Oral History Program Maresha Bosgieter Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 1 August 2019 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Maresha Bosgieter Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 1 August 2019 Copyright © 2022 by Weber State University, Stewart Library iii Mission Statement The Oral History Program of the Stewart Library was created to preserve the institutional history of Weber State University and the Davis, Ogden and Weber County communities. By conducting carefully researched, recorded, and transcribed interviews, the Oral History Program creates archival oral histories intended for the widest possible use. Interviews are conducted with the goal of eliciting from each participant a full and accurate account of events. The interviews are transcribed, edited for accuracy and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewees (as available), who are encouraged to augment or correct their spoken words. The reviewed and corrected transcripts are indexed, printed, and bound with photographs and illustrative materials as available. The working files, original recording, and archival copies are housed in the University Archives. Project Description The Beyond Suffrage Project was initiated to examine the impact women have had on northern Utah. Weber State University explored and documented women past and present who have influenced the history of the community, the development of education, and are bringing the area forward for the next generation. The project looked at how the 19th Amendment gave women a voice and representation, and was the catalyst for the way women became involved in the progress of the local area. The project examines the 50 years (1870-1920) before the amendment, the decades to follow and how women are making history today. ____________________________________ Oral history is a method of collecting historical information through recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account. It reflects personal opinion offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable. ____________________________________ Rights Management This work is the property of the Weber State University, Stewart Library Oral History Program. It may be used freely by individuals for research, teaching and personal use as long as this statement of availability is included in the text. It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Bosgieter, Maresha, an oral history by Lorrie Rands, 1 August 2019, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. Maresha Bosgieter Circa 2019 1 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Maresha Bosgieter, conducted on August 1, 2019, at Weber State University, by Lorrie Rands. Maresha discusses her life, her memories, and the impact of the 19th Amendment. Alyssa Dove, the video technician, and Tyler Brinkerhoff, are also present during this interview. LR: Today is August 1, 2019. We are at the Stewart Library at Weber State University. It’s about a quarter after ten in the morning and we are with Maresha Bosgieter for the Women 2020 project here at the Stewart Library. I’m Lorrie Rands conducting the interview and Alyssa Dove is with me as well as Tyler Brinkerhoff. Alright, so, first of all, thank you again. I know I’ve said that like five times this morning, but thank you. Let’s start with when and where you were born? MB: I was born July 19, 1975 in Ogden, so a lifelong Ogden resident for the most part. I mean, I ventured to Roy, and Clinton, but that’s still close enough to Ogden, I think. LR: I think they will disagree with you. MB: I know. I mean, the general area. LR: You are correct. So you mentioned you have been here all your life, here in Ogden. So where exactly did you live when you were growing up in Ogden? MB: I was the fourth of nine children. Lot of kids in my family. For the most part, I grew up on 2nd Street on Childs Avenue. I did have a little bit of a transient life. We’d move away but we always came back. 2 LR: So when you would move away where would you move to? MB: Well, my mom had some mental health issues growing up, so we lived in poverty and were one of those family that went to food banks and shopped at the DI and all those fun things. I don’t know, they just liked to move and so it just seemed like every six months we’d move away. It was always in Utah, but it could be Salt Lake, it could just be somewhere local. We’d live somewhere for maybe six months, but my parents also did not take very good care of the house. It was more of the hoarding situation I grew up in, so, whether it was that they let pipes freeze or the landlords came in and saw the mess that was made, whatever it was, we would all end up getting kicked out and moving back to my grandma’s house. So the address that I lived at most my life was my grandma’s house, because that was like our home base, where we always ended up coming back to. LR: Ok. So is that where you would go to school from? MB: Yeah. That’s another interesting story. I had an interesting childhood, trust me. I went to kindergarten at Lynn Elementary School, which was right over on 4th Street. After that my mom decided to take us all out of school and so she “homeschooled” us. She didn’t really, but we could only watch channel seven or eleven and kind of run wild. I actually didn’t end up going back to school until I started sixth grade. I should have been in seventh, but they thought it would be easier to transition me into sixth grade than it would seventh grade. So it was very different. We found out years later when we actually had a couple of my younger siblings taken away from my parents that the state was always trying to 3 find my parents because they didn’t have the kids in school and lots of other factors. I think that may have attributed a lot to the moving as well because they didn’t have us in school. I was very lucky though, when we did finally start back into school, I attribute it to we must have a lot of natural smarts in my family; like the schoolwork wasn’t bad, but I could tell you it was very difficult trying to go from running wild all day long to having a full structured day at school. LR: A little bit of culture shock. MB: Yeah. I think probably the first six months, I checked out sick after lunch every single day. My parents just didn’t think it was important. Like I said, I think my mom definitely suffered from some mental health issues, and my dad always worked a couple low paying jobs, so he was always at work. Luckily, there was no abuse or anything like that, but I would say definitely a lot more neglect with the kids, just kind of running wild and trying to fend for themselves. It was interesting. LR: My first thought was: what are some of your memories of this? I mean, there has to be some memories of the moving and just trying to find some structure. Cause I think we naturally try to find structure in our life, even as children, so I’m curious about what some of your memories are of that. MB: I don’t know that there was anything to do with structure, except my grandma, and my grandpa at the time. He passed away in 1983, but I think they were the structure in our life, because when we would leave somewhere, we always came back to them. They would still visit us and took us for trips to spend the night with them, those types of things. There’s just lots of different, interesting memories. 