Nancy Smith

Nancy Smith was a stay-at-home mom then a teacher, a hospital volunteer and a full- time hospital employee when she decided to follow her calling and retrain as a hospital chaplain. She was the chaplain at Memorial Hermann Memorial City Hospital for almost a decade.  She was ordained as a Baptist minister in 1998 but through her studies and her work in multi-faith situations, she moved beyond the confines of the church to work in spiritual healing in its widest sense. She has been married to Joe since 1967 and has two children, Jennifer and Michael and two grandchildren, Ben and Clare.

What’s your story, Nancy?

I am a fourth generation Houstonian and I feel like I have followed a thread of learning my whole life. One of my great-grandparents on my father’s side traveled to Kansas in a covered wagon as a child and then came to Houston. She had one child and after she was divorced, she became the Dean of Jeff Davis High School even though she hadn't had a college education.  When she retired, she went to the University of Houston even though she was in her late seventies. So to me being a lifelong learner is something that has always been in my family and I just never thought of it as unusual.

My own path was really chosen for me, I wasn't the one who chose it. Like all of us, we have circumstances that happen which turn out to be fortuitous. I had grown up the granddaughter of a physician and though I thought I might be a nurse – I would have been Nurse Nancy! – I actually majored in education.  I was a stay-at-home mom until the mid-1980s doing all sorts of volunteer work with the kids like scouting and with the church. 

I went back into teaching when there was a bad economic turn and my husband was struggling to hold on to his real estate business, but I soon realized what I wanted to do was work for MD Anderson, the cancer hospital here in Houston.  I had been volunteering there for many years and had just spent two weeks as a summer camp counselor at Camp Star Trails with MD Anderson kids who were being treated for cancer. It was just a fabulous experience and the spirit of MD Anderson just called me.  So I resigned from my teaching job and was lucky enough to get a job there as a Patient Care Coordinator. We would meet a new patient when they first arrived, escort them around and show them the ropes. We were there to help them and to walk alongside them throughout their time in the hospital. So I got to meet so many well people whose bodies were not so well, and it seemed to me like the person kept getting “weller and weller"!

I realized then that we are all on such a spiritual journey. It had broadened my life so much to see people who had come from all over the world, patients and healthcare professionals, people who had taken such different paths from mine. One time I looked up at a Code Team – the team that comes from all over the hospital to perform CPR – and of this team there was not one face that was the same color as the one next to it, or even from the same religious tradition.  The sense of strong human spirit there totally amazed me, So I decided that I really wanted to support people's spirituality as they go through life.

To me, religion is humankind's way of making sense of life and the spirit which provides it so I began going to seminary at night after I worked all day. My sweet family didn't mind. I would get up at 4am and write my papers for my next class that night and a kind woman at work would type them for me.  I took three years of seminary over ten years and I just knew that there was a thread for me to keep following. I could see it in the scriptures I was reading or in whatever theology I was studying and I could see it come to life in people. It sent me on a journey that went deeper into the church and then it took me away from the church again.

I struggled with the church as an institutional structure and the way that people believe in literalism. It seemed to me that for them faith became such a limiting factor.  Take healing, for example since that’s what I was all about.  In the Bible there are stories of healings. You can take them literally and it won't ever apply to your life because you can't really believe that could happen to you. But what if you see the metaphorical ways that healing happens, like the concept of resurrection?  When you see over and over again people being borne up from the ashes of what they have experienced, you realize that if you believe it too literally, it keeps the truth of it at a distance. It was good for me not only to intellectualize all this but also to integrate what I was learning with what I was experiencing at MD Anderson.

I have had people say to me, "So, what are you?" Well, I went to four different seminaries. I graduated from the Houston Graduate School of Theology, which is a Quaker seminary, because it's here in Houston. I couldn't pick up and go to another location because my family was here and my job was here. I also took lots of classes at Perkins, the Methodist seminary and even at the Catholic seminary.  I actually took one class at Houston Baptist University but discovered that my male peers were not open to women and it felt very oppressive, maybe not from the professors, but from certainly the young men, so that wasn't for me.

My husband and I belonged to a moderate, smaller Baptist Church and there was a wonderful pastor there who believed, as I did, that women could do anything men could do and in the Bible when it said that women don't teach it was more a cultural thing. In 1998, when I was ready to be ordained, he led the church through a study and put me before the church so they could ask about my calling.  When they voted and only four people voted against me from a membership of around 120.  I was so indebted to that beautiful congregation for doing that, but still, four people did leave the church over it.  I know though that it wasn't just good for me, it was good for the church too!

By that time, I was already a practicing chaplain having taken two years of clinical pastoral education. I worked at CanCare and then took on a full-time ministry at Memorial Hermann Memorial City Hospital which was a wonderful experience.  A licensed professional counselor has to go through lots of supervision and if my supervisor, Leanne Rathbun, were in Houston I would nominate her as an Inspiring Houston Woman too. Leanne gave me permission to be messy inside because at that time I felt I knew a lot less than I had known before, and I know even less now than I have ever known. You have all those absolute certainties about life when you're young, in your teens and 20s, but then you start thinking, “Wait, there's more!”  That's what happened to my religion. I could see that there was more and I really wanted little girls in the Baptist Church to know that they could do anything. In fact I wanted little girls everywhere to know that if they follow what's inside, they can “Go for it!”  That for me is what it's all about and teaching and healing are all part of the same thing, part of becoming who you really are.

