Hospitals & Colleges: The Gender Gap of Their Boards

Just months before  Happy Fernandez died in 2013, she had pulled together a group of prominent women in the nonprofit world (and a journalist, me) to figure out her next great thing.  Happy, a former Philadelphia city councilperson, had just retired from her position as president of the Moore College of Art and wanted to put her energy and skills into advancing women in non-profits.
Her sudden death might have ended her quest. But the women she had assembled felt they should continue what she had started.

Happy Fernandez, Philadelphia Inquirer 

A major moment in that effort  was announced today, with the first in-depth analysis of the boards of the Philadelphia area's 25 largest hospitals and 25 largest universities -- "meds and eds" as these influential institutions are called.
Among the findings: that the boards of only 4 of  the 25 colleges have 50 percent or more women members. Not surprisingly, those are schools with historically female roots, such as Bryn Mawr College. The same was true of hospitals, with those founded by Catholic sisters giving more equitable representation to women.
The study was conducted by the Nonprofit Center at La Salle University's School of Business at the request of our group, which for six years has quietly been working behind the scenes to coax  and cajole area universities and hospitals to put more women on their boards. We have now given ourselves a name–  the  Women's Nonprofit Leadership Initiative. And a website www.wnli.org, where you can learn about the members and find research proving the benefits of board diversity.
Reams of research should put to rest any disputing the value of diversified boards, from guiding institutions to better decision making to recognizing and preventing fraud. What's still too often missing today is the will to make it happen.
The full report shows that many of the region's  largest and most important institutions could do much better.
Here are a couple charts from the report -- read the full report here.
And see a story by the Philadelphia Inquirer here.

New Ways to Play: Cathy Topal

One of the delights of new friendships is what you can learn, especially from people who have already enjoyed a lifetime of experiences. Artist and educator Cathy Topal this week opened my eyes to a new world of exploration to share with young children.

Cathy Topal with a flower that could be a "J"

Cathy, a long time teacher at the Smith College Campus School in Northampton, Mass. has just published her 8th book, Beautiful Stuff from Nature, More Learning with Found Materials. It's co-authored with Lella Gandini, whom Cathy met during her first "mindblowing" visit to the town of Reggio Emilia in the late 1970s.

I had never heard of the schools of Reggio Emilia, Italy which have pioneered a movement across the world to change the interaction of children and their teachers, in part by the use of "found materials" and teachers taking note of the child's  reactions as part of a shared learning.
I was intrigued by the idea, and in particular by Cathy's book on using found objects in play and wanted to learn more about how to  start substituting rocks and acorns and old faucets and ribbons for some of the Legos and toy trucks in the toy chest I keep for my grandchildren.

Cathy says she was first inspired to write a book after experimenting with clay in an eighth grade class. "I wanted them to explore," she said, but before she knew it "clay balls were flying all over the classroom. I resolved that if I'm going to do this I'd better learn what it means to explore."
Eight years later, she published her first book, Children, Clay and Sculpture.
Later, while working at the Campus School, she traveled to Reggio Emilia and was overwhelmed by what she saw.  "First of all, it's not a lot of plastic, primary colors, store-bought posters and materials. It's pretty much natural materials. and children's interactions with those materials. Importantly, it's also documenting the children's interactions – really looking at what the children are doing, transcribing what they say, photographing the process of creating, looking and talking about what you've noticed in those interactions and asking questions. Teachers are part of the process [as could be parents and grandparents] and are learning, too. It's not just  giving children something to learn. It's constructing learning together."

Learning from seeing

Returning home, she began to put this method into practice. "We gathered materials, we sorted materials, we organized spaces. We had the children explore. We had piles of materials.  Bottle caps and all kinds of things.  I was envisioning sorting the materials. But the children just wanted to explore it: what is this? where did it come from? The tone in the room blew me away,"

Some examples: "One little girl, I remember,  had this container of

Arranging nature as she sees it 

ribbons, old ribbons, and had spent a long time touching them, playing with them, mixing them up. Finally, she holds up her work and we see she has made a little marionette, a little dancing girl out of these ribbons. It was so perfect and unexpected. She was four. Another little girl had brought in an old faucet to contribute to the classroom's materials. She says,  'I'm going to make a horse.' She takes the faucet and attaches two beads for eyes and it looks amazingly like a horse!"
If a parent or a grandparent wanted to change the nature of play in their house, what should they think about, I asked?

Cathy recommends collecting with children natural materials–stones, seedpods bark, shells– or having them look through objects in your recycling bin such as bottle caps, things that are broken. Start out by laying them all out and just looking, and then grouping objects in some way– by color, by size, number, etc. "There are all kinds of ways to sort. By talking with the children about how things fit together that brings out descriptive language that touches on math, science, technology–all the  STEM subjects. It's a great way to explore and play with your kids. Once you can see what you have gathered and organized, designing a way to display the discoveries or create something with them seems to emerge naturally."

