges, some in community action networks, like in Roseburg it was at the Amkawa Community Action Network, they really, these transition programs popped up all over the country, every state had them, there was, and the purpose of those programs was really to empower women through education, economic equity and employment. So those early, those, well, not so early, but that, like, that committee that I had been on when I worked at the job council on women's economic equity, that was being born out of this, the beginnings of these Dispaced Homemaker programs. So the main tenets of those programs were, and I think this was pretty standard across all the programs, certainly at Rogue Community College. One was just work readiness, how do we get women ready for work, helping them get an employable skill set, training in education was encouraged, an emphasis in non-traditional work, because those are generally, you know, shorter, short training, higher wages, and then career counseling, so a lot of helping women set goals, lofty goals for themselves that included education, career planning, a lot of career guidance, and also in that, which was really, really, really important was financial literacy. We did, I learned, I had to learn a lot about prosperity consciousness versus poverty consciousness. And so, so we did a lot of that work with women that just didn't, you know, this is the era where, you know, women couldn't get their own credit cards. There was a lot, there was a lot of work to do and education to be delivered in, and sometimes we weren't even the people that had it. So we always networking with the community, getting people involved to help our students understand how to survive and thrive as a single, as a single woman oftentimes head of household. The other thing that I think made the single parent displaced homemaker program so incredibly unique and wonderful, was we provided a tremendous amount of emotional support. Most programs had some kind of like women's center energy, you know, we had a wonderful women's center at Rogue Community College in the Grands Pass campus and then also at the Medford campus, but the Medford campus was very small satellite campus. I served for a while on the SOU women's center. We had nice connection between women that went from Rogue over to SOU. There was a nice landing space for them there with the women's center at SOU. You know, we did things and some of these things sound so dated, but they weren't then. What about my, so, you know, we did assertiveness classes and we had support groups and a lot of self-esteem and confidence building. And, you know, on staff in my program, I had bona fide counselors that could not only run support groups but then also provide personal counseling. Our college provided personal counseling in our counseling department. The other thing that the Perkins Funds allowed us to do is it allowed us to provide money for child care and transportation. These are two areas that are still, okay, at that time this is before there was a bus service, particularly in Josephine County and child care is always a need. So our philosophy and our program was we were never going to pay for all the child care because we didn't want to take a line-on amount of someone's budget, but we subsidized their child care. They still had to come up with some of their own money to be able to do things like work, otherwise it would be like, you know, cold turkey when they were done with the program and they got their first job having to pay for child care. And then over, probably in the first couple of years, that emphasis for technology, technical training was really strong. We were being funded by vocational dollars or career technical ed dollars in today's terms. So we started a program called Personal Effectiveness in the Home and what it was was teaching women how to change tires, change oil, clean their VCRs, do basic plumbing projects and electrical projects. And it was great fun. I mean, it was great way too because it's how we connected with women, the women that were few and far between in this region, in particular women in the trades, but we found them and we always would try and get women to be the ones to teach the women how to do these things. And we had some great success stories. We had women who, you know, we'd take them over to the automotive lab. Now, there were no women instructors there, but the male instructors were, you know, they knew what the intention was and they were respectful and they were into helping women learn how to change the oil on their tires. And we had one, several women who chose then to go into automotive. So there was always a dual purpose. We brought them to these areas of the college or we'd bring people in from the field and we would talk about apprenticeship and the kinds of things that women would have to know to path into career path into those areas. So and that class ended up becoming what we called Selected Topics and Technology. And when we changed the course numbering, we focused the class. We still did stuff so that women could be more independent in the home. But we also brought them into manufacturing. We took them on industry tours. We did things that really exposed them to better paying jobs and to dispel the myth that, you know, welding an automotive or dirty jobs. You know, I had one of our women that came through with the program. She always had like big nails, like big red nails, but she could wield a wrench like no one else. And she ended up becoming a service writer for an auto shop, which is exactly what you want. So that, like, I mean, I'm guilty of this. I go into a shop and I'm like, my car kind of makes this worrying