It has felt rather like coming out of the closet in a way for me because I have hidden it from some people I knew in my previous life as a hospital chaplain or as a church person, because I don't want to disappoint them. But I have moved on and I think I would never call myself a Christian in the traditional exclusive sense anymore because I appreciate that there are different paths of different streams which all come off the same river. I’ve worked out that I can’t use anymore the religious language I used to use, because I know that there is more to it.  I’m not saying that I go through a cafeteria line and choose only what I want, but I feel that we can really expand each other’s understanding of where we came from and where we are going just by listening to each other.

That stood me in good stead in the hospital community because a hospital is a microcosm of the world which is why I love it, and the hospital chapel is not a Christian chapel, it is a place for all to go to.  I was the lead chaplain at Memorial City for almost ten years and in our chapel there was a symbol.  It was a cross.  Now, many of my friends were Jewish, the patients and the volunteers were Jewish and I became very close with a rabbi who is in our area, and they would come and light the Hanukkah candles.  At the time of the Jewish high holy days in September, I wanted to cover that particular symbol so that they could come into the chapel and maybe have a service there. So I went to Hansen Galleries and they gave me a beautiful piece of fabric, a tapestry that was so colorful it looked like a stained glass window. I hung that up over the cross but when it came time to take it down and return it to Hansen Galleries, I felt so uncomfortable about it. It felt like we were putting up Aunty Mable’s picture on the wall just because Uncle Henry was coming to visit, only to take it down again when he left.  I thought this doesn’t feel right. We are acting as if we are the owners of this house and we are not. So I went to my supervisor and we agreed to take down the Christian symbol.  Of course, a lot of people were not happy but another chaplain and I worked with a quilter in Pennsylvania who made us a beautiful quilt to hang there instead.  She told us about why she had put this thread here and that thread there, it was all about the story of life’s journey.

   

Faces of Faith - by Ed Hankey

We had interfaith services in the chapel and one year when all of the Festivals of Light – Hanukkah, Christmas, Diwali and Ramadan – all overlapped we organized Sharing the Light of our Faith.  People from different faiths brought pictures and other things to hang outside the chapel and I loved it.  Later the volunteers gave us the gift of a sculpture for the niche outside our chapel and I helped design it.  We called it Faces of Faith, a group of men, women and children of different faiths at different ages.  It’s still there although there is a new chapel.

I retired in 2006 because my mother was very ill, so I got to spend some time with my mother at the end of her life and I wouldn't take anything for that.  I didn't go back to the hospital after she died because my father developed Alzheimer's.  That was another little turn in the road, but you know, all along the way, while you are following that thread, I think there is such a responsibility to tell your own truth.   Though you don't want to squash anybody else's truth, I truly believe that there is a built-in salvific force that our creator has put inside us which moves us towards whoever we are. I don't want to put a name to it.  Most people call that creator God but to me, that's a limiting word. Theologian Paul Tillich said that it’s the ‘ground of all being’ and I believe that. I believe it's more than religious language can describe. I wouldn't deny my Christian faith because of course it brought me to where I am. I believe it all but I also believe there’s more.

What advice would you give to someone new to spiritual healing?

Well, whether it’s someone new to teaching or healing, in healthcare, as a mom or as a friend, I would say that you must listen to that still small voice inside, and if something out there isn't congruent with your experiences don't just jump into it. Keep on listening to yourself and to your experience because each of our experiences, every one of them good or bad, is part of our wholeness.

Who or what has been the greatest influence on your life?

My husband, Joe, has been my greatest enabler in the best sense of the word. His acceptance and encouragement of my evolution is life giving.  There have been other people too, all along the way, who have influenced me and I lament that I am not in touch with every one of those people still. But we were there for each other, influenced each other and inspired each other even if it was only for that one day or even that one hour.  There were my friends that I ran with, there was my great friend Polly, there were people I worked with at MD Anderson, and there were the patients too.  And there’s Rabbi Rabinowitz and my nephew Blaine who has cerebral palsy.  Really, there are so many of them.

How do you find, or seek to find, balance in your life?

When I was younger I ran marathons and even now my physical fitness is very important to me.  So I go over to Trotter YMCA every morning and do my exercises.  That gives my day structure, and I experience the YMCA as a place of great diversity and faithfulness.  I know lots of lovely groups of people over there.  We have a birthday club and on Sundays I go to what I call ‘yoga church’.  It's wonderful!  It's like a ritual for me and it keeps me grounded. There are people in that class from all over the world and it feels just like a beautiful little church for me, with all the people from different places.  I used to be on the board there years ago when the Y set up a Women’s Center because many women don't want to exercise with other people, especially the Muslim women because they have to be dressed. So in the Women's Center they don't have to be. It's a separate space, smaller than the big one and I thought that was just very understanding and empathic, especially for a Christian organization.

Jerusalem International YMCA

I traveled to Israel in November and it was so good. We stayed in Jerusalem in a hotel called the King David Hotel which was absolutely fabulous.  Right across the street was a YMCA housed in a historic building and when you walk in, their mission statement is there on the wall and it says we are a place of peace amidst a time of religious diversity.  It was special to me to come across that.

What does Houston mean to you?

It's a whole different city than it was. The little house I grew up in is long gone.  It was on Norfolk Street and now it’s under Greenway Plaza!  Then we moved out to Briargrove when that was the furthest you could go.  I love when I go to the Heights because that's where my father's family originated and I love going over to the Montrose area because that's where my mother's family came from. I see places that aren't even there anymore, but they're so real in my mind.