4 I’m just trying to think. My mom was very different. She didn’t believe in doctors and medicine. We were not immunized, either. She thought that was the government's way of keeping diseases around, instead of curing from them. When we were kids and we would get sick—and I don’t know how somebody never died in my family, honestly—but we would get Dr. Pepper and soda crackers, or herbs and melaleuca oil or something like that, or go to the chiropractor. She thought a chiropractor could cure anything. There was even a time we just had record players with magnets spinning around all the time. I have a hard time buying into anything natural anymore, just from that. We never went to the doctor, didn’t go to school, we just ran wild around the neighborhood and did whatever we wanted to. Then we would end up getting kicked out of somewhere and they’d put everything in storage, pay it for a month or two and then not pay it anymore. We lost everything that we owned over and over and over again, as kids, so I think I probably have like four picture from my childhood that came from my grandparents. It was different, and I think I’ve probably blocked some memories out, but it just was what it was. You didn’t think anything of it. LR: I understand that, I do. You said you were the fourth one. I come from a large family, too, but I only really grew up with five. So I’m wondering how that was like some of your memories of growing up in a large family? MB: By the way, when I was in seventh grade, after we moved to Woodruff, Utah for a year, we finally actually stayed put back in Ogden. My great-aunt passed away right around the corner from my grandma’s so then we stayed put after that. 5 There’s a twenty year difference between the oldest and youngest child in my family. So there was a really big gap. Obviously the last couple were already out of the house by the time the younger ones were born, and I think probably about the time my older sisters were in junior high or high school, they had wanted to stay with my grandma, and so they were kind of out of the house as well. My younger two sisters are separated by six years from the other chunk of us, so there was my older brother, me, my younger brother, and then two girls,that were a couple years apart. It was mostly that chunk, of kids for the majority of my memories. I was the tom boy. I hung out with the boys, ran around, jumped off roofs and all that fun stuff, whatever we decided to do. My older sisters were there, finally, when I started junior high. They would try to take care of you a little bit more, fix your hair, try to make sure you had clothes or those types of things. They didn’t necessarily live with us for a lot of the time, but they kind of took on, I think, almost more of a mothering role at some point. Then with my younger sisters, I remember my second youngest sister, when she was born, my mom— and again, there were six years between the last two set of girls and the ones before them—my mom got blood clots and so she had to go back into the hospital and so I almost more raised that little sister. Somebody had to kind of step up and take care of her and I was just at that age. I used to treat her like she was my daughter, fix her hair and take her around everywhere with me. But those are the two actually that we ended up, later, taking away from my parents. 6 TB: You mentioned your grandparents’ role in your development as a child and I’m just curious what influence they left on you, looking back now? MB: My grandpa passed away when I was eight, so, there were early memories of him, but after that it was more just my grandma. I would say she was a really big, key influence in our lives for sure. People often say, “I don’t know how you guys turned out normal.” After hearing lots of details from my childhood. I’m like, “Well, nobody’s normal.” But I think that she probably was the only thing that made there be some normalcy. She was that steady force that was always there and we knew was always there to support us and take over if there was a problem. Very caring and loving. She was a hard worker. She actually worked at Defense Depot Ogden and had a career when my mom and my aunt were younger; which was very different at that time of history, for a women to be out of the house working and having a career and she would travel a lot with DDO. I didn’t necessarily know her during that part of her life. Once I got to know my grandma, she was working at a chiropractor’s office—that’s why we used to go to the chiropractor all the time. She worked until she was eighty-something years old. Finally when she quit it was because she’d gotten in a car accident and broken her leg and she had a hard time getting around. Just always a wonderful, caring person that tried to be there and put a little bit of stability into our lives. LR: Going along with that, what women did you look up to as a young girl? MB: You know, as a young girl, we just moved around so much,and with me not attending school, that I didn’t necessarily see a lot outside of my family so 7 obviously my grandma was really my only role model. I would say the first time I really remember looking up to someone was probably not until high school. So obviously when I started back to school, my parents still did not care about school or consider it to be a priority. So if you were sick or had a sliver they would ask, “Do you need to stay home?” They didn’t care if we flunked, so obviously I did not have the greatest grade point average in school. But I remember when I was in high school, about my sophomore year things changed. My freshman year grades were not super fabulous and I didn’t really care about school, it was more about hanging out with my friends. My sophomore year I found business in high school and specifically Sharon Roghaar, who was an accounting teacher. It was amazing, I just suddenly found something that I connected with that made me care a little more. So she was such a role model for me. I serve on the intergenerational poverty committee for Weber County, and I’ve told them about my past experience a little bit. I’ve said, “When you grow up in poverty you don’t have a lot of self-confidence. You don’t feel like you’re worth anything and you really have to have somebody in your life that makes you believe that you can be something more.” I would say that she [Sharon Roghar] was a big, key factor in that for me, because she really did believe in me and thought I was amazing. I took every business class and every accounting class and did independent study and was teacher’s aide and would go compete in accounting competitions and they actually chose me as the business Sterling 8 Scholar my senior year. I’m sure I had the lowest GPA ever for a Sterling Scholar. That was one of those key things for me. LR: What high school did you go to? MB: Ben Lomond. LR: Ok. Which makes sense. 