Portraits by Donovan Roberts Witmer
Some are arriving at the end of their careers while others are taking leaps into new ventures. They represent different generations but share a passion for community-building. They never open doors just for themselves. Other people and places come first. They feed and educate children, guide struggling women toward self-sufficiency, support local businesses, and help cities rejuvenate.
Susan Eckert
United Way of Lancaster County
Nonprofits everywhere are struggling, says the president of United Way of Lancaster County. So how do they tackle the challenges that pile up with a bad economy?
“One bite at a time,” responds Susan Eckert. “How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.”
In January, Eckert retires from the post she has held since 1987, but she leaves a record of accomplishment. Comprehensive child care. Quality preschool. High school graduation rates are up. Homelessness is down.
When she joined the United Way, Eckert was one of only seven women in the United States who headed United Ways of $4 million and above. In business and in communities, few women or people of color held leadership positions. That’s all changed, energizing United Way campaigns and projects with fresh perspectives.
“We’ve gotten to the point where we really do represent different values, and we have a better understanding of what the diverse constituencies can bring,” Eckert says. “There is a recognition that if we’re going to talk about mobilizing people, if we’re going to talk about changing conditions, we can’t be isolated.”
Americans have always had unique talents for spotting problems and mobilizing to fix them, Eckert believes. “All the major changes in our lifetime—seatbelts, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, the environmental movement—resulted from citizens banding together.” In United Way-led community conversations, one emergent theme is that “people want to have a role to play in making a better community, almost universally.”
Eckert has built her career on lessons learned at every step of the way. Early on, for 18 months, she taught students with learning disabilities. Lesson learned: Not everyone is cut out to be a teacher. But education has never been far from her mission and aspirations. “I was still committed to education, but I wasn’t necessarily meant to be a teacher.”
Years as a college fundraiser and as executive director of the Lancaster YWCA during its revitalization taught Eckert about the importance of the right match. Since institutions and individuals all have personalities, they have to click if something positive is going to happen.
Eckert has also tried to strengthen accountability, proving that the dollars and resources contributed to United Way really have improved financial stability, health and education in Lancaster County. One example: Every Lancaster County school district participates in the preschool-quality initiative Success by 6, and in four years, school readiness rates have moved from 65 percent of five-year-olds to 72 percent.
“You gotta love that fact,” Eckert says.
Eckert and her husband, Gerald, have two grown sons. What did two active boys provide to their career mom? “Comic relief,” she says. No matter how hectic things got—even on the evening that Susan and Jerry realized they’d forgotten a son—the family always had breakfast together.
“I’m not saying I created any kind of masterpiece. Toast. Cereal. I hate to say it—Pop-Tarts. But we ate breakfast together. That was an anchor in getting the day started off.”
Heading into retirement, Eckert advises young women taking leadership positions that “there are sacrifices to be made, but you can have it all.” In her own life, “things may have been a bit rocky in the balance territory sometimes,” but she persevered. “The tradeoffs to me were having all those sectors of my life—a husband, children, family, friends, a sense of some level of creativity, whether that was from cooking or quilting. You make your priorities, and you plan for them, and you can have it all.”
Mandy Arnold
Gavin Advertising
To Mandy Arnold and her husband, “living local” doesn’t mean they skip The Gap and Target entirely. It just means that every purchase starts with a question: “Can I buy it locally?”
So they buy soap and detergent from a York retailer of ecofriendly products. On road trips, they bypass chain restaurants and eat at places like an “awesome diner” in Richmond called Minnie’s. By living local, Arnold says, they help strengthen the economy and get to know the businesspeople they patronize.
“Your life and reputation are the culmination of all these interactions and all these decisions you make every day,” Arnold says. “I’ve found that when you expose yourself to more of these characters in your community, it makes it more enjoyable. When you get into the habit of fast food and big-box stores, it makes for a boring life.”