Where is your happy place in Houston?

On my patio. On a pretty day I just sit tight there and wherever I look I see green in any direction.

What is your favorite restaurant?

It’s Pondicheri. I love the big breakfast plate because I love the way they balance their tastes. Another place I love is a neighborhood restaurant called Joyce's which has been here forever and ever. It used to be that we would go in there and I would think it was full of old people, and of course, now I'm there! Anyway it's a lovely little retro seafood place.

What is your Houston secret?

One place I love is full of secrets. Glenwood Cemetery was, I believe, the first planned public garden in Houston. People in the 1800s went there for picnics and it is filled with famous and infamous Houstonians and world class sculpture. The monthly tours led by Jim Parsons are really fun and are rich with history and gossip.

If you could change one thing about Houston…

I love the vitality of Houston and I love the diversity, but if there's anything I'd change it would be that we could see each other's ‘otherness’ more readily and be more accepting of it.  We should embrace it more than being afraid of it. I love the things that are organized to foster diversity like the festivals in Downtown.

I also think that in this city it is too easy to become isolated. We go to work and we come home and stay there. So I think we all need to make an effort to get out there and meet more people. I would certainly change that about myself.

Nancy Smith was nominated as an Inspiring Houston Woman by Jennifer Enos

Rebecca Richards-Kortum

Rebecca Richards-Kortum is Professor of Bioengineering at Rice University.  She is the co-founder of Beyond Traditional Borders (BTB), a program which challenges undergraduate students to create affordable technologies for use primarily in Third World countries.  Together with her colleague Maria Oden, she was last year awarded the prestigious Lemelson-MIT Prize and they donated the $100,000 check to the hospital in Africa which inspired the BTB program.  She lives in Houston with her husband, Philip, and their six children.

What’s your story, Rebecca?

I'm on the faculty of Bioengineering at Rice University and I focus primarily on two areas. I work on creating technologies for low-resource settings, primarily with a focus on pediatrics, improving child health and improving maternal health.  I also have other projects which focus on early cancer screening and diagnosis focusing mainly on cervical cancer, head and neck cancer and esophageal cancer. I've been doing cancer imaging reading my whole career, but it was really in the last seven years that I've come to focus on cancer screening in low-resource settings in developing countries.

That means really thinking about how you reduce the cost of screening so that it is affordable for the vast majority of the world at risk from the kind of cancers we deal with so that people can have access to early screening, not just to palliative care when they develop stage four cancer.

I originally studied medical physics and then switched to engineering when I got my first faculty job, but they are similar in many ways, math and science, with a design-oriented focus.  Biomedical engineering does tend to have more women than, say, mechanical or electrical engineer.  When I started teaching electrical engineering, maybe 10% of the students in my cost were women, but now I’m in biomedical engineering, it's closer to 50-50.  In Global Health it’s closer to 90% women which on the one hand is wonderful but on the other hand, it pisses me off!  Is it really just our problem to deal with poverty and social injustice and making the world a better place? I think we need more balance on both sides.

Why do you do what you do?
In 2005, I went to Malawi and met a really unbelievable pediatrician, Dr Elizabeth Molyneux, who has been in Malawi her whole career. She was the one who really inspired me to think about how we could get undergraduate students to look at new at ways to address needs in the hospital nursery, especially for premature babies.

From that meeting, my partner Maria Oden and I created Beyond Traditional Borders, which is a minor in Global Health Technologies where we bring students from all over campus – humanities and social sciences as well as engineering and science – and we give them real design challenges. They start with an introductory eight-week design project and then a one-semester project and then a whole year. After each of those projects they have the opportunity to apply for a summer internship where they take the thing that they have created to the place which had originally proposed the challenge for them to solve. During these internships, they get wonderful feedback and although most of the time it's “You need to change this many things before it's useful to us”, for the students it's incredibly motivating.  They get to go and experience first-hand the real challenges that they've only learned about it in a classroom setting.  When they come back, they are so motivated they will often do independent study work to further their technology to get it to the point where it actually can be used clinically.

For example, premature babies often have breathing difficulties.  Here in Houston, it would easily be treated with technology called CPAP – continuous positive air pressure.  It’s very simple, if you think of a baby's lungs as a balloon. In our lungs we have surfactant which helps the balloon of our lungs stay inflated but with premature babies they lack surfactant so when they breathe the lungs collapse. Every breath for them is like that first puff into a balloon and they get exhausted just by breathing. With CPAP, you just put little silicone rubber prongs into the baby’s nose and the machine blows in a mix of air and oxygen so that when the baby breathes, instead of the balloon collapsing, it stays open and the hard work of breathing is greatly reduced.  For most premature babies, if they are on CPAP for a week or two they develop surfactant and are fine, but if they don't have access to a CPAP machine, the mortality rate is as high as 75%.

The challenge that Dr Molyneux gave us was to develop an affordable CPAP machine. Here in the US, the cheapest CPAP machine will cost you around $6,000 which might well have been $6 million for her in Malawi because it was just not affordable. In response to this problem, our 2010 team of students developed a prototype which delivered airflow and pressure comparable to the one they use at Texas Children's Hospital. But our machine was made with fish aquarium pumps and cost only $150!  Since then we have been able to prove that it does improve survival.  Mortality rates went from 75% down to 35%, which is comparable to the rates in the United States when CPAP was first introduced.

