JACKSON HOLE WOMAN, Jackson Hole News&Guide, Wednesday, October 17, 2012 - 17
human services Continued from 16
Entry Services’ Keverin Burns, the Community Resource Center’s Smokey Rhea, the Latino Resource Center’s Sonia Capece, the Senior Center of Jackson Hole’s Becky Zaist and the Community Safety Network’s Sharel Love to make up the female council membership. Teton Literacy Center’s director, Valley Peters, recently stepped down, and Clare Payne Symmons is serving in the interim. Also on the council are the Curran-Seeley Foundation’s Ed Wigg and Teton Youth and Family Services’ Bruce Burkland. Council members have known one another and worked together in human services for years. While the gender makeup of the organizations may be unusual, more than one member said it doesn’t make a big difference in the way they do their work. “Jackson’s just such a great community, and we’re really close-knit, especially in the human services field,” Burns said. “We recognize people as people, not as much by race or gender.” Also, she said, with the long tradition of female leadership in Jackson Hole human services, most residents — from clients to elected officials — take a woman director as a matter of course. But when those women head out of Jackson Hole, they realize that’s something they shouldn’t take for granted. As an executive director and as an advocate for domestic violence and sexual assault victims, Love goes to Cheyenne on a fairly regular basis. While being a woman hardly registers in her consciousness back home, she said, it can be another story when she is facing members of the 87 percent male Wyoming Legislature. “Here in Jackson, I just don’t think about gender,” Love said. “There’s just so much to do. I think about it when I go to Cheyenne because it’s just so overwhelmingly male, and there I do find myself dealing with it in a way that doesn’t come up when I’m work-
BRADLY J. BONER / NEWS&GUIDE FILE
Sharel Love is executive director of the Community Safety Network.
ing in this community.” When making presentations in Cheyenne, Love said, the Community Safety Network tends to bring male board members forward to cut down on any listeners’ tendency to dismiss victim safety as a “women’s issue.” “Like it or not, people tend to forget we do serve the whole community,” Love said. “And when some male legislators think of something as a women’s issue, they don’t always take it as seriously.” Ashley said she, too, is more conscious of her gender as a potential handicap when her work takes her outside Jackson. “According to the stereotype, women are supposed to be more caring and compassionate,” she said, “and so people, especially men, tend to consider you as doing ‘women’s work,’ and you can feel like they don’t think it’s very important.” That’s a shame, since every woman interviewed said not having to worry about gender meant both the council and her individual organization probably function more smoothly. “We don’t think about ourselves, we think about our clients,” Love said. “Our work is so important that of course we want to do it the best way we can and have people contribute and do what they’re good at. Gender doesn’t enter into that, and it shouldn’t.”
Left to right: Kathy Erickson, Kate Foster, Laura Lorenz, Casey Stout, Katie Wolitarsky, Maureen Murphy, Hannah Hall. Not pictured: Christie Maurais, Sandra Bockman
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