2nd Street. I live right by there. MB: I think we talked about that. LR: Ironically, you were born the same year as my sister, so you graduated in 1993? MB: I graduated in 1994. LR: Oh, that’s right. I normally asked if you were encouraged to pursue an education, but from what you've said it wasn’t a priority when you were younger, and it wasn’t until really your high school experience that you started really enjoying school. Did you have the opportunity to go to college. MB: I did. So obviously with all of the accounting stuff I did, that was what I was going to do. Neither of my parents graduated from college, I think they both went for a couple of years, and none of my siblings had gone to college either. I did start the following year, and obviously received financial aid. One of the amazing things about programs that we have now like “Upward Bound” and those types of things is support, because that was completely different for me. As soon as I graduated I was out of the house. Which is another struggle, trying to survive and jobs and paying rent and all of that fun stuff. I started at Weber State the following fall and started taking general classes and I also stared taking accounting classes, which I have to admit bored me to death after what I had already done. I was so far past that, so it was hard to go back to the very basics and people not 9 understanding debits and credits for me, so it frustrated me. I did go to school for a couple years, and again probably was not as focused as I should have been. I think there was also not having a lot of family support or people pushing you towards it, and when you’re getting financial aid, you’re not paying for it yourself, you don’t necessarily have any skin in the game or anything like that that you have to live up to. So I mean, I did alright, but I went for a couple years, did some generals. I ended up meeting my future husband, and we actually took a couple of classes together and those types of things. But again, trying to move around and pay rent and juggle jobs, and I didn’t have a car. I would have to take public transportation and it was definitely a little bit more difficult getting around. In the spring on 1996, my older sister had a son and I ended up moving in with them and staying home to watch her son. I started working full time in the evenings as well, and ended up not going back to finish school. LR: Where were you working? MB: I’m trying to think which one. I juggled jobs a little bit, too. I worked in a group home in the evening in Riverdale. I did that for a while and I was living in Roy, then I started working at Sears Portrait Studios, and I worked there for a year and a half. Then my sister actually worked at Merrill Lynch, and so in the spring of 1998 I started working at Merrill Lynch as well. I started part-time, helping with cost-basis and those kind of things, and it was just such a natural fit for me. It just seemed to work out so well that I think within the first month they had hired me on full time and I started as a client associate. I started helping the financial advisors taking care of clients and then within the first year I was registered. You 10 have to take your series 7 and all of those different exams to be able to take orders to sell stocks and bonds and mutual funds. I just progressed from there, I actually ended up being at Merrill Lynch for fifteen years and I worked with the same team that my sister did, and I have to say, that’s where I met another really big influence on my life, Dwight Baldwin, one of the financial advisors. When I started working I had no idea “What I’m going to be when I grow up.” No aspirations, dreams, whatever. But Dwight could see that it was a great fit and he was just one of those naturally supportive people and was just always pushing me to do something more and keep progressing. I worked as a client associate for him for years, and I was registered. I did end up getting married during that time as well to my fiancé and Dwight was kind of pushing me to be a financial advisor. I wasn’t quite sure if I was ready or not, but I ended up having a child—two kids eventually—but as I progressed along, Dwight just kind of took me along with him. He became the branch manager at the Merrill Lynch in Ogden, so I ended up being his assistant and the office manager as well as helping his clients. At that point, he was still always prodding me and pushing me that I should be a financial advisor, that it was a great fit for me. I would work with his clients and some of them liked to talking to me so much they would take advice and place orders me even when he was in the office, When my kids were little it wasn’t really a great fit, but he still was trying to push me along that path and so he had me join a civic club, the Ogden Noon Exchange Club, just to get out and 11 get involved in the community and those types of things. I think that’s kind of where I started really volunteering, which has never stopped. I’m actually a past-President of that club. It was a fun club, just the neatest old men. We met for lunch and a speaker every Tuesday at noon at the Ogden Golf and country Club, and we would also go out and get involved in things. I think I joined my first board while I was in the Noon Exchange Club, I was on the Family Counseling Service board, and I was the President of the club as well. Then in 2010, I think, Dwight finally convinced me to go on the path of becoming a financial advisor, so I ended up working with more clients and having to get out in the community. At that point you have to prospect and network. I’ll say this, though, I talked about growing up in poverty, where you don’t feel like you can be anything or have a lot of self-confidence. I do have to give my ex-husband a lot of credit in that he was one of those people that supported me and loved me unconditionally and let me grow into who I am. Unfortunately at some point who I became changed from what he needed and we weren’t quite as compatible anymore. So I went down the path of being a financial advisor, got really involved in the Chamber of Commerce, I joined another civic club, the Ogden Rotary Club, and dug right in and was just doing a little bit of everything. The Rotary Club was more of a prospecting thing for me as well, just because some of my clients were in it. But this is when I discovered my real passion for helping others, volunteering and being involved. I was always doing something at the Chamber, I was on a lot of different committees. I actually got the “Volunteer of the Year” 12 award from the Chamber in 2012. As you get out and start connecting with people who getting to know people, are involved, I think you start getting pegged, like “Hey, you would be a great board member,” and so I started, again, being involved on more boards. The Rotary Club asked me to be President-Elect, so I was President in that club as well. I’ve been involved in so many things, like the Ogden Nature Center. I was on the Nature Center board for seven years, and I’m past-President of that board as well. With Rotary we would go and volunteer at different places, so I actually used to volunteer at CCS, and my kids have been going there since they were little. I would take them to volunteer and I just loved it. Every chance that I got, always out doing something and dragging my kids along with me, which they loved and hated all at the same time. I think a few thing happened that changed my path at one point. I got a divorce, like I said. I think that I had grown into a different person and that I was a lot more sure of who I was and what I wanted to do, and was very outgoing and social, which I didn’t used to be. That was not necessarily a fit for my ex-husband anymore, I remember it led to a lot of issues between us. We tried counseling and everything else, but I think who we were and what we needed to be happy had changed and so we decided to