Now we are working to roll it out across the whole country and I am working to put together a complementary package of technologies that will do all the things that babies need – keeping them warm and hydrated, keeping their glucose levels where they need to be and, if they have jaundice, treating them with phototherapy.

When we have a project we think will be successful, we make the first few prototypes in our lab so it can be taken for clinical evaluation.  We work with colleagues at a wonderful industrial design firm called 3rd Stone Design who have helped us find appropriate manufacturing partners to bring the CPAP device to market.  We are also in very early conversations with some multinational corporations that have the capability to undertake the international distribution we would really need. So we are not there yet, but I feel that we are on a really positive path to get to the point where it could be more widely available. We also just received from grant from Glaxo Smith Kline and Save the Children which will allow us to expand to Tanzania, Zambia and South Africa, so we are super excited by that.

Maria Oden (left) and Rebecca Richards-Kortum 

at Rice University's Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen in Houston

Image by Jeff Fitlow

Last year, Maria Oden and I were honored to receive the Lemelson-MIT Prize for our work with Beyond Traditional Boundaries.  Even more wonderful was that it came with the prize of $100,000 and we were able to donate that money to the Central Hospital in Malawi, the hospital which inspired our program and the CPAP project.   When you go to the ward, there aren't enough beds for the babies so it is not uncommon to find sixty babies in twenty beds.  There’s also not enough space for moms so they can't be with their babies all the time and that's not good for the moms or for the babies. We have been able to raise another $275,000 in additional donations which will allow them to expand the nursery which is very exciting.  We have the architectural plans and they will be breaking ground as soon as rainy season is done.  If everything goes according to schedule, it will be completed in December 2014. That's going to be a happy day - walking in see that!  And of course, the new nursery will have our CPAP machines and hopefully many other technologies which will be created through our program.

  

What is your Houston story?

I grew up in Nebraska and went to the University of Nebraska, and then I went to MIT for graduate school and from there I went to University of Texas in Austin where I was on the faculty of electrical-engineering and also biomedical engineering. I had been there about 16 years when I moved to Rice in Houston in 2005. 

The main reason to move was that there was no medical school in Austin, at least there wasn't then.  For people like me who do the kind of translational research in which you are doing clinical evaluations of technologies, it’s really difficult without a medical school so we would be driving to Houston every week.  When a job opened up at Rice, it seemed like an amazing opportunity.

At home I have six kids from aged twenty-two down to aged four.  I have three boys and three girls. Alex and Max are both at college, one at Rice and one at the University of Houston.  They're both studying engineering which is wonderful and makes me so happy!  Then Zach is in high school and he wants to do either architecture or civil engineering. Kate is in middle school, Elizabeth is in second grade and finally, Margaret is in pre-school.

                                           

We adopted Elizabeth and Margaret from Ethiopia. Margaret has been with us since 2010 when she was six months old and Elizabeth was about to turn seven when she came to us in 2012.

I love being a mom, it's just an amazing experience and when you travel in Africa you see a lot of kids that don't have parents and who are living in orphanages.  We felt that we had more room in our family so we looked at the various adoption programs and decided that at that time Ethiopia was really the only program in Africa that we felt was an ethical program. Maggie was only a baby and therefore had a very easy transition, but when Elizabeth arrived with us, she had perhaps only twenty words of English. She is so brave though and it's really amazing to think of all the uncertainty that she's been through. She was born in an area of Ethiopia where they speak Wollayta and when she came into care she was placed in an orphanage in Addis Ababa where they speak Amharic. She was only about four at that time and there was only one other little girl who spoke the same language as she did. Then she came home with us and had to learn yet another completely new language.

Adopting an older child is a very challenging but wonderful experience and it's very different from adopting an infant. I thought I knew that going in, but really I didn't really know it at all! Much as you try to be prepared, you can't really know how challenging, but also how great, it can be. I think Elizabeth is not yet fully settled but she has made so much progress. The difference for her between starting first grade and starting second grade was enormous. She's absorbing English day to day, but we have hired wonderful Rice student teachers who come and work with her on her homework every day after school.  They are just amazing with her and they have energy at that time of day that I definitely do not have!

Because of the work I do, I have to spend lot of time out in the field with the student interns, looking for new challenges and checking that they're doing the right thing as far as getting feedback on their implementation. So I usually have to do four trips abroad each year – to Africa to see them but also to meet with those in China involved in our cervical cancer project and in India with our esophageal cancer project.  So I do end up with too many frequent flyer miles – that's such a badge of shame, right?

So I’m lucky to have beside me my husband Philip, who is awesome.  He's also at Rice in the faculty of Psychology. We actually met living in the dorm in our freshman year in Nebraska. I lived on the second floor and he lived on the third floor so I've known him since I was 17.  As our careers progressed, Philip and I have made decisions together as much as possible. When we moved to Austin, he had the opportunity to go back and get his PhD which he really wanted to do and then he got his dream job in Austin so it worked out pretty well. Then when we came here, he moved from industry into the academic job at Rice.

Who or what has been the greatest influence on your life?

Definitely it's my kids. Because so much of what I do is focused on trying to help moms have the opportunity to bring their kids home, and anybody who has had a baby knows how much you worry, being a mom myself has definitely influenced the projects that I've chosen.

What advice would you give to someone new to your field?

