Composing a Further Life

helping women.” This was called Alumnae Resources, and this time the ones who were listening and counseling were the women who came in themselves, seeking to understand their own potentials.
    “Women are amazingly able to discover an affinity, and they are willing to help as human beings, but they need a way to know that they are helping,” Glady explained. “So Alumnae Resources became very big, and despite its name it went on not just to liberal arts women but women in general and then men later on. Of course, they came in at times of transition … that emphasis on transition has been a secret of all the organizations that I have been part of starting. I left that in 1979, when my own career changed, but I took the same concept up later. I guess, as I have reflected on it and as others have, it was me going through these different stages of my life.
    “I’ve been lucky in everything I’ve done in an entrepreneurial way in the nonprofit world because I’ve been among those who have sensed what is about to come, and in helping people find their own voice. There are many other ways of starting nonprofits or sprouting an organization, but it seemed to me that for me it was organic. It was like putting something in the ground, planting a seed as an experiment in order to see, Is there an unspoken need for this? Does this seed have a need to grow? Can it grow out of this soil and this particular community? If so, you’re likely to be joined by other people and other organizations to help you iterate the words that need to be spoken. People can find a voice by joining a person or an organization they are comfortable with, that fits with how they feel and may be a sort of paradigm of their time. Then there are the forerunners of an idea. They may get battered down, they may be isolated, but they’ve made the first call. I think in the work that I’ve been doing, creating nonprofits, I’ve been lucky enough to speak up or serve a need when there was a groundswell for it. With Alumnae Resources, I found myself on a wave of sisterhood of the women’s movement as it was just beginning to arise and be spoken in other parts of the world. We were very lucky to be so advanced in America.
    “I guess Enterprise was the transition of young people who were trying to find their way and work themselves into adulthood. Then I saw that women like myself were also in a time of life when they were facing transitions. You talk in your book about the fact that a problem is also an opportunity to grow.
    “I had a book by William Bridges, a very simple book called
Transitions.
7 He was a successful professor at Mills College, and then in the sixties he decided he didn’t want to do that, but he couldn’t explain why. It was a time when people were starting various kinds of communes, not just youth communes that were acting out but communes of people searching jointly for new ways that they could get on together. He and his wife formed one up in Northern California, and he spent a year or so documenting what he was feeling and doing during the transition, and essentially the very simple model he came up with was that at first you resist the change and bang on the door that is closing, but then you realize that you can’t go back. Then you go into kind of an abyss of unknowing and feeling very shorn and uncertain of who you are, your identity and everything. And then gradually, if you find some support and realize that other people are also feeling the same way, you realize that this is a growth period, a creative opportunity leading on to another part of your life … but you have to do some work on where you’ve been and exploring what you might want to do. That’s why I started Alumnae Resources, to help people transition.” The thread of continuity that runs through Glady’s many ventures in the nonprofit world seems to be the creation of an organizational model for mutual support between individuals that allows them to begin to realize their potentials.
    Glady spent eleven years working with the Education Fund. “We became a national model and the Ford Foundation took it on in a big way. It was both thrilling and absolutely exhausting, and I was overdoing myself, taking too much time from the family. But it was completely a good thing, this promise of youth and real investment—Well, anyway, I won’t say more than that. I finished my tenure there after eleven years, and then I thought, Well, now what?”
    Glady