separate in late 2011. That was when I was getting the award from the chamber and he wanted to stay with me until I got that, so we didn’t actually tell anybody until after the dinner in February 2012. It was very amicable, which was nice. But getting a divorce changes your focus and the importance of things in your life. 13 As a woman financial advisor I think was very much easier for me to get out and talk to people and get in front of people. They were a lot more willing to talk to me> I think when a male financial advisor goes up to someone and is like, “Hey, I’m a financial advisor,” people want to run the other way because they don’t want to talk to him, right? They were willing to talk to me, but I think on the flip side, something that I began to notice is that there’s still a difference in how serious people take women in a professional manner. It’s not everyone, but there was enough of it that it was uncomfortable and disheartening. As a financial advisor I would invite somebody out to lunch or coffee to go talk, like the normal thing, and, I was never allowed to pay, which I guess is not a bad thing. There was definitely a small degree of not taking me seriously and then, possibly because I was a little bit more attractive, I don’t know it just felt like on top of not taking you seriously people just wanted to flirt a little bit. I’m like, “That’s really not why we’re here.” I’ve had people ask me, my current—I’m really bouncing around a lot here. LR: You’re fine. MB: You know, my current fiancé will ask me when this whole #MeToo thing was starting, he said, “I just don’t get it. Why did all these women not say something and why are they all coming out of the woodwork now?” I just said, “If every woman reported everything offensive that ever happened to them or every comment that somebody ever made or advance that anyone ever made, you would be pigeonholed into some corner. It’s just reality as a woman. It just happens all the time. I think the key thing with the #MeToo is that when some 14 woman finally did come out and say something about what happened to her, they tried to shame her, or say she was lying or had some ulterior motive, that’s when other women are like, ‘No,’ and finally say, ‘It’s important for us to come and back them up with what we know.” That was my explanation for him because of what women face all the time. So it was a little disheartening and uncomfortable sometimes in that profession. When I got a divorce, priorities change and, maybe a callous thing to say, but making rich people richer just didn’t seem to be fulfilling me anymore, so at that point I decided that I really wanted to do something different and would love to work in non-profit. I was on lots of different boards and volunteering at tons of places and I thought, “Why don’t I just make it my career instead of trying to squeeze it in on the side of my career?” I was on the board for Catholic Community Services at that time and I just mentioned to the director, “You know, I’m kind of thinking about making the move to non-profit and if you hear about anything, let me know.” She thought about it and then she said, “We might have something coming up. It’s definitely not the level that you should probably be at, but we might have an opening and let me get back to you.” Things just kind of worked out. As I was getting ready to transition I had people ask me, “Well, are you going to go be a director somewhere?” I’m like, “I have never worked a non-profit, I don’t want to go in and mess something up. I want to get my feet wet and just make sure it’s a good fit and I know what I’m doing and I’m not going to completely ruin something.” 15 I left Merrill Lynch after fifteen years in 2013 and started as the volunteer coordinator and doing development at Catholic Community Services and loved it. Even now, people will say, “How do you work in this situation and see all these sad stories and work here every day and not just go home crying?” I’m like, “You have to steel yourself for like four months.” You want to do everything for everyone and it breaks your heart, but you get to a point where, “We’re making a difference.” and know that you can do what you can only do and hopefully connect them to other resources. I think there were a lot of good things that were a natural fit for me, and moving over with my business experience and my contacts were very helpful. I think a lot of times people who have only been in non-profit can’t necessarily see the business side of it and wonder, “Why can’t we just do whatever we need to do and spend money, why do we have to cut staff when the donations dry up?” Having been on the other side and also having been asked for sponsorships, I understood the flow of how many different non-profits are coming to a lot of these different companies and banks and organizations trying to get them to make donations and so I think that was helpful for me having been on both sides of it. Then obviously with my childhood for my past, I think that’s probably why I have such a connection to non-profit in community, especially with lower income individuals and children. LR: I have a couple questions, from what you’ve been saying. I can’t decide which order I’m going to ask them in. So how did you balance your home life with your career, cause you were doing both and I’m curious how you did that. 16 MB: So, when I was at Merrill Lynch, obviously before I was a financial advisor, it was just a very set job, you know, nine to five or eight to four, whatever I was working. Before I had kids I always used to make fun of those moms that couldn’t leave their kids for like a week to go on vacation or something. “They’re going to be fine, get over it, just leave.” When you have kids it is a little different. My son was born and my sister actually had a little boy ten months before that, so I said, “Where do you take him to daycare?” We still worked together and she had been taking him to this daycare center and, there was a woman there who actually had been watching her older son at that same daycare. I was lucky enough to have three months off maternity leave, he was born in September of 2001 and he started back in January of 2002. Within the first couple of weeks he had RSV and pneumonia which was a horrible situation. The lady that we knew at the daycare, her little girl was only a month older than my son, and she was wonderful, but she had a lot of gripes about the daycare center and them letting kids come when they were sick and all those kinds of things that she kind of felt led to the situation. My son was in the hospital for four days and her daughter ended up having to be in the hospital as well and so once they were done with that, she approached my sister and said, “Hey, I’m not going to do this anymore, I’m going to stay home and watch kids in my house, are you guys interested in having your kids come and I can watch them at my house?” “Yes, for sure.” It was amazing because we ended up having other kids, like almost at the same time—I only had two, but she was like a second mother to them, so it was 17 wonderful. It is such a stressful thing for a mom to have to leave their child, especially at daycare centers. There are positives and negatives about centers, I mean getting to know people and interacting with other kids is such a great thing for children, but a lot of time they do have turnover issues, and