Arnold is a Baltimore native who settled in York. She holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees and a graduate certificate—“sort of like a mini-me master’s”—in communications areas. Until recently, she was vice president of marketing at LightStyles Ltd., the Marvin Windows distributor.
“So,” she says, “I am a communicator.”
“Your life and reputation are the culmination of all these decisions you make every day”
This fall, Arnold took all that experience into a new venture, creating the marketing and PR firm Gavin Advertising.
“I’m super, super excited,” Arnold says. “It’s a big risk, but I feel it’s the right thing to do. When you do something and get that sense of being invigorated by it, you want to do more of it. That’s why I decided to make the leap.”
Gavin’s downtown York office is neighbors with longstanding businesses and with new brewers, delis and cheesesteak vendors. Even before Gavin opened its doors, Arnold had begun work on Adopt-a-Venture, the firm’s donation of 100 hours a year in branding and marketing services to a York-based startup.
“After a year, we’ll be mother bird pushing them out of the nest,” she says. “Hopefully, they would stay downtown, but even if they didn’t, just the idea that something really exciting started downtown, that concept will bring more people that want to be around it.”
Arnold is a player in the civic causes reigniting downtown York. She serves on the Central Market board and works with Downtown, Inc. She founded the popular ThinkDrink, a monthly happy hour where York businesspeople and residents can swap ideas. Each month features updates on a city project such as Codorus Creek development or VIP tours of a fun venue like York Revolution’s Sovereign Bank Stadium.
“ThinkDrink has gotten a reputation for something new that’s going on,” Arnold says. “If you want to know what’s going on or have access or be in the know, this is something you go to once a month.”
Arnold’s husband, chef Sean Arnold, has a “love affair with farm-to-table foods,” she says. As chair of Healthy World Café, he’s helping to open the nonprofit, pay-as-you-can eatery in York. “It’s about sustainability and serving healthy food with dignity and creating an environment where you’re supporting local,” Arnold says.
Arnold’s mantra these days is, “Self-doubt is a virus,” and she and Sean boost each other’s confidence even as they take risks.
“When you’re stressed and the house is a mess, it’s okay because I know you’re focused on something you love to do, and you need to not worry about these other things so you can do what you love. I’ve gotten much more mellow about vacuuming over the past year. If I have 20 extra minutes a day to do something I love, there’ll be a little extra dog hair on the floor.”
Ruth Koup
Dress for Success
The client looks sharp in a red jacket paired with black pants. Her personal shopper is helping accessorize the new outfit.
“Pearls are so professional,” the shopper says. “You wear these for a job interview, and they say, ‘Boy, is she professional.’”
The client is impressed. “That’s good,” she says. “See, I need to know that.”
The Dress for Success of South Central PA’s boutique may be the region’s most exclusive shopping venue. Clients referred from social service agencies come for an outfit—suit, shoes, jewelry, even a bag—to wear for job interviews. When they get the job, they receive another five days’ worth of clothing for an appropriate start in the workplace.
The region's dress for success counted client number 5,000 this fall
Dress for Success came to the area when Ruth Koup, mother of three, was filling out applications for graduate school but got sidetracked by a television documentary about the international nonprofit providing clothing and job skills to help women achieve self-sufficiency.
The social worker, whose first job interview suit came from Goodwill and who still dresses beautifully in indistinguishable-from-new second-hand pieces, was intrigued.
“I live that,” she thought. “I walk that.”
Koup left a lucrative consulting career and underwent the rigorous application process—business plan and all—for founding a Dress for Success affiliate. She learned that the area’s few work-clothing closets at social services were “full of inappropriate things. Who’s going to a job interview in a cocktail dress?”
Koup founded Dress for Success in 2006, in a tiny, cramped space. In 2008, the affiliate moved to larger quarters, with room for a chic boutique, a waiting room, offices, a computer lab and storage. A new, computerized inventory system will help staff and volunteers—the people who help clients “stand taller”—track merchandise that comes in as donations or purchases and goes out as a fresh start in life for women of all ages.