I think the most important career advice is to think about where you find meaning. If you are going to work hard, you want to work hard at something that you find meaningful.  Worry less about what ladder you want to climb and just try to figure where something you find meaningful can intersect with career opportunities. 

How do you find, or seek to find, balance in your life?

That's the eternal challenge, no?  Well, we take it a day at the time. The hardest thing about having six kids is making sure that they get enough one-on-one time with you. Somebody is always having a crisis, so you have to make sure that you're not getting so absorbed in that crisis that other people are either being neglected or feeling neglected. Even with the two older boys at college, you know they never really leave you! That's a big myth, I think, but it's great that they still need you and want your help.

What time do I get for me? I get up early and that's my time. I like to run and so I do that in the morning. I can't stay up late but I can get up early.

What does Houston mean to you?

What really drew me to Houston professionally was the Medical Center and the opportunity to work with physicians that are providing patient care and are also trying to bring the next set of advances in patient care.

On a personal level, although Houston is the fourth largest city in the US, where we live feels much more like a small community. We really love it here.

Where is your happy place?

My happy place has to be looking at an empty email in-box.  Some days I think all I do is answer email.

What is your favorite restaurant?

My favorite place to eat in Houston has to be the taco truck beside the Alabama Ice House – it has the best tacos in Houston! It might look a little sketchy but it's very good.

What is your Houston secret?

I think Houston's best kept secrets are the public schools. They are awesome. There are many very talented teachers, especially in the magnet schools and high schools. We have had two kids at DeBakey High School, and one at the High School for the Performing and Visual arts and both schools offer really great experiences. Mr. Smith, who was until this year the band director at Pershing Middle School, was an amazing resource and of course Mark Twain Elementary is really an extraordinary school.

If you could change one thing about Houston…

I would make it Austin – but without the cedar! I do miss the beauty of Austin. Houston is pretty in its own way, but it's not as pretty as Austin.

  

For more information about Rebecca’s work with Beyond Traditional Borders, visit the Rice 360º website

Deborah Markey

Deborah Markey became the Executive Director of the Houston Arboretum & Nature Center in 2005.  She guided the 155-acre nature sanctuary within Memorial Park through the dual devastation of Hurricane Ike and the subsequent drought.  She has succeeded in increasing not only the Arboretum’s financial capability, but also its impact on the Houston public through its work with both children and adults.  A Houston native, she has served for many years as a community leader in The Heights area of the city where she lives.  She has three children – Connor, Hunter and Madeline.

What’s your story, Debbie?

Going through two major natural disasters in three years was something that I would never have expected to be dealing with nine years ago when I joined the Houston Arboretum.

Hurricane Ike came along in 2008 and we know the hurricane then brought on the drought. The reason is a scientific phenomenon called El Niño and El Niña. El Niño is a period of time in the Gulf of Mexico when the water is really warm and causes a lot of precipitation to come off the Gulf across Texas.  During those years, Houston’s atmosphere dumps lots of water on us and it’s very humid. When I came to the Arboretum in 2005, that's how it was.  But Hurricane Ike cooled those waters and switched the oscillation patterns from El Niño to become La Niña, a very strong current which prevents any cold and wet weather coming from the north.  It means if you looked at a weather pattern, you would see cold fronts stopped as if at a barrier around Texas.  

Generally, Houston has about 55 inches of rain a year but in 2010 it was just 11 inches and in 2011 only 12 inches. Everyone in Houston felt the drought and knew that less rain was falling than usual each year, but it wasn't until 2012 that we all realized the enormous damage that the hurricane followed by the drought had really done.

During Hurricane Ike, we lost one thousand trees.  It was painful to see. These were live trees, big trees, every walking trail was deeply blocked and there was no power to the park.  We had shut down on Thursday night knowing the storm was coming, and when we came back to work on Monday, it was way more devastating than we had expected it to be.  To their credit, all my staff came ready to clear the park. I had to laugh with them that this was the line in their job descriptions which said “Will undertake other tasks as needed!”

Everyone joined in, even the office workers and me. I put all the guys on chainsaw duty and all the girls on brush clearing. Luckily my Conservation Director had made the decision on the Thursday to reserve a backhoe to come after the weekend, otherwise we would never have got one.  So the backhoe and operator arrived on Tuesday to clamp and haul stuff for us.  Of course, I could not depend on the City of Houston to help because they had so much else to do around the city, but we did have lots of people turn up to volunteer through the week, and even more on the weekends, so we found a way to do it.

We piled the stuff in the parking lot – huge tree trunks and underbrush – and I had three 40-foot containers being emptied three times a day! This was of course incurring huge haulage charges and I soon discovered that the insurance would pay for none of it.  The insurance covered damage to the building – of which, luckily, there was very little – but covered none of the forest.  That took a long time for us to recover from.

It wasn’t until that week that I ever thought of myself as a leader.  I suddenly realized that people were looking at me as if to say, “What should we do?”  I understood then that there is a difference between being a manager and being a leader.

That was such a painful time, but it was worse to watch the forest die over the following few years.   Memorial Park, of which the Arboretum is a part, is a population of trees planted 75 years ago all competing for the same water.  By August 2012, when you drove through the park and looked at the tree line, you thought, “Wow, it looks like fall in the park,” but then it hit you. That was not fall, that was death.

Then, of course, the wildfires at Bastrop happened. The Houston Fire Department and the Texas Forest Service called us all together to create a plan to be implemented in case of a forest fire in Memorial Park. We had to clear our driveway back a certain number of feet so that the fire department wouldn't get stuck if there was a fire in the park and we had to clear a lot of acreage.