taking them to somebody’s home, you never know what you’re getting into either because there’s not necessarily someone else there to witness what's happening. She was wonderful and so she actually watched my kids until Hunter was starting Kindergarten. We didn’t live close to her, she lived in Ogden and I lived in Clinton at this point, so I had to move him to another daycare that would take him to and from school, but my daughter continued to go there. So I was very lucky in that I had a great situation during the day that I completely trusted and she would do amazing things with the kids. Once I transitioned to being a financial advisor, that led to a lot of extra events in the evenings. My husband was home so luckily he was able to kind of take over when I was busy and really work with the kids. But I was always very involved. Since the time my son started school, I was always a room mom and in PTA and chair of the book fair. Even though I was working, it was always very important to me to still be there and be involved with the kids, so I was always very involved with the schools and the teachers and however I could help. My son is a senior, and my daughter will be a sophomore this year, but I was always the mom that would go help out on field trips, chaperone, and bring in donations and whatever the teachers needed. There are pros and cons to being a working mom. I am very busy because like I mentioned, I’m on a lot of boards. I probably 18 couldn’t name all the boards and committees that I’m on sometimes, so there are lot of different things that we’re always off doing. You do have a little bit of, “Do I spend enough quality time with the kids? Do I not?” But I also like to think and I can tell especially for my daughter that it’s been an example as well for her to learn about being involved and being a part of the community and making the changes that you want to see. I think she does look up to me and respect that. They have been dragged along to things, they’re like natural- made little board members already because they’ve been to so many board meetings and events and committee meetings and all those things. So they’ll have no problem rolling right into that. It’s pretty funny. LR: The other question I had was, since you decided to start volunteering, what is it about volunteering that is so fulfilling for you? MB: You know I love our community, I love Ogden and Weber County, we have such an amazing community and there are so many amazing organizations and people. On the flip side, there’s so much need and so many things that need to be addressed. I just feel like I’m one of those people—I think there are two kinds of people who join boards. People who just want to be on a board because they want the name recognition or they want something for their resume and they’re going to show up once in a while. I’ve always been one of these other people that, if I’m going to commit to something than I commit to it and I’m not afraid to speak my mind, but it’s never in a confrontational way either. If I don’t think something’s right than I’m definitely going to speak up and I also am one of those people that will always step up and take charge and try to make sure that we can 19 resolve things. So for me, a definite big part of the volunteering and the boards and the committees and all of those things that I do is just trying to improve the community that we’re in and make it a better place and make positive changes. There’s so many different things that I can contribute to and have great input on, and no one person has all of the great ideas. I think it takes everybody coming in and changing things and shaking things up and bringing in new ideas and thoughts and suggestions about how we can improve things. The only way that we can ever make a change is to go be part of that change. It feels amazing when you can see that something is working. Obviously my work now is almost like an extension of volunteering for me, although I still do that a lot as well. I guess I could go into that a little bit more. I started at CCS six years ago doing something different and then I ended up being full-time just doing development. When I started at CCS we actually were in the hole about $250,000 a year on our budget, which is not a good place to be. We’re a state-wide agency, so the executive board is actually in Salt Lake for CCS, and it had been something they had discussed about shutting down the Northern Utah operations because they were losing money, but it’s such a needed organization: we are feeding people. I’m always telling people, “You have to address those basic needs before you can expect somebody to move forward in other areas of their life. You can talk about budgeting and improving jobs and all of that kind of stuff as much as you want, but if you’re not addressing the basic needs of food and housing and clothing first, they’re not going to put time into any of those other efforts.” Having been in a situation where I’ve used a pantry as well as just 20 getting to know all of our clients, it is such an amazing, needed thing that we do. So I came on board and again and it was a natural fit just because of all the contacts I had in the community, from Merrill Lynch. I knew a lot of influential people, people from boards and the Chamber and Rotary, I knew so many people involved in different businesses and those types of things, so it was very easy for me to get out and promote what we do and who we are. I think that was a big part of the situation that they were actually in at CCS when I started was nobody knew who they were or what they did. If they knew we were out there, they thought we were the Utah Food Bank, or they knew we were Catholic Community Services, but they had no idea what we did. For me a big part was going out and just making sure that people understood who we were and a big part of selling our story is bringing people in. Individuals I think have a pre-conceived notion about who uses a food pantry or who uses food stamps. It’s somebody lazy that just doesn’t want to work, they’re just looking to get a free handout and that is so not the case. Things have changed a little bit, but I think when I started we were helping about 2,300 households a month. Some of those are individuals, we have a lot of seniors, a lot of single moms with the kids, a lot of working families that just don’t make living wages. But if you can bring people in and show them who are and what we do and actually show them the faces of the people that we’re helping and just walk them around that building and see the immense amount of food that we’re dealing with, it just instantly changes perceptions and people want to be involved and they want to help out. It was a slow process, it took a little while to get 21 started, but just bringing people in and again helping them want to be involved, whether it was through financial donations or volunteering or connecting us to somebody else who might be able to help. We were lucky enough to be able to turn that around and we have actually been able to put some money away into reserves the last few years, which is a drastic change. Some of our programs in Salt Lake started struggling and then Northern Utah was the strong part of the operation, which was wonderful. I’ve been the director for about fours years now, and it’s just amazing to see the change of awareness in the community