The Power of Presence

by Joy Thomas Moore

  It pleases me even more that my grandkids are starting their financial literacy at an even younger age. When they reached three and five, we gave them a piggy bank that I first discovered on the Money Savvy Generation website years ago when I was working on financial literacy issues with communities around the country through the Annie E. Casey Foundation. It’s a sturdy plastic piggy bank with a stopper in each foot, which is connected to four separate compartments that have these words printed on top: SPEND, SAVE, INVEST, and DONATE. Whenever Mia and James get some change, they work with their parents to select which slot to deposit the coins. This allows their mom and dad to talk about what the various words mean and why selecting one over the other makes the most sense at that moment. It’s a fun teaching tool that’s already beginning to help them understand the value and purpose of money. To find out where to purchase your own bank, please visit this book’s website, www.power-ofpresence.com.

  LESSON FROM A LIONESS: Know how to control your money before it controls you.

  Financial freedom should start early, at home, and on a personal level. There are great resources online that won’t bog you down in nitty-gritty details, but that share great ideas for simple spending reductions we can make throughout our daily lives. You will find some of these resources at www.power-ofpresence.com. I love asking around and seeing how people like to save money or ways they teach their own children the value of money.

  Talk to other lionesses about the ideas they have implemented or advice they have. There are more and more ways to comparison-shop for both the things we need and the novelties we desire.

  Don’t be afraid to say no to your children, even though it completely stinks to have to disappoint them. If it is helpful, and if they are old enough to understand, provide context by showing children some numbers or bank statements so they understand more fully what the family’s circumstances are. But at the same time, don’t overburden them with the fear that the family is in such dire straits, the only alternative is for them to take matters of bringing money into the household into their own hands.

  I truly believe that even if it is five bucks spared, it is important to have your own personal rainy-day fund first. Having that savings, albeit small, after Wes died, taught me how powerless I am over the unexpected and that preparation, even in small doses, can prevent an onslaught of panic, debt, and self-doubt about being able to handle finances solo.

  Champion for the Path to Financial Freedom: The Hilary Pennington Story

  You must tell your money how you want to live your life, and not the other way around.

  —Manoj Arora

  Hilary Pennington spent much of her time as a toddler shuttling back and forth between her father’s native South Africa and her mother’s hometown of St. Louis, Missouri. As a white child of relative means, she got a glimpse of two worlds thousands of miles apart but eerily similar: South Africa’s apartheid and segregated St. Louis. But by four years old, the back and forth stopped for her, her younger brother, and her pregnant mother, Vanessa, when her father was diagnosed with aplastic anemia and they all returned to St. Louis for his extended medical treatments.

  While they provided invaluable support to the young family, Hilary says her grandparents didn’t know quite what to make of her mom. She was the first woman in her family to go to college; the first to move to the big city, New York; and not until she was thirty-six did she meet and fall in love with a poor, unknown teacher from South Africa. Hilary calls her mom a visionary, a woman ahead of her time, determined to make a mark in the world. But in that moment, she was a caretaker, a pregnant mother of two, and a woman struggling to keep her family together.

  And perhaps that’s why Vanessa thought it a stroke of luck that on the day she went into labor, her husband was already scheduled for his regular blood transfusions—in the same hospital. Hilary says what happened next changed their family forever.

  They put my mom on a gurney and in a room, and literally forgot about her. The doctors gave her something to speed up and intensify the labor but no one stayed around to monitor her. By the time they came back to my mom, the baby was in distress and my sister had already suffered oxygen deprivation and brain damage. It wasn’t noticeable at first. She was just this beautiful little baby girl and my dad was there and they rejoiced over the birth. My dad died a few months later, and it wasn’t until some months after when Tracy was diagnosed developmentally disabled.

  As the family emerged from the impact of this double tragedy, Hilary says her mom made the conscious decision to take control of their lives by moving out of her grandparents’ home and into their own space. It was only a few blocks away so they still had the babysitting support all young families need, especially single-parent families with a child with special needs. This was especially important as her mother learned how to raise Tracy without a partner. It was, however, enough to provide the independence her mom needed to really embrace her role as head of household.

  As Hilary spoke about this phase of her mother’s life, I could so relate to what she was feeling. I remember a moment when I sat in the relatively empty garden apartment that Nikki and I moved into after living with Rae Carole. I had just laid a piece of remnant carpet in my living room, and as I sat in the middle of the floor there was an overwhelming feeling of accomplishment. I bought this. I brought it home. I laid it. I did it myself and it is mine. In that simple moment, I knew that armed with my job, my education, and the support I enjoyed from family and friends, I could make it as a single mom. But I knew the advantages I enjoyed for financial stability were not available to everyone. So did Hilary’s mom.