We lost five thousand trees in the drought. There was a 50% mortality rate across Memorial Park.  But as one of the park’s stewards, I get to help fix the problem. It's not an overnight fix, of course, it's going to take millions of dollars and many years, but we will do it because we have to and we will use the knowledge we have now to make the park more sustainable.

Last year we went through a master-planning process to raise money to restore the land, and raised about $700,000. The restoration will cover the 155-acre forest sanctuary and also all of the building work that needs to be done. For example, we only have 91 parking spaces and that's not nearly enough. We're full every weekend and have to have parking attendants to handle it.

Although it does make parking harder, I am very proud of the work I have done to raise public awareness of the Arboretum in the nine years I've been here.  When I first arrived, business for the Arboretum totaled $600,000, but now the total gross revenue is $2.2 million. I’ve taken a small organization with a small footprint and have grown it. We have homeschool programs and preschool programs. Our Summer Camp which was half a day for six weeks and cost $85 a week is now all day for six weeks and brings in $295 a week from each child. We have Winter Camp, Spring Break Camp and we partner with lots of different folks to add a lot of other programs too. We know many adults who want to be here, but how do you get the others to come?  You serve them wine and cheese!  Just recently, we had a very successful Tapas on the Trail event with 250 people in the forest in the evening with gourmet food. We also have a family event called ArBOOretum in October and that’s very popular.

So though we've done a great job of encouraging people to come here, they don't necessarily see the devastation I see and they still love coming here.

What’s your Houston story?

I’m Houston born and bred, but because I went to college at Texas A&M in College Station, I was ready to come home afterwards.  But I've always thought that if I had going to UT in Austin, I probably would never have left. I love Austin.

I was married for a long time and lived in the Houston Heights and when I got divorced in 2002, I moved to the Woodlands Heights, close to my children's schools.  I had a website development business which was great because I could work from home so I could be there for the kids. I had a number of really great jobs including working for a management consultant who was a Harvard MBA and ten years working with her really helped me a lot. I was also very involved in the Houston Heights Association. I was on the board and in charge of many projects within the Heights including raising funds to renovate a neighborhood park called Donovan Park.

Although I didn't have any paid non-profit experience, I wrote up my résumé listing all my skills and asked people I knew to let me know if any suitable jobs came up. Then one day my son came home with the book from Writers in the Schools on the front of which was his picture of a turtle. I asked him where he had seen a turtle and, he said he’d seen it at the Arboretum. Though I hadn’t been there myself for a few years, he had gone there on a field trip.  Within a couple of months of that conversation, I was appointed Executive Director at the Arboretum. It was an amazing coincidence!

Who or what has been the greatest influence on your life?

My mom – I was the first from my family to go to college and I was a bit miserable for the first couple of years. I was not happy in my science-based course and I was struggling with my grades. I remember coming home and saying to my mom that I was going to drop out, but she wouldn’t let me.  She said I was too smart and I’d worked too many years to throw it away.  Instead, she arranged for me to take an aptitude test which found that I had an above-average business brain.  My mom suggested that I go back to school and change course to major in Business, so I did and it was like second nature to me.  It was really awesome.

What advice would you give to someone new to running a non-profit?

I'd say collaboration is the key to success and also being open. Houston Mayor, Anise Parker, said recently in one of her speeches that “collaboration is the new competition”.

I am so lucky to be within an organization which is part of the larger Houston picture, and to be one of the leaders working to make Houston an amazing internationally-known city in which to live and work. People think of us as having cowboy boots and pick-up trucks, with horses in the backyard.  They think we have no culture but it's really not like that. Houston's a very diverse city.

How do you find balance in your life?

I like to find balance. I'm an avid outdoors person and have to spend a lot of time outdoors to be happy.  Exercising and keeping in shape are important to me. Also my job is super fun so it's not like I don’t look forward to coming to work. I'm good at not taking work home, so while I work a lot here and I do work on the weekends if I need to, when I go home I have my own time in my house with my wonderful dog and the one child I have left at home. Living in my neighborhood is really awesome.  We have access to so many trails so I can bike up here at the weekend to check on things and then I ride back home which is a great experience for me.

Balance is important, but in the greater scheme of things, we are lucky that we are living in a time where we have so much that other people in the world do not have. I'm very aware of the fact that we are in the top 1% that has this amazing quality of life that other human beings don't have.

What does Houston mean to you?

Being part of a program called Leadership Houston has really made me realize how much I love the city. Mayor Parker recently came to the graduation ceremony of and said that when she was part of the Leadership Houston program, she had no idea she was ever going to be the mayor.  I have watched her throughout her career and she has done some amazing things in this city.  She said that she always makes time to come back for that event because any one of us could end up as mayor too.  This is such an inspiring program. Mayor Parker was a graduate from Class 12, I am in Class 30 and they are already recruiting Class 34.

Also, in Houston, the spirit of philanthropy runs very deep. So many men and women who have money because they made good in this town have then given back to the city. Look at Bill White and what he achieved during his time as mayor, for example.  He rallied his philanthropist friends and said, “I want to build a beautiful city park near the George R Brown Convention Center and I want to get it done before I leave office.” Few people realize how much collaborative work it took to transform a series of dusty parking lots and private spaces into Discovery Green, the most beautiful urban park space you've ever seen.  Now this huge effort has moved on to transform Buffalo Bayou Park as well.  In this city, there are so many people investing time, energy and money to create real quality-of-life experiences for the people who live there.