about what we do and really we are looked at as one of the key social service providers in the community. Whenever there’s a committee—and that’s part of why we’re so busy, too—but whenever there’s a committee or a group that is focusing on a problem or somebody’s going to have a resource fair or whatever, they look to some of those key partner organizations and CCS is at the top of people’s lists a lot more, which is so amazing to see, just the turn around and the change and again, the awareness. We run a childhood hunger program, and when I go out and people say there are no hungry kids in Ogden, I’m like, “You just have no idea.” Everybody’s been through things in their lives, whether it was a poverty issue or something that happened to them while they were a teenager, loss of family, suicide, whatever it was, there are so many different stories. I think if you haven’t somehow been affected by poverty or witnessed it first hand, I think it’s easy for people to just think that it’s not there, or again, that it’s just those individuals in the community who are looking for a hand-out. So to be able to go out and help 22 try to change perceptions on that and just change people’s minds and open it up so they can see people in situations and families and stories instead of just a person that’s standing on their corner with their two kids in front of a store begging for a handout. I mean there are just so many different stories behind all of these people and why they are who they are. That’s been a neat part of being involved for sure. TB: This goes back to your first work experience that you mentioned at a home. What led you to working at that and what were some of your experiences working at that home? MB: I don’t even remember how I started there, I can’t remember if it was just a job listing in the newspaper, because back in the day you actually looked in the newspaper to find a job. LR: I remember this. MB: I know, Just like typewriters, right? I don’t think that I actually knew anybody when I started there, it was just I needed a job and there it was, so I started. I worked in a residential home and there were four disabled individuals who lived in the home permanently. We would do shifts addressing needs and taking them to programs and doing community things and shopping and cooking meals and all that kind of stuff. It was a great experience, I think, in getting to know those individuals on a deeper level than just what you sometimes witness. This one young man that lived there, and I think if you didn’t ever have the opportunity to get to know him, you probably just would have been horrified by him and his behavior. He was non-verbal and he was the sweetest kid when you got to know 23 him, but he would have behaviors where he would just go off. Like he would just be doing something and all of a sudden he would turn and attack you. He was really slow, so it wasn’t like he was going to hurt you. But I think if you didn’t have the opportunity to get to know what an amazing person he was when you weren’t witnessing those kind of behaviors, I think it’s very easy to see people and make judgments without knowing a lot of the deeper story or how they are at other times, or some of the situations again that may have led to that experience. I think that helped me, because I don’t judge people. I don’t judge their behavior just off the top of the bat. A couple of people that work at CCS actually have experience working with individuals with disabilities. We serve a large population of individuals with disabilities at CCS, whether they’re mental or physical. I think for us, recognizing that some people don’t have a lot of control over the way they are and the things they do is very helpful as well. There are some amazing people that come out to the CCS and it’s so fun to get to know them. There are a couple that are a pain, and we get it, and I tell people all the time, “Some people are just a little off. They’re just never going to be what we consider ‘normal’ or ‘mainstream.’” They don’t seem like they’ve got a disability or anything is wrong with them, but they’re just not what we as a society consider normal. People look at them and think they’re annoying or they’re obnoxious and unfortunately that’s kind of a situation that leads them to be trapped in a certain place where they’re not going to be able to change their circumstance,, they are always going to need a little bit of extra help to get by. 24 They’re not going to go out and get some amazing job that is going to make them suddenly be successful and not need to come to us for help. We also know, however, that everybody can be respectful, so we put up with a lot of people is behaviors fairly willingly knowing that there are a lot of stories and situations that led people to where they are and how they behave, but we also expect them to treat us with respect just like they do everyone else. It works both ways but some people don’t like that very much cause they feel that having an explosion or getting mad is going to get them what they want, which it doesn’t. Not with us anyway. Other people, it just kind of calms them down a little bit when we’re like, “We’re giving you respect, if you can’t be respectful, then you can leave and come back when you can be. We’re not turning you away, we will help everyone, but you need to treat us with respect like we’re treating you with respect.” All of my team are so amazing at dealing with those situations that I don’t even have any second thoughts when somebody tries to call me to complain about one of my team discriminating against them or being rude or turning them away or saying mean things. I am very lucky that I have such an amazing group that all care and are there because they love what they do and I’m able to back them up just right from the get-go. TB: You mentioned some of your first experiences of working on those community/civic clubs and that you were in the leadership of those. What were some of your best experiences and some of your worst experiences in that leadership position? 25 MB: You know it’s pretty amazing to join one of those clubs, there are just some outstanding, amazing people. When you join something like the Rotary Club and the President of Weber State is always a club member, and just all these amazing people from the community you may have heard about, the wonderful things they’ve done or see them in these areas of leadership, it’s pretty daunting when you first come in to be a part of a club like that. Then to get to know everyone on a personal level are able to contribute by helping direct the clubs a little bit. I would say some of the best things that probably came out of that experience is self assurance. I’m not worried talking about in front of people at all, so I can’t say that it changed that for me, but I think it made me more comfortable. As the president you actually run all of the weekly meetings, and the Ogden Rotary Club has a hundred members, and any given week we usually have about fifty members present, so getting to be up there and interact with other people and talk and tell jokes and laugh things off when something happen, I think is such an amazing experience. I think people are naturally scared of talking in front of others and public presentations and speaking, and it takes practice to get comfortable at that. I will still get up and emcee at my CCS breakfast