  In the 1970s my mother started something called Continuing Education for Women. And it was during that amazing decade with the huge upheaval in society, and the idea was to help women who wanted to learn more to go back to school to get either a degree or a certificate. Mom convinced Washington University to let her develop this curriculum, although they would not let her use university property in the daytime, so she had to teach her classes at night. When she didn’t have a babysitter she would take all three of us with her. She also got other professors involved by convincing them to help teach the classes. Mom wanted women to develop their minds and develop themselves as leaders. It was one of the first certificate programs at the university, and she became one of the founding members of the board of what became CAEL—Council for Adult and Experiential Learning, where a person could assess prior learning so she may not have to start out as a freshman in college. My mother was indeed remarkable.

  But even as Vanessa pioneered in this area, Hilary says she always knew her mom sacrificed what could have been a huge career to be present for her and her siblings. For example, Vanessa negotiated a three-quarter appointment at the university so she could work school hours and be home for them. Rather than go on the speaker’s circuit during vacations or holidays, she took that time off to spend what Hilary calls plenty of quality time with them. She fought for every possible opportunity she could for them.

  My sister was born before the Americans with Disabilities Act that provides for mainstreaming children with disabilities. My mom sent her to some really good private schools for kids with cognitive disabilities when she was little but there was nothing when she became a high school student. Then she was placed in a special school district in St. Louis, which was basically a dumping ground for the city’s poorest children. It was despicable, awful, shameful. My mother finally took her out and worked out some kind of apprenticeship with the children’s hospital for Tracy.

  But Hilary says her mother was furious about the kids, most of whom were kids of color, left behind because they didn’t have that kind of access to opportunities. As much as she could, she advocated for them as well. Looking back Hilary says that this situation and how her mother handled it helped shape many of her later views on education equality.

  While she fought hard for all of us, she demanded a lot. In addition to working hard at school, we had chore
s that had to be done even if it meant missing the big football game! At the time it was hard for me; being the oldest there were the typical mother-daughter conflicts. I wanted to differentiate myself and grow up to be different from her.

  But the exact opposite happened, at least as far as educational attainment, gender equity, and financial resourcefulness go. Hilary so embraced her mom’s values that she went on to Yale, Oxford University, the Yale School of Management, and later the Episcopal Divinity School.

  As Hilary continued down her own career path, she also realized how much of her mother’s values around economic security she had internalized and how badly she wanted to put them into action. In 1983 Hilary co-founded Jobs for the Future, then a small nonprofit working with a few states to figure out their workforce needs, help them find skilled workers, and help those workers move into higher-wage jobs. Today, Jobs for the Future works in more than 120 communities across forty-two states, dedicated to helping fix what it calls the “leaks” in the education-to-workforce pipeline. As its president and CEO, Hilary helped it become one of the most influential and respected organizations in the country around issues of education, youth transitions, workforce development, access to opportunities, and future work requirements.

  When given the opportunity to put the force of even bigger dollars behind her ideas, Hilary became the top higher education official at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. After six years there, she moved across the country to the Ford Foundation as its Vice President of Education, Creativity, and Free Expression. At Ford she is marrying all the parts of her experiences, beliefs, values, and passion for economic security, education, and gender equality globally.

  While Vanessa passed away a few years ago, the lessons Hilary learned from her about values, dedication to passions, presence for one’s family, and the special place single moms hold in society preparing the next generation will live on forever in her heart and through her work.

  LESSON FROM A LIONESS: No matter how small your wallet, have a big mouth.

  Financial independence isn’t about having as much money as a two-parent home; it’s about trusting yourself to manage the resources you have and being able to provide for your family’s health, safety, and growth. Maintaining presence required Vanessa to take a less prestigious job, but she still turned it into something huge beyond belief! She sacrificed some of her ambition in order to have summers off. She taught her children, by her example, how to work and fight and that education is key to breaking any negative cycle. She spent a lifetime working for economic parity for women, a passion she passed on to her daughter.

  Vanessa used her voice to gain access to as many resources as she could for her special-needs daughter, before the benefits of the Americans with Disabilities Act (information about ADA can be found online at www.power-ofpresence.com).

  Not everyone finds it natural to fight for themselves or speak their mind, even for the sake of their children. How can you begin to speak up and speak out when it just isn’t your nature? How can women defeat the double bind that says a woman who doesn’t speak up gets lost in the shuffle and the one who does is a raving bitch? In his TED Talk, “How to Speak Up for Yourself,” Adam Galinsky explains that it can be easier to stand up for what you believe when you’re doing it on behalf of others. “When [women] advocate for others,” says Galinsky, “they discover their own range and expand it in their own mind. They become more assertive. This is sometimes called ‘the mama bear effect.’ Like a mama bear defending her cubs, when we advocate for others, we can discover our own voice.”

