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Women
Helping Women in Need
It all started with Mom – three mothers, to be
exact. Three women raised three women who went on to
lead nonprofit organizations in Washington state. These
mothers don’t look the same on paper. One was
an immigrant from Yugoslavia, another married at 16
and never earned more than minimum wage, the third was
a single mom who reared two sets of identical twin girls.
Despite their divergent backgrounds, these moms raised
their daughters to believe that giving to those less
fortunate was akin to following the golden rule.
Thanks
to the values they instilled in their girls, thousands
of women in Washington state receive support and services
necessary for their survival. These daughters are visionary
leaders who make a daily difference in women’s
lives: Rita Ryder, president of the YMCA of Seattle,
King County and Snohomish County; Cheryl Cobbs, executive
director of the Fremont Public Association; and Julia
Pritt, founder of Washington Women in Need.
 Julia
Pritt
The story behind Julia Pritt’s nonprofit agency,
Washington Women in Need (WWIN), comes out in bits and
pieces, slowly, without loud whistles and bells. A successful
businesswoman who has raised three children, Pritt and
her husband started Attachmate in 1982, a corporation
that designs management software and services for major
businesses and government agencies. A decade later,
while she was in her late fifties, Pritt experienced
several life-altering changes. First her mother died.
Then her husband of 20-plus years left her, making her
both a divorcee and a wealthy woman. In 1990, she found
a lump in her breast. After a biopsy in 1991 confirmed
it was cancerous, Pritt underwent chemotherapy and radiation
treatments.
“I
was in the fourth month of chemotherapy for breast cancer
and I thought, ‘What am I going to do with the
rest of my life?’ At first, I was thinking of
helping women with breast cancer,” says Pritt,
a down-to-earth woman who likes to remain behind the
scenes. “I asked God what I was going to do. Then
I started getting these ideas.”
Pritt
grew up poor. Lacking health insurance, her family never
visited the doctors or dentists. Her mother became an
extreme example of the old wives’ tale that “you
lose a tooth for every child you have.” She lost
all of her teeth. Pritt envisioned starting up a nonprofit
agency that would provide money for all the services
her mother lacked: scholarships for education, mental
health counseling, health care insurance premiums, and
physical, dental, vision and hearing exams and treatment.
She wanted to put the needs of women first, with no
strings attached. WWIN would award grants to women so
they could choose their own counselors, doctors and
schools with money awarded to them. Knowing nothing
about the nonprofit world, Pritt gathered some friends
together, created a board, a staff of two people (herself
included), and started taking classes on nonprofits
at Bellevue Community College.
WWIN,
which opened its doors in 1992, provides financial assistance
for the health and education needs of low-income women.
Bureaucracy is kept to a minimum, and grants are awarded
to women based solely on need. If a woman is 18 or older
and earns less than $18,000, she qualifies for assistance,
and she can be awarded up to $10,000 worth of grants
in her lifetime.
“There
are an enormous number of women in need: There are 600,000
women in Washington state living in poverty. We don’t
have any illusions that we can help every woman, but
we can help 300-plus a year,” says Colleen Crowley,
WWIN’s executive director.
The
women WWIN helps are often divorced, unemployed or suffering
from domestic abuse, life-threatening illnesses or physical
and mental impairments. Although Pritt’s inspiration
for the services came from thinking about her mother’s
life, they also reflect Pritt’s history. When
she was divorced, she was able to obtain counseling
to deal with her grief. When she became ill, her health
insurance served all her medical needs. And, because
she never finished college herself, she feels women’s
success hinges on gaining an educational foundation,
says Crowley.
Because
women often put the needs of others before themselves
– especially if they have children – Pritt
wants her organization to focus solely on the needs
of women. “We get calls from women who want help
for their children, but what we’re here for is
you,” says Crowley. “We want to eliminate
the barrier that you can’t get counseling (or
other help) because it takes money away from the kids.
Then you become the stable person in the family.”
Pritt
no longer works in the office, feeling her organization
needs fresh ideas to keep growing. Her biggest contribution
continues to be one she has provided since her small
Bellevue office opened: She pays all of the nonprofit’s
operating expenses, so 100 percent of donations go directly
to helping women. The rewards she receives from being
the face behind WWIN are simple. “I just walked
up today and this lady wanted to shake my hand because
we’re giving her counseling,” says Pritt.
