Liesl Pike Moldow ’83
wants to ‘give teens the mic’ on mental health issues Liesl Pike Moldow ’83 (center) returned to Mayfield with her family, Katherine (23), William (19), husband Charles and Thomas (14), to speak at the Class of 2021’s graduation in June.
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hen Liesl Pike Moldow ’83 got an invitation from Head of School Kate Morin to speak at Mayfield Senior School’s 2021 graduation, she admitted to being “flabbergasted” by the request— but delighted as well. Later, she hopped on a Zoom call with several members of the Class of 2021, where she quickly fell into reminiscing about the time she spent as a Mayfield student herself. Liesl exhibits a genuine ease in talking with this age group, partly because she has children around this age, but also because the Bay Area non-profit she co-founded, SafeSpace, serves this age bracket as well. Established in 2016, SafeSpace (safespace.org) is a youth-led organization that empowers peer support and self-advocacy, changing the conversation about mental health. Via campus-based presentations and other outreach efforts, SafeSpace has connected to more than 15,000 students in the Bay Area. From its inception, it was clear the need for an organization like this was great, and during this COVID-19 pandemic, it was only more pronounced. Liesl says the purpose of SafeSpace was to “give these kids a chance to make a difference and to... give them the mic.” The Pike name is a familiar one on both the Mayfield Senior School and Mayfield Junior School campuses. Liesl explains that the philanthropy of her grandparents was very specific to “their commitment and dedication to the things that they believed in.” She fondly recalls spending Sundays with them, when they would take the 10 grandchildren who lived locally to Mass at St. Philip the Apostle and treat everyone to breakfast at Van De Kamp’s afterward. Liesl learned a lot from them
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both, especially “how important it was to serve and to give back.” Liesl received her B.A. from Stanford, her MBA from Harvard, had some early professional successes in the internet boom, and got married and had children. But, as she said in her graduation speech, “Good judgment comes from experience. Experience ultimately comes from bad judgement...and I have a lot of experience.” Liesl was only a student at Mayfield Senior School for a year before her parents moved homes. When she entered a public high school in Orange County with 2,000 students, she encountered her first brush with depression. The topic was never openly discussed in her family, but decades later, as a mother herself, she watched her own teen daughter struggle with overwhelming anxiety, and Liesl wanted to be more communicative and proactive. Her first-born daughter got the help she needed and eventually went on to study at Stanford. But after a heartbreaking number of local teens succumbed to their own mental health emergencies by ending their lives, Liesl felt compelled to do something. Research suggests that when teens are encountering a mental health challenge, they tend to reach out to another teen first, and Liesl and her co-founders wanted SafeSpace to fill that void. They wanted young people to be given resources to help themselves and each other as well. Much of the insight and humility that Liesl brings to her work, and her perspective on life, comes through her varied experiences of motherhood. When her second daughter, Madeline, was born “mysteriously and profoundly
disabled,” Liesl says she had to “stop mourning the child I’d expected” and embrace the marvels of the daughter she had in front of her. “[Madeline] is a great tactile person.” says Liesl. “She laughs a lot...she loves music. She has no worries. She has no regrets.” Liesl has come to appreciate the divinity constantly flowing through Madeline. “She showed me, ‘Don’t wish for others what they don’t want for themselves.’ ” And in a particular way, Liesl says Madeline reminds her of Mayfield’s motto, “Actions Not Words,” as well. Madeline has never been able to speak, but when Liesl paid close attention to her daughter’s likes and dislikes, she realized that Madeline had been “quietly self-advocating” all along. There was a period, early in the pandemic, when Liesl and the SafeSpace team worried about how the small organization would survive the challenges of COVID-19. But instead, the non-profit flourished. Liesl was pleasantly surprised that the youth leaders continued to meet and plan, even though they couldn’t gather in person for a long while. “It has engendered this incredible...camaraderie and this commitment to SafeSpace.” Liesl expresses a lot of faith in this generation, and by having their mettle tested by a global pandemic in this critical period of their personal development, she suspects they may be acquiring the determination and resilience that usually comes much later in life. Liesl admitted, “I always wanted to graduate from Mayfield,” and this June, as our official commencement speaker (see page 53), she helped send the Class of 2021 out into the world with her compassionate wisdom.
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