  Galinsky believes that what we need to do is to be mama bears to ourselves. It makes sense, as we have all heard the common wisdom that people should treat themselves as they would their best friend, yet it is one of the most difficult things to do, no matter how logical it seems. “When I’ve asked the question around the world when people feel comfortable speaking up, the number one answer is: ‘When I have social support in my audience; when I have allies,’” Galinsky explains. “So we want to get allies on our side. How do we do that? Well, one of the ways is be a mama bear. When we advocate for others, we expand our range in our own eyes and the eyes of others, but we also earn strong allies.” In other words, advocating for others is a win-win: It increases your stature in your own eyes and others’, and it expands your army of allies.

  If people understand you are motivated by goodness and genuine need, articulate it with intelligence and humility, notice how your opinion or gesture is perceived by the receiver, ask for help and advice, and advocate for others—so you don’t come off as you fighting for numero uno—you won’t have to be afraid to speak up and step up for the rights of your family.

  Becoming a Single Grandma: The Ona Caldwell Story

  From what we get, we can make a living; what we give, however, makes a life.

  —Arthur Ashe

  Ona Mae Gooch Caldwell’s rented two-story house stands in the midst of one of the South Side of Chicago’s toughest neighborhoods. At night, the sounds of police sirens rushing past often drown out the sound of gunfire. Ona didn’t start her life in these streets but in the rural town of Water Valley, Mississippi, where she picked cotton and produce as a sharecropper, as everyone in her family had always done. She dropped out of school in the fifth grade to work in the fields full-time, though she kept reading everything she could get her hands on and repeated simple math problems daily so she wouldn’t forget how. She married at seventeen, and from that union came seven children. She worked the fields every day and learned to drive the trucks and the trailers. She learned the secrets of growing healthy crops and how to get the most out of the soil. But what she learned in the fields was compromised by what was happening at home. Her husband abused her often and after one very severe beating, Ona fled for her life.

  Saving money wasn’t possible as a sharecropper but she was confident that she could take care of herself and her kids if she could get a fresh start. But that wouldn’t happen in Mississippi. Using $35 her father got for selling a cow, Ona took a bus to Memphis and then a train to Chicago to live with her older brother. She left her children with her mother so she could find a job and save some money to send for them. She was twenty-seven years old.

  Ona worked several menial jobs at a time, sometimes late into the night. Eventually she saved enough to bring her children, one by one, to live with her. She also brought some of the country life to the city, planting in whatever patches of land she could find in the lots behind her rented homes. This provided the fresh fruits and vegetables they needed to supplement whatever store-bought food she could afford.

  The beatings she endured in her married life forever jaded her view of the institution and although she gave birth to six more children, she never remarried. She told me she probably scared everyone off because she would say, “If you ever put your hands on me, you’ll be one dead SOB!”

  But that made her a single mother of thirteen. An obvious question for her was: How did she do it? Ona had clear and definitive answers. She had faith in God that there would always be enough food to eat and a place to sleep. She also had faith in herself that she could manage her family as long as she enforced strict rules: She simply had to or they would all be lost in chaos. Going to church every Sunday was another part of the family routine. Her grandson Robert says that there were the usual rules about taking out the garbage, doing the dishes, and staying out past curfew, but surprisingly the rules she was most adamant about, at least for him, was that there would be no television until all the homework was done and she saw it. He said she may not have understood what it said because she didn’t go past the fifth grade, but she knew what was neat and what wasn’t. If she thought the work was sloppy, Robert said she would tear it up and they’d have to start all over again.

  She relied on her older children to help the household run smoothly while she worked, as well as to keep the peace. She admitted that sometimes she felt she was running a military operation with harsh
consequences and concrete rewards being issued every day. But it worked. As she spoke to me, it was clear that she was proud that all her children had escaped serious trouble with the law, no small feat in the neighborhoods where she could afford to live. The only one she had trouble with was Lucille, who rebelled in her teen years and eventually became a mom at sixteen.

  Now eighty-eight years old, five foot two, and 130 pounds, Ona carries herself with a grace and confidence that make her seem younger and taller. She never licked a habit she picked up when she was six years old, chewing tobacco, because she says it calms her. But emotion gripped her nonetheless as she told me about the events of more than twenty years ago, when before the sun made its debut, a loud knock at the front door jolted her from a deep sleep.

  Well, it was early in the morning. The doorbell rang and my son Gregory answered the door. I was still in the bed. I slipped on a housecoat and came downstairs. He and the police was sitting there and Gregory said, “You gotta sit down.” I said, for what? He said, “Because they’re going to tell you some bad news.” Then I just told them, I said, go on tell me what is what. So the policeman said, “Your daughter was killed. She was run over by a car.” I could say nothing. They said they would take me to the morgue to view her body.