“Every year we have a video of clients and that’s
very rewarding to me, to see the women we’ve helped.
And, as you get older, you do want make a difference.“
Cheryl
Cobbs
The Fremont Place Organization (FPO) serves more than
25,000 individuals and families every year. The office
of Cheryl Cobbs, its executive director, resides on
tree-lined 45th Street, the soul of Wallingford. Since
its inception in 1974, this organization has outstripped
its Fremont roots, with 25 programs in Seattle and King
County. Cobbs, a jovial woman with an ever-ready laugh,
has worked here for 20 years, stepping into the top
position in 1996. By her own admission, she’s
a “change junky.” After toiling for a city
agency and running her own consulting business, she’s
glad to be at a place where she can see change happen
up close, without the bureaucracy-heavy feel of a government
office.
Although
Cobbs could easily let the 550 employees and national
service members do all the hands-on work, she stays
involved with the day-to-day operations. She takes shifts
at Capital Hill’s Broadview Emergency Shelter
for Women and Children; she sits in on FPA client-focus
groups; and says one of her favorite daily activities
is talking to the sweet Russian women who line up early
for the services offered at her branch office.
Like
the YWCA’s Opportunity Place, the FPA’s
Community Resource Center in Wallingford is a hub of
activity. On the second and third floor of a fairly
new building (built in 1998), the community it serves
walks through its doors everyday. The first floor houses
other community organizations, including a food bank
and a public library. The FPA office houses several
programs, from Operation Frontline, which offers cooking
classes on how to meet nutritional needs with meals
concocted from food banks, to Solid Ground, a case management
program for homeless people that follows people through
their first year in permanent housing.
Unlike
most service agencies, nonprofit or government run,
the FPA provides both direct services as well as advocacy
work around policy and legislative issues. “You
can’t address the root issues [of poverty] unless
you address it on a policy level,” says Cobbs.
In
a similar vein, the FPA has recently focused its attention
on anti-racism work. “About half of the people
we serve are people of color. There are huge barriers
to people of color to things like jobs and schools for
their children,” she says. “There’s
a clear connection between institutional racism and
poverty. If our mission is to eliminate poverty, we
can’t do that if we don’t eliminate racism.”
Cobbs
brings a wealth of personal experience to FPA, which
is one of the reasons why she is able to look at the
bigger picture when it comes to issues of poverty. Denise
Klein, a former co-worker who has known Cobbs for more
than 30 years, notes that she didn’t come in at
the executive level. “She’s been at the
grassroots level. She understands the needs of people
who are actually performing the services,” says
Klein. “And she is pretty much without ego in
the best sense. She’s very modest and somewhat
shy; I would guess that she’s worked hard to be
at a place where she’s comfortable making public
presentations.”
According
to Cobbs, it’s her passion that drives her to
work every day, saying that anybody can learn the mechanics
of her job, but it’s her commitment to help people
that keeps her from burning out. She believes her mother
instilled within her a desire to effect change. “I
was raised by a single mom. She had four kids: two sets
of identical twins,” says Cobbs. “She worked
two jobs most of the time we were growing up, [but]
she still had some time to do volunteer work. She would
drag us to places like the Red Cross when there was
an earthquake in Alaska. We learned early on that there
were people less fortunate than us. It was a basic expectation
in our house that we did what we could to help.”
Like
Pritt, it’s the thanks she receives from clients
that makes the job worthwhile. She talks of meeting
a woman who was a client of the Broadview Shelter at
a recent annual luncheon. A victim of domestic violence
who finally managed to leave her husband, she thanked
Cobbs for FPA’s services. “She said the
program gave her the time and space she needed to figure
out how to make her life work,” says Cobbs. “When
you hear someone tell you what your program did for
them, that is really all you need.”
Reprinted
by permission of Seattle Woman magazine.
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2285 116th Avenue NE, Suite 100, Bellevue, WA 98004
Phone: 425-451-8838. Toll Free: 888-440-WWIN
Email: wwininfo@wawomeninneed.org
webmaster@wawomeninneed.org
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