Where is your happy place in Houston?

I think my favorite place is Buffalo Bayou Park. I really enjoy spending time there, like this weekend when I took the trail from my house which connects to the Buffalo Bayou Trail right at Spaghetti Warehouse.  It’s great to see this renovated space and everyone on their own bikes or using the bike-share program.  There are skateboarders too and even groups on Segways. 

What is your favorite restaurant?

My favorite place is a neighborhood restaurant called The Glass Wall.  It’s right down the street from my house and has fond memories for me.  When the power went off thanks to Hurricane Ike, they accommodated half the neighborhood, so we have found a way to pay them back.  The bar is reserved for people who live in the neighborhood and when we go in there, it's like Cheers! where everybody knows your name.  They serve great local food and wine, and anywhere the bartender knows what you’ll have to drink before you even get to your table is really a great place.

There are so many good places to eat in Houston, it's hard to choose another one, but it would have to be The Grove on Discovery Green.  The food is fantastic and the atmosphere’s incredible. If you have the chance to sit on the porch outside overlooking all the people that are using the grassy green space, it's really lovely.

What is your Houston secret?

I would have to say that the Arboretum is the best kept secret in the city and I would love to keep it for myself, but I do realize that's probably not the best business model for an executive director to have! I’ve met many people who say their favorite place in the whole of Houston is the meadow pond, so it’s not only me that loves it here.

If you could change one thing about Houston…

Mass transit – it's terrible that we don't have it.  It is embarrassing that we have a city of this size and we are embracing the rubber tire model of getting around. I do realize that though lots of people are trying to stop that being the case, we're too far into it to make much change. I am disappointed that I have to take my car to work every day but even the buses are just not an option for me because the route would take me over ninety minutes each way.

To find out more about the Houston Arboretum and Nature Center, click here. 

For further information about Leadership Houston, click here.

Amy Weiss

Rabbi Amy Weiss is the founder and executive director of Undies for Everyone, a non-profit organization that distributes new underwear and socks to underprivileged students in Houston’s school districts.  She founded the Initiative for Jewish Women and serves on the Independent Police Oversight Board in Houston. She is the Director of Food and Nutrition for Houston Hillel, the campus organization for Jewish students, where her husband Rabbi Kenny Weiss is the executive director. She has two sons, Eli and Joshua.

What’s your story, Amy?

Ever since I was a child I wanted to have a house full of people.  As a rabbi, I meet so many people who are new to Houston – we called them strays – and we welcome them in.   That’s just so fulfilling to me. I became a rabbi to make Judaism more accessible, so it's not unusual for us to have fifty people for Passover in our house every year. I love making people happy and I love nurturing people. That's why I do all the cooking here at the Hillel. For example every Tuesday and Wednesday we do lunches here for the students.  A friend of mine and I bake cookies at the beginning of every semester and put them in the freezer so the kids have homemade cookies for every lunch, because they should feel comforted and nurtured.  I guess that I treat others like I would like to be treated.

Growing up in Dallas, I was very involved in my youth group and was a song leader, playing the guitar all over Texas and Oklahoma at conventions of hundreds of Jewish kids. After getting a degree in advertising from the University of Texas, my first job was selling advertising, but on the first day, literally the first day, I remember thinking this just isn't right for me.

Eventually I found myself involved with my synagogue again and the rabbi there took me under his wing.  He wanted me to become a rabbi and after getting my Masters in Jewish Education, I began the rabbinic program at Hebrew Union College in New York. On the last day of my first week, I met my husband Kenny who was there leading a teen trip. He came to my house for dinner and we've been together ever since. That was 1991. It seems like yesterday but at the same time it just seems like so far away.

In 1995, when we were living in Washington DC, our first son Aaron was born prematurely and died. Then, after having trouble getting pregnant again, we had Eli in 1997.  When Eli was eight months old we moved to Pennsylvania and since there nothing else to do I got pregnant again, but I lost that one. I got pregnant again and in 1999, we had Joshua.  Aaron, Eli and Joshua – you can tell we're rabbis, we're so biblical!

We moved to Houston in 2001 when Kenny got the chance to apply for the job at the Houston Hillel.  He just fell in love with it, so we moved here a year later.

Why do you do what you do?

Losing our first son, Aaron, really changed me. When Eli and Joshua were born, I figured if God is going to give me these children I’ve got to do something with them, I have to be there for them. I can't be a congregational rabbi and have two kids. Some people can do it but I can't.  So I started the Initiative for Jewish Women (IJW) and did that for seven years. I was programming for Jewish women, but the truth of the matter is that there's a zillion things for Jewish women to do and I after a while I found I couldn't differentiate myself.  

By 2008, I was also blogging for the Houston Chronicle’s religion section and around October time, when everyone was doing endless holiday toy drives for underprivileged children, a social worker said to me, “You know what these kids really need? Underwear and socks!”  So I blogged about it and people started dropping things off here.  I got a few hundred pairs and I talked to Waste Management to get boxes. I pulled together a committee and Undies for Everyone just sort of grew and grew from there.

