Srirupa Dasgupta
Founder, Upohar Ethnic Cuisines
Srirupa Dasgupta—call her “Sri”—grew up hearing stories of refugee life. Though her own life was settled, the partition of India had forced her grandparents from what is now Bangladesh into Calcutta. Their lives were disrupted, but they anticipated reunification with their families and homes someday.
“It never happened,” says Dasgupta today. “Whatever they came with was whatever they had. I don’t believe my grandmother ever saw her mother again.”
Dasgupta came to the United States in 1984 to study at Smith College and carved a career in software engineering and executive coaching. She lived in Ohio and California. In 2007, the mother of two children, now ages six and eight, moved to the Lancaster area when her husband, Pablo Jenik, accepted a post as a biology professor at Franklin & Marshall College.
While settling in Lancaster, an idea started “percolating,” Dasgupta says as she stands in the East Side Community Kitchen, a cooperative space for Lancaster-area caterers. Intrigued by Muhammad Yunus, the Bangladeshi champion of the micro-business movement, she felt a pull to start a business with impact, something to help solve a social issue. She knew that Lancaster was home to refugee communities. Plus, she loved to cook. So, the idea dawned—why not start a catering business employing refugees and recent immigrants to cook the foods of their native lands?
She had no catering experience. She ran the idea past trusted friends, including Susan Diklitch, director of F&M’s Ware Institute for Civic Engagement.
“She jumped up and said, ‘Yes!’” Dasgupta says. And so she founded Upohar Ethnic Cuisines. With a handful of employees and the hope for more as business grows, Upohar—Bengali for “gift”—provides vegan and vegetarian meals for business luncheons, dinner parties, banquets, and everything in between.
As she dove into her new venture, Dasgupta found help from the James Street Improvement District, Church World Service, and the owner and other tenants of the East Side Community Kitchen. With the mindset that “everything is an experiment,” Dasgupta conquered fears and worked around barriers – tackling the government paperwork that once terrified her, communicating through translators and picture books, abandoning a plan to establish employees as personal chefs because “Iraqi men didn’t want their wives working in someone else’s kitchen.”
Early in the venture, Dasgupta spent every weekend selling food at local markets and food fairs, testing the suitability of exotic dishes to American palates. Through it all, she has held a job as F&M’s director of web content. When the craziness threatened to overwhelm family life, she and her husband agreed to trim their weekend appearances to one a month.
“I need to have balance in everything,” she says.
Dasgupta’s employees earn fair wages and introduce their foods and culture to American audiences. The Iraqi yellow rice with vermicelli and aromatic spices is popular. The cucumber salad, a spicy Nepalese achar, is “such a spectacular hit, you can’t even imagine.” Plus, the chefs build connections to their new home, she says. “The idea is to make them feel they’re part of a bigger community, that people appreciate what they bring here.”
At each step, Dasgupta tries new things and new venues, keeping what works and discarding what doesn’t. She reminds herself that “this is a big experiment.”
“Go with the flow. I want to make an offer and see what the response is. If nobody comes, I’ll make another offer. The big thing is to remind myself that you don’t get attached to a particular outcome. Keep this openness. Like all experiments, we don’t know what’s going to happen. It’s how you respond to it that is more important.”
Jane Rice
Vice President of Marketing, Utz Quality Foods, Hanover
In 1990, Jane Rice was devastated to learn that she had breast cancer, but she was more concerned about “fulfilling some purpose for existing” than about how long she would live.
“Of course, selfishly, I wanted to live to see my children graduate from college and have their own families, and I’ve been blessed with that opportunity,” she recalls today. “But I was very concerned that I had not fulfilled a purpose.”
Though she was already a fixture in Hanover-area causes, Rice was now at the beginning of a second life devoted to helping people overcome cancer and domestic violence—the same afflictions that she had battled.
Jane Rice grew up in a lower-income home in Hanover, but she was always taught to share with her five siblings, “even if I had a nickel.” When she married Michael Rice, a third-generation member of the Utz Quality Foods family, she learned to emulate her husband’s parents and grandparents, who “were all about helping those who could not help themselves.”
After she began working at Utz in 1983, she helped leverage the company’s success into fundraising for such causes as Hanover’s Eichelberger Arts Center and Gettysburg’s Majestic Theatre.
Her cancer diagnosis imbued her work with personal overtones. She didn’t know other young women with breast cancer but thought, “Geez, I can’t be the only one. Other women have walked in my shoes or are going to walk in my shoes, so I’m going to shout it from the rooftop.”