where we have five hundred people in attendance, and people are like, “How do you...? Are you nervous? Are you worried?” I’m like, “No, I seriously write my speech like the night before and I’m like, what’s the worse that can happen? I fall up or down the stairs and I can make a joke and laugh it off and it will be fine.” 26 The clubs are amazing just because you really get a chance to have a little bit of direction and input on things that are going on in the community. I’m also going to tell you the worst part about that role. As the president, you’ve got all of these different committees underneath you and people are supposed to take on key positions with service or speakers or treasurer and all these different things. I think the most difficult part of taking on any leadership position is if you have people underneath that don’t do what they’re supposed to do, it puts a lot of the burden back onto you as the president. But again that kind of plays into my whole attitude of I’m not going to commit to something if I can’t do what I’m supposed to because I’ve seen that so much and it does leave the burden on everybody else. TB: I do have one more question. So you were talking about with your children’s school and how you’re involved with the PTA and all of that. You mentioned you growing up with your parents and your schooling experience. I don’t know how to phrase this. I’m kind of trying to think. MB: Like not having that role model, how do you learn to be a parent and a contributing member of society? TB: Yes. MB: You know, there are a lot of siblings in my family that I think have held on to a lot of bitterness and anger about the things that happened when we were kids, and how it went. I don’t think that that does anything for you except destroys your life going forward. All it does is burden you and make you an unpleasant person to be around. You can never change the past, all you can do is learn from it. Every 27 experience is just a learning opportunity. So for me it was a learning opportunity of what I didn’t want to do and how I didn’t want to be, for sure. LR: You had mentioned a few of your mentors that you had as you have gotten older. Now, as you’re more established in your career and you’re doing. What you love to do, who are some of the mentors that you have now? Specifically women, but sometimes your biggest mentors are men, so that’s the question. MB: You know, I think people come into your life for a reason at a time when you need them, for sure, so there have been so many people that have come into my life along the way. The other thing I was thinking about it, when I talk about everybody having a story; I think it’s very easy for us to look at people, “prominent” people in the community, like the Jeanne Halls or whoever and just think, “Wow, they’re so amazing, composed and put together and they must have had a perfect life,” without knowing all of their stories. Everybody’s had experiences that make them who they are. Some of them may be caused by themselves and some of them may be cause by exterior influences, but they all contribute to who they are now. There are so many amazing women in our community for instance, I am very good friends with Jeanne Hall. I love her, she is such an amazing, caring woman. If you ever get to hear her background story, you realize why, because she hasn’t always been in the situation that she is now. But she is so caring and involved and right on top of things. There are other amazing people that you run into in the community, like I love Marcia White. I do, I think she is such an amazing person to be able to be in the position and take that leadership role and 28 be confident in who she is and expressing herself and caring. I remember when she first joined the city council, I remember her going out and having conversations with people, one on one conversations, trying to find out who you were and what you were about and what your thoughts were. It wasn’t just the campaigning thing for her, it was like she really wanted to know. Jan Zogmaister is also amazing. I think any woman involved with politics is a role model. It’s obviously a little bit harder to be the leaders starting to come up into those different roles and maintain your composure. I know there are definitely things that happened while she was in office that were a little harder to deal with or could be a little bit infuriating if you feel like you’re being attacked and prodded. But she’s such an amazing person in that she doesn’t, at least. I’ve never witnessed it, she doesn’t let things bother her. I love when people are able to stay focused and worry about the issues and not get involved in the frath and the fray and again, are trying to make the world a better place. So for me, more of my women that I look up to are people locally in the community who are making a difference here as opposed to a national level. Another person that I love, and she would not consider herself a role model in any way, shape, or form, is Kimberly Green with America First. She’s got a great story. She’s in the executive leadership for the Chamber, has been promoted to vice president at America First, and I’m sure people look at her, and think, “Wow, she’s so put together and has such an amazing life with and her kids and everything else.” Again, not knowing of the struggles that she had to get there. But she’s just such a wonderful, positive, caring, fun person. One of my 29 besties for sure, and definitely a role model because she does do so much for the community. Nothing in our community is going to change without everybody working together and partnering and trying to make the world a better place. LR: So how do you think education empowers women? MB: I think it’s a very important thing. I do regret that I didn’t finish and I would love to go back and finish my degree. I think that’s almost one of those things nowadays that you feel is a detriment if you don’t have it, and for women especially, there’s that difference. I’m not a feminist by any means, we’re all in this together and it takes men and women working together to suceed. However, I think that men are a lot more able to feel like they should be in positions and roles in leadership without necessarily being qualified. They’re like, “Yeah, sure, why not. I’ll shoot for it.” I think women are a lot more hesitant to do that because we feel like we need to be 100% qualified, like you’re not going to apply for a job if you can’t check off every single box. You’re not going to run for office if you don’t feel like you’ve got the experience or the time or everything else. I think honestly, you really do have to have a college degree to even feel like you’ve checked off a box anymore, whether or not it provided anything. I think it’s just opening up the eyes to the world and the experience and different things. I think it’s definitely a very important thing for men and women for education. I think it’s just one of those things, you have to have it, even if you’re applying for a non-profit job fourteen dollars an hour, they want you to have a Bachelor’s degree anymore. I don’t 30 know how you pay off your student dept with fourteen dollars an hour or support your family. LR: Along with that, when you hear the term “women’s work,” what does that term mean to you? MB: Well, to me it has a negative connotation for sure. I don’t think that there should