Then last year, my dad died. So I stood back and re-evaluated my life, and I thought, “You know, the Jewish ladies don't need me as much as these kids need their tushies covered.” So I let the IJW go, and focused my energy on Undies for Everyone. I got some friends, filled out the paperwork and it is just unbelievable how fast it all developed.  In our fourth year, we gave out 10,000 pairs and this year we gave out somewhere between 33,000 and 38,000. We even had a donation from the man whose family owns the company which supplies Target with all the Disney and Marvel-type underwear.  They are Jewish so someone had given him our details and he sent us 43,000 pairs of underwear. Elyse, our board chair, and I flew to New York in October to meet him, so now we have a relationship with him and another company in New York. That's where we get the big stuff but also individual people or schools have underwear drives, where they ask everyone to bring one packet.

There are two parts to our organization. Obviously our first priority is about covering the kids who are disadvantaged, so there is the collection and distribution of mass quantities of underwear, but we also offer the opportunity to give to anyone who wants to do something for someone else.  Some people can write really large checks or even medium-size checks, and other people can go buy one packet of underwear.  Either way, they will know that they have changed someone's life and I think that changes their life too.
 

Our idea is also that we have to teach our kids how to give. A parent can use Undies for Everyone as an opportunity to take a kid to the store and say, “You have a whole drawer full of underwear and you take it for granted. But there are kids out there that don't have any underwear at all, and doesn’t most everyone deserve to have underwear?” Everyone can identify with that.  So let your kids pick a pack of underwear to give to someone else and that's the start of teaching those kids about being philanthropic and giving them the opportunity to repair the world.

Once we have all these undies, we distribute them in a number of ways. The City of Houston runs a Back-to-School event which pre-registers 25,000 kids in fifteen school districts. Each of them gets a wrist band which gets them a backpack and supplies, vaccinations, uniforms and even haircuts.  We, of course, give away underwear.  I think 15,000 pairs went there and another 10,000 pairs went to Houston Independent School District nurses, not only for the elementary schools where little kids have accidents but also to the middle school nurses who really love it because teenage girls are not regular yet in their cycles. We gave 3,000 to Fort Bend schools, 2,000 to Alief and to Waller and we will soon expand into charter schools and places like that.

For the future, we already have a trademark attorney and we are looking to go national within a few years. You know, it's God's work. This is not just about covering these kids’ privates, it is about dignity and self-esteem. It represents so much more for them, it’s about being like everyone else so they don’t have to worry about someone else finding out they aren’t wearing any.

Is there more to your story?

I don't blog for the Chronicle anymore but I do make mezuzahs out of Lego! And yes, that is extraordinary, but I am all about making Judaism accessible!  A mezuzah has a prayer in it and you put it on your door frame.  When I was growing up, people only put up one mezuzah, but in traditional Judaism, you're supposed to have one on every door in the house, except the bathroom and the laundry room. So for people who normally wouldn't put a mezuzah on their kid’s bedroom door, here's this really cool thing, and since everybody loves Lego, you're giving the kids an opportunity to connect. It's not scary, it's not old and it's not weird. It’s just really cool!

Who or what has been the greatest influence on your life?

It's really hard to say because there have been a lot of people who have influenced me, but I think my husband is really the greatest influence.  He allows me every opportunity to be successful. I worry a lot and it can be paralyzing and he just doesn't let that happen. He doesn't let difficulties or worry stop him. He will do anything to give me an opportunity to shine and he has just been the best thing that ever happened to me. He’s an awesome, awesome guy.

What advice would you give to someone who sees a need in the community and thinks they have something that can help fill that need?
Go talk to lots of people and make sure that need isn't being filled by someone else.  If you want to succeed and you want to make a difference, you have to know that you are doing something different from all the many other non-profits in Houston. Otherwise you are not going to get funded and you're not going to get people on board. The other thing I would say is take Rice University's Leadership Institute for Non-profit Executives course which has been phenomenal. It's a one year course and I have met some of the greatest people. I've just loved it.

How do you find, or seek to find, balance in your life?

You know I’ve given that a lot of thought and I don't think there really is balance. My family comes first and everything else comes after. There are always things to do, including this job, so that I can be there for the kids and for Kenny, because the home is the center of it. Everything else just fills in around it. I have also just accepted that I'm not going to be able to do everything fabulously.

What does Houston mean to you?

It is so clichéd, but I think Houston is the city of opportunity. It is a really diverse city, in thinking and believing, with lots of different religions, but ultimately so many people do so much work for Houston to make it a better place. It's just amazing.

Where is your happy place in Houston?

It’s the swing on our front lawn at home. It hangs from a tree and sometimes Kenny and I will sit there and just hang out, throwing a ball for the dog. But really, wherever I am, if I have my family and my friends near, I'm okay. As long as the food's good!

What is your favorite place to eat?

Our go-to place is India’s, on Richmond, which is really good. It's from the 80s or the 70s, it has commercial carpet but the food is great and the people are so nice. It’s so quiet, you can go on Saturday night with another couple and have a conversation and some really good food.

What is your Houston secret?

The Chocolate Cinnamon Shake at Goode Company Taqueria! It's not even a milkshake really, more like soft serve ice-cream. In fact, they don't even serve it with a straw. I don't know if it's actually a kids’ thing though because it has quite a cinnamon bite to it. It's awesome!

If you could change one thing about Houston…

The weather or the potholes! The weather because I'm not good at sweating. And the potholes? I think the tire people go out at night to dig them.

For more information about Amy’s work at Undies for Everyone, click here. 

To see Amy’s Lego mezuzahs, click here.  

For more information about the Rice University Leadership Institute for Nonprofit Executives, click here.