Dress for Success goes well beyond suiting, helping women advance their careers by teaching computer skills and offering professional development programs. The new inventory system offers a chance to train clients in a state-of-the-art technology that employers demand. A new partnership with Walmart is helping women update their resumes, land jobs and internships, and build “a little bit more in skills and talent and outlook,” Koup says. “It brings up their spirits, because when you’ve been unemployed for months and months and a year or more, you lose your drive and initiative.”
The southcentral Pennsylvania Dress for Success affiliate is a groundbreaker. Koup approached the state about contracting out its work-wear efforts, and now Dress for Success is statewide, using a database that prevents abuse and saves the state millions of dollars.
Koup also founded a mobile unit—a Dress for Success innovation—to bring suiting sessions to women in a widespread area with few regional transportation options. The “wildly successful” unit has suited five hundred women, and “that’s five hundred women that would not have been suited.”
The region’s Dress for Success counted client number 5,000 this fall. “If you have a down day and come here, you can’t walk away not feeling better, because you’ve had an impact on people, every day,” Koup says.
A few minutes later, the client who is suited in the red jacket, black pants, and pearls thanks Koup and promises to take advantage of every service.
“I like to give, too,” the woman says. “I’ve been praying a lot. I’ve been asking the Lord to bless me because He knows what I have in me. I will give.”
Then, the client is gone. Koup smiles, her expression saying, “See what I mean?”
“Every day,” she says. “Amazing. Every day.”
Joan Espenshade
Power Packs Project
Ask Joan Espenshade about porcupine meatballs, and she answers like a four-star chef.
“Porcupine meatball—you put uncooked rice in with the ground meat so the little pieces of rice stick out and it looks like porcupine quills, and then you cook the meatballs in a tomato sauce, usually,” she says. “It’s very kid-friendly.”
Kid-friendliness is one key to the success of Power Packs Project, the nonprofit that Espenshade founded in 2005 and set on a growth path that continues today. Every Thursday, Power Packs distributes a recipe, in English and Spanish, and ingredients for a low-cost, nutritious family meal to more than 600 families of elementary- and middle-school students in Lancaster County. The recipe comes hole-punched, so parents can make their own cookbooks and reuse the recipes to feed their families year-round.
“It’s not just a Band-Aid to feed their families over the weekend,” says Espenshade.
Espenshade is a former teacher and community volunteer who created Power Packs after hearing a school principal say that students lined up every morning for breakfast, regardless of weather, for their first substantial meal since lunch the day before.
“I just can’t imagine putting my kids to bed at night if they were hungry”
Which made Espenshade wonder—what do they eat on weekends? She learned that parents were making “Sophie’s choices,” on weekends, deciding between paying the rent or feeding the kids, paying for utilities or buying bread.
“This is Lancaster,” Espenshade thought. “This is the garden spot. We should be able to do something.”
Espenshade’s research found programs that handed out packaged foods to kids only. She pulled together a committee, and they asked what that model teaches a child. “It teaches them to hoard,” Espenshade says. “It teaches them that that eating is a solitary activity. It teaches them that mom and dad are not responsible for their nutrition. It teaches them to covet very expensive, individually wrapped, highly processed food.”
Power Packs began at one school and quickly grew to 24. “We have never gone to a school and said, ‘Do you want Power Packs?’ They hear about it and the impact on kids, and they come to us.”
Ninety-seven percent of participating parents say their children are healthier. Teachers report that students are better behaved and more focused on schoolwork.
“I just can’t imagine putting my kids to bed at night if they were hungry,” Espenshade says.
Espenshade is a mother of two, married to attorney John Espenshade. She works for Power Packs full-time but unpaid, and she loves to cook. For Power Packs, she finds recipes that can be adapted for kids, perhaps by removing yucky stuff like black olives. Recipes can’t require special equipment, including mixers, blenders, crock pots, or even ovens “because a lot of our families use a microwave and a hotplate.”