She founded the Hanover Area Breast Cancer Support Group, which remains a valuable outlet for Hanover-area women.
“There were wonderful gifts that came from that experience,” Rice says. “I met women I may not have crossed paths with prior to that, and they gave me strength. They were helping me to heal, as well, and I didn’t feel so alone.”
In a way, the cancer diagnosis led Rice to confront another crushing part of her life—her childhood in a home with a violent father. She met a York businessman from a similar background, and he invited her to share her experiences in a speech.
“I could speak about breast cancer,” she says. “That was pretty emotional, but it was much more challenging to speak about domestic violence.”
Still, she fought off her doubts. Her father had died by then. Her mother convinced her to make the speech, saying, “If your speaking out helps one person, then you should do it.” As she heard the stories of more and more cancer and domestic-violence survivors, she realized that her public crusades “put a face to both issues.”
Rice helped lead a capital campaign to build a domestic-violence shelter in Hanover and came up with the name of “Still Waters,” inspired by the 23rd Psalm.
“I truly think we’re all broken at different places, and it’s up to us to try to mend those places and pull that determination from somewhere inside yourself, so that you become resilient in the face of life’s challenges,” she says.
It was her husband’s idea to accommodate events by building a ballroom in their new home, the splendiferous Oxford Hall Manor, but her idea to “fling open the doors” for nonprofits, personally hosting fundraisers every month. “I could not live there and not share it with other people and not make a difference in other people’s lives,” she says.
Rice created the Sweet Charities Cancer Patient Fund to help women fighting breast, ovarian, uterine, and cervical cancer pay their daily living expenses.
“I can come up with the ideas, but I can’t succeed without the people who share the passion and are confident in their fields,” Rice says. “We come together for that.”
These days, Rice stays busy with her causes, her husband and children, her six grandchildren, and her three dogs. She prays for guidance as her journey continues.
“I feel now I’m fulfilling a purpose, but am I totally fulfilled yet? I don’t know. I don’t know, so I’ll just have to wait and see. I’m trying to be one of those little sheep in God’s flock. He’s my shepherd, so I have to go where He leads me. That’s as simply put as I can say it.”
Susan H. Moran
Founder, That’s It! Wedding Concepts
A friend told Susan H. Moran that her website for That’s It! Wedding Concepts had all the answers—services, ideas, contact info—except one. Why, the friend asked, does she do it?
Moran was startled. No one had ever asked that question. She looked for a recipe box filled with childhood photos, hoping to find a particular snapshot.
“I climbed up in the closet and there it was,” she says. “Did the happy Snoopy dance on that one. It tells you everything you want to know.”
It’s a picture, now on her website, of the Barbie and Ken wedding that Moran staged at age eleven. The bridal couple stands under an arbor. A baby doll is the minister. Other Barbies wear elegant bridesmaids’ dresses. Clearly, Moran was born to conceptualize and organize weddings.
And although her wedding consultation business is only four years old, Moran’s drive to connect people and stage memorable events stretches back much farther. She learned about giving from her good-hearted father, a physician who was often paid in home-canned jellies. As a young mother in Texas, Moran responded to calls for help from not-for-profits. In her native Texas and since transplanting to the Harrisburg area in 2003, Moran has devoted her energies to health care and the arts, from the PinnacleHealth Foundation to the Harrisburg Symphony Society.
“The need is unending,” Moran says. “That’s what drives me, knowing that there are so many worthy causes, but with the economy and people going back to work, the pool of volunteers has dwindled. It’s something we all need to realize, because even on the worst day any of us have, we clearly have it so much better than so many others.”
Moran has deeply held beliefs—that everyone has a gift, that God networks people for a reason, that “there’s a blessing in just about everything that happens. You just have to figure out what it is, sometimes.” Her time in Pennsylvania has connected her with “good-hearted, kind, hard-working, interesting, funny, delightful people.”
The idea for a wedding consultation business simmered throughout Moran’s years of raising her two children and planning charity galas and events. After moving to Pennsylvania, the idea resurfaced. Her first sounding board was her husband, Patrick Moran, who “didn’t take a nanosecond” to express his support.
“It would be impossible for me to do what I do if I didn’t have his one-hundred-thousand percent support,” she says. “It has been the most incredible journey since then.” Brides, grooms, and parents come to her with a vision. Her role is “creative problem solving” to make the vision come alive. She feels entrusted with a solemn responsibility.