noise. You know, and you get this man, manplacating you, which is the term I left to use when a man kind of is like, all right, well, okay, lady. So, oh, a worrying noise, huh, little lady? But a woman as a service writer would be like a worrying noise and would help me feel like I wasn't crazy or incompetent, but that, you know, what a worrying noise could mean in terms of an engine. So, you know, we had women that, you know, got jobs at the department DOT, like at the way station. We had women that went into electronics. We had women that became welders. We had women that went into construction. And we had women that went on to get degrees and like women's studies and, you know, I mean, we had women who went into the human services and people, basically, I would say that a high percentage of women that came through our program, even though it was like a term-long program, decided that education was like fun and interesting and they liked feeding their minds and they were being great role models for their kids. And so it was very common to have a high percentage of our students leave our program and then at the college, getting college credit and then to enroll in college in some either career technical program or two-year degree program or one-year certificate program. So the programs were very, very successful. And in that process, I want to go back to the trades for a second. For a while, there was, well, there is a very strong Oregon Women in the Trades Network and a woman named Connie Ashbrook is the head of that. I think she just got acknowledged a couple of years. She got some big honor for all the work she's done for women in the trades in the state of Oregon. So we used to bring women in a van up to the Oregon Women Trades Conference up in Portland and then one year we thought, hey, let's just do one in Southern Oregon. We worked with Connie Ashbrook, the ESD, the Southern Oregon Educational Service District and we had a good run. We probably ran the women, we did Southern Oregon Women in the Trades Fair every year for I don't even know how long, maybe 15, 20 years. And it, you know, started small, got big, high schools and middle schools loved it because it was a day where they could bring, and it was only for women. And then in the later years, you know, teachers and counselors, particularly in high schools, said, what about men? And let me just shift this for a second. So we had the women, we had the Southern Oregon Trades Fair and one day was for boys and one day was for girls. Because the way the two genders would interface with, you know, lot, pole, we'd had lines, telephone come to come out, we had all kinds of industry, welding and lots of science-based industry, manufacturing, medical areas where oftentimes not many women would choose those trades. That's how it started. But same with young men. After I did my 16 years with the Displaced American Network, I then became a high school outreach coordinator. So kind of my work and kind of that outreach morphed a little bit into high schools. And part of that was realizing that young high school students didn't really know anything about the trades. And there was an issue of recruitment into some of the trades in Southern Oregon. So they want young people and they want both young women and young men to choose, like the electronics industry is booming in this area yet. They were having trouble finding, you know, enough qualified people. And that's, you know, you got Southern Oregon Regional Economic Development working with us too because they realized that if they want to attract business to this area, they need to have a pool of people to hire from. So I'm going to go back to Displaced Homemakers for just a second. So we had, at Rogue Community College, we had two single-parent Displaced Homemakers in both counties, one in Grants Pass campus and one in Medford. Their names were moving on in Josephine County. Bright Futures started out as women in transition and changed to Bright Futures in Jackson County. At one point, Molly started a program called Transitiones, which was learning about American workplace expectations. It was originally for women and it was for the Latino community or Latina community. Now Latinx. But it soon included men too because what would happen is women would come to this class at night and so would their husbands and they would just stand in the hallways. So we eventually merged into women and men and tried to provide opportunities for women to, the Latina women to have time if they needed, if they were in situations of any kind of abuse or anything like that, that they had outlets to be able to be assisted. But mostly it was about, at that time, and again this is like 15 years ago, how to write a resume and how to fill out an application and expectations of cultural eye contact and things that were different for the population, which was in large part immigrant. And what's changed, of course, is over time, is a lot of immigrant families are now their permanent residents here. And so this was a program that was really perfect for that time in this valley. We also had a teen parent program at one point. You know, Southern Oregon won the prize for having the highest number of teen pregnancies in the state. So we had, we found money at the college to run a program called Lynx, which was a teen parent program, which then also became a teen adventure program where we took teens out and did backpacking and stuff. It was a really fun program and it was for teen moms only. And all these programs, eventually I was coordinating all of them, but we wrapped them into a package called Discovery Programs. And the Discovery Programs had a good run at the