There are hopes to expand Power Packs into Central Pennsylvania Food Banks’ 27-county footprint. Wherever Power Packs goes, benefits ripple beyond the dinner table. Parents who grew up on hot dogs and microwave pizza learn money-saving, nutritious meal solutions to use year-round. School administrators connect with families not for disciplinary reasons but to share the bounty. Kids are cooking with their parents – “Make it just like it says, Mom,” they say – and they get a boost in the climb out of poverty.
“It’s a universally accepted concept that hungry kids can’t learn,” Espenshade says. “If we’re going to change the face of poverty we have to change that, so that children can get an education and can step out of poverty.”
Kim Walsh-Phillips
Inside Out Creative
Kim Walsh-Phillips has clients in Florida, Canada, Kenya, and a lot of places in between. But every Saturday morning, she’s at York’s Central Market, breakfasting with her husband and 15-month-old daughter.
It’s one way that Walsh-Phillips keeps her marketing business, Inside Out Creative, grounded in core ethics and values. “We’re committed to the community,” she says. “We love living and working here. Wherever we do work, this is where our headquarters will be.”
Walsh-Phillips is a native of Long Island, New York, but has stayed in York since graduating from York College of Pennsylvania. Even as a girl, she was the one designing invitations for the senior prom or helping friends campaign for student council.
“It took a great adviser in college to show me that this was an actual career,” Walsh-Phillips says. “I knew that’s what I wanted to do. I never questioned that, which is a total blessing because I know that’s a journey a lot of people are on for a long time.”
“Discover what your strengths are, and be true to yourself with those strengths”
Walsh-Phillips’ career in corporate communications and with Main Street York—now Downtown, Inc.—inspired a love for urban renewal.
“The core of a community is its urban center,” she says. “If that’s not strong, the surrounding community cannot be strong, either.”
Today, Inside Out clients include cities seeking brand identities to help attract businesses and visitors. The effort “is awesome because you can affect so many lives.” In one of her favorite community branding exercises, the merchants of Lock Haven, in Pennsylvania’s northern tier, formed an association that continues to sponsor events and promote beautification.
The “neat part” about York’s brand message—Walsh-Phillips’ enthusiasm bubbles up through liberal use of words like “awesome” and “neat”—is the way it’s changed. “Our roots are in history. We have an incredible amount of historic events, and we’ve been able to preserve the architecture. And it’s filled with very warm and dedicated small business owners.”
Walsh-Phillips serves on the York Symphony Orchestra board and is a past board president of York Arts. Plus, she serves on “about 5,000 committees.” She belongs to a cadre of young people taking York’s civic-leadership reins from a few venerable hands who grew out of the area’s old industrial base.
As those “few key leaders” move into the background, Walsh-Phillips says, “it requires more of us to step up to the plate, and that’s been really powerful, because the more people you can get involved, the more effective you can be.”
Walsh-Phillips and her staff donate services and time to community causes in the arts, education, conservation and health. Their clients are companies they would patronize—a value stemming from Walsh-Phillips’ Christian faith and from her team’s shared adherence to a strong code of business ethics. One new client is Acacia Creations, a Kenyan firm selling fair-trade jewelry made from recycled materials.
“We now have clients worldwide,” she says. “All of those different, unique perspectives on culture, business, the economy and commerce help us look at our Central Pennsylvania clients with a fresh perspective. We get to see it from a world view versus just a local view, and still have the benefit of living in the area and taking that good, old Pennsylvania Dutch perspective to it, as well.”
Walsh-Phillips credits her husband, Ian Phillips, as her “number one sounding board.” As a mentor for many others, she tries to pass on the main lesson her own mentors taught her.
“You should not spend any time trying to assimilate into what you perceive others desire you to be. Discover what your strengths are, and be true to yourself with those strengths.”