“Boy meets girl, they fall in love, they decide they want to spend the rest of their lives together. That’s huge. That is ginormous. They are declaring their intention toward one another in a very solemn manner, and a very meaningful manner. That’s what’s important. The reception is a celebration of that commitment and the two families joining. It’s a life moment. It’s fun, it’s dynamic, it’s memorable, it’s life changing, but at the end of the day, it’s a very sacred thing.”
To hear the vows spoken “is a privilege,” and Moran hopes to keep her business “always growing. Always growing.”
“I always tell my children,” she says, “that the only thing that’s ever going to limit you is yourself. If you shoot for the moon, you’re going to land in the stars.”
In Memoriam
Julie Sullivan
Julie Sullivan, says Kathy Denton, “has her little fingerprints all over this area.”
Friends speak about Julie Sullivan as if she’s still with them. They remember her “quirky laugh.” She wore “the cutest shoes.” She was “a smart cookie.” She found that elusive balance between work, family and causes.
Julie Sullivan died on August 2, 2012, at the age of 48 after a short battle with cancer. She left a husband and teenaged twin sons to whom she was devoted. Despite her passing, she made lasting impressions on Susquehanna region institutions providing shelter, beauty and hope—Ronald McDonald House Charities of Central Pennsylvania, Harrisburg Symphony Society, Junior League of Harrisburg and YWCA of Greater Harrisburg.
Her volunteer life began at age 24, as a Sunday-night attendant at Ronald McDonald House in Hershey, the home away from home for families of Penn State Hershey Children’s Hospital patients. Over the next 24 years—half of her life, realized RMHC Executive Director Kathleen Denton—Julie served on the board, as board president, and leading the capital campaign that funded a major expansion.
In tireless fashion, she led creation of the Ronald McDonald Family Room in the hospital, a homey respite from the beeps and tubes of hospital rooms for 26,000 hospital visitors a year.
“These are the mothers, the fathers, the siblings, the grandmothers, the visitors, the fellow students of the young patients who visit the Children’s Hospital,” Denton says. “They have a little opportunity to rest and recover. It’s incredibly important to the families.”
Julie “always, always had a smile. Always,” Denton says. “She walked into a room with a huge smile on her face. Always pleasant. Upbeat. Energetic. She was an inspiration, and she was generous and creative and fun and warm.”
Universally, friends say the same thing: Julie got things done. She came up with ideas and made them reality. Any task handed to her was seen through to the end.
“She was incredibly calm during situations of excitement or crisis,” says Karen Shughart, former president of the Harrisburg Symphony Society. “When you’re running special events, there are things that can go wrong, but there are lots of deadlines and lots of challenges, and Julie never got ruffled. She was calm and gracious through everything she did, and cheerful. I never saw her show impatience with anybody, or anger or discomfort.”
Former Junior League President Alison Ballantine viewed Julie as her “first role model, the epitome of volunteering and giving all that you can to make the world a better place and Harrisburg a better place.”
“She was very encouraging and very enthusiastic,” Ballantine says. “It made you want to follow in her footsteps and make a difference.”
Julie was a “breath of fresh air” whose passion for the well-being of women and children – especially kids – drove her ceaseless involvement, says YWCA of Greater Harrisburg Executive Director Tina Nixon.
“She was always upbeat, always happy to be here, always happy to help,” says Nixon. “She was always concerned with how I was doing in my role, understanding the stress it takes, always checking in to make sure I was alright. She was very, very concerned about other folks.”
Julie oversaw events that introduced volunteers to the women and children the YW serves through its shelter and other services. “She had the ability,” says Nixon, “to make individuals, no matter what their stage of life, feel like whatever they were going through, that it was going to be okay. She was a connector. She really connected individuals.”
Julie’s friends share varied perspectives on her legacy, but all know that she made a difference in countless lives.
“Listen to everybody’s opinions,” says Ballantine of the things she learned from Julie. “She had a way of listening to everybody’s opinions and leading and guiding people.”
“Give back in any way you can give back,” says Nixon of Julie’s lessons. “Help individuals that are in need. It’s important to be able to advocate for your own children. They were her life and her light. I admire her as a mother, as a woman who was empowered and was very interested and dedicated to empowering others.”
Karen Shughart watched as Julie volunteered for Harrisburg Symphony Society’s 2012 Showhouse, even as illness was taking its toll. “She had the ability to be optimistic and positive in times of great adversity. In that respect, she was a role model to me. It really is a lesson in taking each day as it comes and appreciating every moment.”
“You have to go where your heart tells you to go,” says Ballantine, “and she listened to what her heart was telling her.”