college. And so you asked a couple questions of me and I would say that the women's movements around Displaced Homemakers was very, very organized. There was a National Displaced Homemakers Network, our sex equity coordinator, which the name was changed to a gender equity coordinator, probably sometime in the mid-90s. They brought all the, with their 17 communcologies in Oregon, 15 of them had single-parent Displaced Homemaker programs. We met together once a quarter for three days. We strategized what did women need, what advocacy, what funding, what grants, how could we collaborate. It was very, very organized. And one of the things that I think was astonishing about it is that all the community colleges in Oregon are very different sizes, numbers of students, et cetera. But the group made a decision early on that whatever money we got from the federal government channeled through the Oregon Department of Education, we would take that amount of money, we would divide it evenly between the 15 programs. It didn't matter if they were urban or rural. And so I thought it was a very feminist, this is the way we're going to do this. So in that, the leader, the early leader of those programs was a woman named Hilda Thompson. He was since passed away, sadly. But she was an amazing visionary leader. She eventually changed her name to A Grace for Amazing Grace. And she led us through really establishing who we were as a presence in the state and gave us guidance but mostly facilitated all the brilliant minds of the women who were the leaders of these programs. So it was a tremendous honor and privilege and learning. Oh, my gosh, it was like getting a degree in women's studies, being with all these coordinators of women's programs around the state. We ultimately wanted to become our own 501c3. So we became an affiliate of the National Displaced Homemakers Network, which at some point in the late 90s changed their name to Women Work exclamation point. And so then we became Oregon Women Work. And it allowed us to apply for funding separate from the state to do small projects. And we had a very robust student based leadership programs, as well as we could spin off and look at things like how to support women in small business. It gave us a little bit more flexibility than just what we could do through the Carl Perkins funding. You also asked about the observations of women at that time period when I first started, came into my professional role. And I know specifically for this project, Women's History Month was a very, very important synergistic point for a lot of women in Jackson County and also in Josephine County. I served on the planning committees in both counties, but I ended up playing a much bigger role in Josephine County because Jackson County was established by some of the women that I think you've already interviewed. You talked of that one performance we did at the Old Pink Church, which is now the Cabaret Theater with Olive Streit and Judy Schaefer. And that was a really fabulous time. And I watched and learned and then brought it to Josephine County. And through the college, it was wonderful. The college was a great venue and central focus point, but there was some great women's groups in Josephine County as well. Women's Crisis Support Team and different medical clinics and people that wanted to support and promote women's history. So we had, every month for many years, a series of arts and music and speakers. We had Stacey Allison, who was the first woman to climb Mount Everest, come and be like the keynote speaker for Women's History Month. She donated all the proceeds from her talk, which was a community talk to the next year's Women's History Month. We got small grants to be able to run some of the workshops that we did. So that was, I think, a really important organizational point. It was kind of informal, but it really connected people to be able to really look at women's status and role. And safety was a huge issue at that time. It still is, unfortunately, especially during the pandemic and the shutdown. I think doing crisis work when I was working with Crisis Intervention Services and the Helpline and Dunhouse and all the ways to help women and children be safe. Really looking at ways that women were oppressed, what the damage of domestic and sexual violence can do to women and children and a family. Shelters were relatively new at that time. Training for police force after sexual assault and domestic violence was kind of groundbreaking. And we were doing that at that time. Just believing women and children was in some ways a new concept. And our agency, Crisis Intervention Services, was a feminist agency. And I put that in quotes because we said it all the time in staff meetings and we had men that worked for our agency as well. But we had debate after debate of what does that mean? What does it mean to be a feminist agency? What does it mean? And what I think was really important was that we were having the conversation and that we were taking that time to look at, okay, so how do we lead? How do we facilitate? How do we create equity for all the voices in the room? Is that what makes it a feminist agency? How do we provide for all the people in need? I mean, even in the Displaced Homemaker's single parent programs, at a certain point men wanted in. And partly because men said things like, I need emotional support and I need career counseling. And that really wasn't happening. There weren't men's programs like that. So at Roe Community College, we ended up, at a certain point it was like we had the one-off man here and there. And then we started becoming, and one of the reasons why we changed our name to the Discovery