be anything designated women’s work. The only time that anybody has ever tried to say that to me was my ex-husband and it was only because of his father-in-law. His mom stayed home, his step-dad, made the money and she cooked and cleaned and did everything else. We were having a house warming party after we bought our first place and they came over and were helping us get ready and he was like, “Hey, is there anything else I can do?” I said, “Yeah, there’s that stack of newspapers under the stairs, if you could go take that to the recycling.” He made some comment about women’s work, and I might have passed just for that moment, because his step-dad was there, but as soon as he was gone, I said, “There is no such thing as woman’s work. Now, if you’re making enough money that I can if I chose to stay home, take care of the cooking and the cleaning and the kids and everything else and you can support us and that’s financially ok, then the ‘woman’s work’ would be my job, I get it cause that’s what I’m doing to stay home, we both work, we have a family and a house, we’re equal partners, there is no such thing as woman’s work.” I don’t think that anything should be designated, I think any woman can do any job a man can. Nothing should be designated as woman’s work. 31 LR: If you were to give any advice to young women today based upon your experiences and what you’ve been through, what advice would you give them? MB: Let’s see. I think that a big part, like I’ve already said, is that a lot of people don’t feel confident in themselves or like they can necessarily step forward and do something or tackle a problem or a project because maybe they don’t feel like they got the experience, or you have something in your past that makes you feel ashamed or not like you can step up. Again, everybody has a past and everybody can go forward and make a change and make a difference, especially women. I think that we need to continue to move forward and be more involved in a lot of different ways. In leadership roles, at work, and definitely leadership roles in politics and our community. Men and women have different view points and different things that they focus on and I think that women bring a very different point of view that is very much needed and we definitely need more women to step up into leadership roles and try to make sure that we’re making a difference and focusing on the things that are important. Important to everybody is different, for me it’s our community and the people in it. Whether that’s your business, your job, your work. Again, women bring such a different perspective than men do and they need to be at the table to make sure that all of our view points are being heard and everyone can be considered. If women aren’t there to help explore a little bit more... I think women are better at looking at both sides of the situation, and thinking about deeper affects and how it might affect people as opposed to just bottom lines or those types of things. I think that’s a very important thing, in 32 business, in politics, and in the community. We need more of that, so don’t be afraid to step up and step forward and try to help change a community. LR: Ok, last question unless you have anything else you’d like to add? So this last question is a question that we I’ve asked everyone we’ve interviewed throughout this project. So how do you think women receiving the right to vote shaped or influence history, your community, and you personally? MB: I guess that ties back to what I just said. Women do have that different view point and I think women being allowed to vote and having the input and the say in who represents them and the issues that we have and need to address is a huge factor. It’s a slow turning shift, as you can tell anytime you are involved in anything political, but we’re starting to get there. Women have to be involved in it, even though we all have that opportunity to vote, it annoys me beyond comparison when someone says, “Well, it doesn’t matter if I go vote or if I put my say in there, cause it doesn’t count anyway.” Unfortunately, when three-quarters of the population is saying the same thing and not going out, we’re never going to be able to affect change, because if it doesn’t start somewhere, then it’s not going to happen. Voting by mail is easier for sure for people, and I get that it helps out, but I always took both of my kids to the polls with me. I’m like, “It is your duty, and you need to be informed before you go to vote, you can’t just show up and just vote for somebody by name or just vote for straight party, which should never happen either.” That’s our duty to be involved and try to affect those changes for sure. So I think that that’s the biggest thing, is just allowing us to start getting in there and 33 having a say in who’s at the table and having people think about both sides of an issue. I love something Lieutenant Governor Cox said, when he spoke at Women in Business, because I was on Women in Business board for a couple years, too. I had him come and speak to us last year in November and he was talking about women stepping up and having a place at the table, whether it’s at work or in politics or anything else, and specifically talking about politics and for more women to step up, I remember we were having some conversations about how hard it is and especially when people would start doing negative campaigning and all of those types of things. Finally somebody from the audience was like, “Well, that just sounds awful, so what would make somebody want to step up and do that and go through that?” He said, “Because the people that we need to be in politics are the ones who aren’t doing it because they want to.” The people who want to be politicians are not who we need at the table. It’s the people who don’t want to be involved in that, because it is so messy, but they have a realistic view and can contribute and they’re not just listening to political parties or whatever. Those are the ones that we need to step up. Is it easy? No, and we wish it would be a lot cleaner and nicer and all of those things, but the people who don’t want to be politicians are really the ones that need to step up and have that say and help contribute. He’s a pretty amazing guy, actually. I don’t like a lot of politicians, but he’s pretty amazing. LR: How about for you personally? 34 MB: I don’t know. I’m sure there will be something. I hate politics, I really do. I’ve always said I would never want to be a politician because I like to be loved and everybody hates politicians no matter what you do. I think as well over the last few years, I’ve come to that realization that if you don’t step up and try to help make that change, then things aren’t going to change. There’s so many things that need to fixed and it’s such a broken process right now. I did the Women’s Leadership Institute with Pat Jones in Salt Lake last year. So I’m sure at some point there will be something, but I don’t know what yet. I haven’t made any decisions. But I definitely think it’s something important to be involved in. I’m sure that will be somewhere down the road, unfortunately. LR: Alright, thank you so much for your time and for you candor, I appreciate it. You’re right, everyone has a story, and it’s fun and it’s a privilege for me to sit in and hear stories, cause I learn something new every time I do this, so thank you.