Some types of activities which she and her collaborator Gandini describe in their Beautiful Stuff from Nature book, are on a video, and include incorporating drawing, building in three dimensions, constructing portraits,  and, frankly, wherever a child's imagination and love of exploration might send them.

Limbering up on logs 

Cathy Topal and  Lella Gandini, are doing a workshop on Beautiful Stuff from Nature on Oct 21 at the Eric Carle museum in Amherst, Mass. Their book is available here or at online booksellers.

Ken Parker—Of Granary Building Fame and More

Ken Parker, one of the early design gurus of Philadelphia and a pioneer in transforming the Fairmount neighborhood, was back in town today for a big birthday celebration.   What should be celebrated are some of his Philadelphia milestones. For one, he bought an old, unused cement Granary Building and put his design studio, KPA (Kenneth Parker Associates), on the ground floor and a spectacular penthouse for himself on the top.

His innovative firm, with a bit of sleight of hand (keep reading) landed such jobs in the 1970s as the interior of the then-new FMC building and a then-new building at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, among others. His visionary ideas were written up in Philadelphia Magazine, the Philadelphia Inquirer and Architectural Digest.
My husband and I met Ken in 1972 when we bought a house he had designed at 1 Pigs Alley in Fairmount, two doors down from where he was then living.  (Pigs Alley was a tiny lane behind our house and his, off of 24th and Perot Streets where there had once been an abbatoir.)

In foreground, the Granary building

We never knew until hearing Ken speak today that he had brought in the neighbors to make the office look busy the day the president of FMC, Ray Tower, came in to seal a deal for KPA to design the interior of the  225,000-square-foot building.
"It's called 'papering the house,'" Ken said. FMC thought they were contracting with a successful, established, "mid-sized" firm when instead it was tiny and just getting going.

Among the neighborhood characters he had brought in that day was Tony Rappa, a rotund, aging Italian who spent most of his days stoop-sitting on Perot street. 

Fortunately, the FMC president didn't stop to ask Tony questions, but also sitting at a drawing board, looking busy was a medical technician and chef, Ray Moderski. "At the bottom of the steps, Mr. Tower took a left instead of a right and he walks back to Moderski," Ken recalled, "And he says, 'What are you working on?'" Ray, who had been drawing a stick-figure version of a house,  says, "Here is my dream house. Here is the living room...."

Kitchen at the Granary

We were fortunate enough to get invited to Ken's penthouse at the Granary a few times, with its lush rooftop conservatory, it’s all-white kitchen in the round, and its luxurious hot tub with its extraordinary view of Philadelphia's skyline (at a time when City Hall was still the tallest building). He threw fabulous parties there. It had a "Gatsby kind of image," Ken recalled, a scene often written up by the press.

Ken's hot tub with city view

"I’ve had a wonderful life," Ken said to the crowd gathered for his 80th birthday. “I’ve loved and I’ve been loved....   "I'm proud to say I lived a respectable life as a gay man when it was not as accepted as it is, thankfully. ...
"I see today as caramelized walnuts on top of a multi-tiered cake which has been my happy life."
Ken continues his design work now in California. You can see it here.

Unretiring in Swaziland

In Swaziland, recently renamed eSwatini, there’s a magistrate of sorts known as the “induna” who settles community disputes.  It’s unpaid but an honor that generally is not refused. And so on a trip to South Africa, with a day over the border to the independent state of eSwatini, we sat with the induna of the Mahlanya community to hear about his work, his life and his family.

The Swazi induna with guide Nana Sambo

This induna, age 77, has been asked to do the job for the last 20 years and you’d think by now he might want to retire. After all, it’s a 24-hour job when anyone can drop in on him at any time of day or night, we were told by our guide Nana Sambo (seated next to him in photo) He runs a farm so the vegetables help support his household, and the king of Swatira sends an occasional gift. It also helps that, unlike the king,  he has only one wife.
Polygamy is fine here, if you can afford it, which the king, age 50, apparently can. He currently has some 10 wives and about 40 kids. (He had 12 wives but two  died recently.  We’re told being one of many wives can be a lonely proposition.)
We walked down a dirt road for about 15 minutes to get to the home of the induna.  It is a walk  that anyone who wants a problem resolved must take, perhaps walking even further. The induna does not settle disputes by phone or email, only in person. Nor does he generally meet with tour groups but this was a special opportunity set up by our group, Overseas Adventure Travel.
Most of the problems that come before him, he told us, have to do with disputes over land, for instance, a neighbor building a fence that encroaches on your property.  Some crimes he must turn over to the judicial system. As he explained, doing his job is a challenge sometimes because he never studied law.
Asked if he plans to retire any time soon, he answered that working “keeps his soul young.”
See a video of him here https://youtu.be/1lyBaoem6pMe,

The wife of the induna