programs is because we really wanted to seem like we were open to all people. And so we were, and it was great. And those things also changed too every year in the Carl Perkins legislation that we would have to be more inclusive. We served a lot of people coming out of the recovery community and people coming out of incarceration. So it was such very interesting work. And I did that work very, you know, very wholehearted for about 16 years. And I did have a wonderful honor in 2005. I was awarded Oregon Women of the Year Award from the Oregon Women's Commission. And I shared that award with two other women that year. That's how it always is. And, you know, we had a, it's a fundraiser for the Commission for Women. But it was a wonderful moment to really take stock in the work that we had done. The women that had raised me and then the women that I in turn got to raise. And, yeah, it was a great, it was a great period of time. So what were the long-term effects of the outcomes of this work? And I would say that women in transition programs have been discontinued in a majority of the colleges now. In fact, two, three years ago I got asked to speak at one of their quarterly meetings, ones I used to attend all the time myself. And it was a little, you know, a little sad to see that, you know, from 15 colleges it was down to like four or five in the state. But I really appreciated that the colleges that were still have those programs because that meant that they were funding them outside of Perkins funding. They just wanted a history. So myself and another old-timer retired, at this time retired person. We did a, we did a presentation so they could understand the context from whence they came. Nontrad funding has not dried up altogether per se. It's really morphed into STEM, and there is a lot of focus on getting women into STEM and men into STEM as well. But I think that that candle, that flame has not gone away. And I think that we're seeing a lot more young women who are interested in math and science and engineering and technology. And so I think we're on our way. And in fact, you know, at that time when these displaced homeless programs were first starting, there weren't, women were not the majority of students in colleges. Now they are well over 50% of the students and colleges. So I'd like to say, you know, our work did some good. You know, it's like in the old days in domestic violence when I used to go out and do talks, I would say trying to work myself out of a job. Unfortunately that didn't happen. You know, unfortunately we still have a lot that is needed. And you know, right now in our country where I think a lot of social justice issues are really up. And so I'm very excited about the vice presidential pick and the vice and the presidential ticket, the Democratic ticket. I'm very concerned about the protests that have been happening. So I really believe when I think about what changes are still needed is that women in leadership really are important. People of color in leadership are really important. Transgendered people in leadership are really important. Gay and lesbian people in leadership are really important. People who have come from immigrant parents are important. The concept of affirmative action, we are not there yet. And although affirmative action has these categories, it's so important because that bringing that perspective forward to leadership, people who are making the laws and the decisions about American society have got to have a diverse set of experiences and opinions. And I think that feminism and promoting that kind of the foundation of feminism is understanding that our modern structures are seated in this patriarchal structure. And while that was what it has been for a long time, it's time to bring in other perspectives because we will do things a little bit differently and it can happen thoughtfully and intentionally. And that's what I wish for in my professional career. And it's been a little bit what's been a little discouraging about kind of looking at where the country seems to be in terms of racism and oppression and power at this time. Perhaps it's been what needs to happen in order to bring these issues forward and to have a resurgence of how does it look today to change our patterns of leadership and how does it look today to bring forward young leaders like some of the young women in Congress right now are just awesome and amazing and how do we bring their voices forward to bring forth the experience of who represents who's in our country right now. What was really great about the single parent displacement period of time that I was able to be involved in is I got to watch change happen in Oregon. I got to watch students really grow and change and really have a kind of a supportive structure to make substantial changes in their lives that I think became generational because they were then the role models for their children. So I just want to I guess close by just saying that I do think that the role that women have played in Jackson and Josephine County that there's an unusual group of women that have been in this area that kind of we raised each other, we mentored each other, we leave a legacy as well as are looking at young women that are coming up. I mean I'm a professor at SOU so I get to see young women all the time who I'm so impressed with their articulation and their experience and they don't come from the same place of fear or thinking that that they can't do something because of their gender and that to me shows the progress. We still have a long ways to go. However, it's been a fun journey so far and I wish that this project and that these stories inspire women to do good work.