WOMEN OF ACHIEVEMENT who speak English as a second language – a topic that’s always hit home for her. Anabel could barely speak English when she moved to the States from Puerto Rico in 1981 to start her undergraduate studies at Syracuse University. A college friend would walk her through simple phrases like, “How are you doing?” and, “Where are we going for lunch?” When Anabel moved to Durham in 2010, she spent every Saturday morning for five years teaching ESL students at The Church of The Good Shepherd. Anabel likes to think that’s where her son, Andres, found his motivation to join the Peace Corps in 2019. The pandemic cut Andres’ experience short, and necessitated that Anabel watch her daughter Gisela’s Durham Academy graduation on TV. Still, over the past year she’s sometimes worked 55-plus-hour weeks, at times overseeing some 300 cases. And that doesn’t include her pro bono work. “It’s what makes me feel so good about what I do,” she says. That drive earned her induction into the state’s Pro Bono Honor Society in 2019 and the Citizen Lawyer Award from the North Carolina Bar Association the following year. Anabel finds ways to advocate for people beyond her role as an attorney. She’s a member of North Carolina Advocates for Justice and coordinates U.S. citizenship clinics. She recruited 21 attorneys from her office to volunteer at the last clinic three years ago. They processed nearly 50 applications that day. You’ll find her at an occasional Durham City Council meeting, gauging how certain plans affect neighborhoods with large Latino populations. When Bill Bell was mayor, she’d walk up to him and relay her complaints without hesitation. Now she’s in Raleigh doing the same thing at a state level, often sitting in on four-hour meetings for the Governor’s Hispanic Advisory Council. For all the awards and accolades she’s received for her work, her one hope is that it makes an impact for generations to come. “I’m really proud and honored to be a member of all these committees, but I feel for my children and their children,” she says. “Knowing that we [as a country] move so slowly sometimes. When my son was in Brogden Middle School, he was followed by a group of kids who called themselves ‘the border patrol.’ “I hope that with all this effort and all this work and all these committees, we will see improvement, see change.” – by Hannah Lee 56
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RA C H A EL C LA SSI FOUNDER AND CEO, TINY EARTH TOYS his time last year, Rachael Classi’s upstairs closet in her Duke Park home overflowed with toys. The blocks and doodle boards once loved by daughters Donna, 4, and Lucia, 2, cluttered the space. Rachael saw what the overstuffed alcove was teaching her children. “Habits of overconsumption start really young,” Rachael says. “It kept hitting me that we don’t need to constantly be purchasing brand new things for our little ones.” Rachael and her husband, Peter Classi, were without child care when the pandemic began, and struggled to manage their full-time jobs. Rachael left her position as vice president of strategy and marketing at Teamworks to look after her daughters. At home, she found herself “trying to find ways to bring new and novel things into the house [without] spending a fortune,” Rachael says. She began exchanging sanitized toys and books with neighbors. This informal neighborhood trade-off reminded Rachael of that closet. She surveyed parents and discovered that they also wanted to find a systematic way to pass on toys their children had outgrown. So, she developed a concept for a startup that would offer subscription boxes of playthings intended for reuse. She teamed up with experts, including certified Montessori early childhood teacher Olynda Smith, in October 2020 to curate sustainable, age-appropriate toys. Tiny Earth Toys launched a full line of products for newborns to toddlers in March. Each box option contains high-quality wooden toys and is intended for about four to six months of use before TET recommends sending it back and moving on to the next option. Returned kits are sanitized and then sent to their next home. “She could very easily just be looking at the nuts and bolts of the toys, but she’s also looking at the bigger question of how to support families,” Olynda says, which is why boxes include guides that are centered on being environmentally conscious. Rachael believes it was no coincidence that her inspiration struck last summer. “If the pandemic had not occurred,” she says, “I’m not sure I would have slowed down enough to realize what was going on in our house.” The business continues to grow – it sold out of two of its flagship kits and doubled the number of parents subscribed in April – and Rachael is excited by the momentum. She hopes to share with others what she already knows: that they can “be really happy without needing to own that closet at the top of my stairs.” – by Renee Ambroso
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