In fact, Janet was one of the founders of the Junior League of Kane & DuPage Counties, where she remains a Sustainer, and she attributes much of her success in nonprofit management to what she learned from League experiences. Like what? Well, how to assess if a community project met the mission of the League and if it was a good investment of the League’s funds and volunteer time, and how to train volunteers to be good board members, or how to use organizational development, as well as gaining management experience that made her feel more confident and competent. (Not to mention lifelong friendships!)
Janet moved directly from League work to nonprofit management, using her League skills to build what was a foundering human services agency into a sound organization now known as Teen Parent Connection, a Glen Ellyn, IL-based agency focused on support and education for teen mothers.

TREE Fund was a more complex and demanding assignment. For one thing, it has an international impact. TREE Fund’s focus is the conservation and preservation of trees in the “urban forest” – tree populations in urban and suburban settings – through research and education, and it is the only non-governmental group with this focus. Funds raised from corporate and individual sponsors and donors support scholarships for aspiring arborists, funding for scientific research into critical urban tree care issues, and funding for arboriculture education programs in schools

Success in fundraising is critical, given the breadth and depth of TREE Fund’s programs. Working with a small staff, Janet raised more than $1 million in 2012, including more than $600,000 from the group’s major annual fundraiser, the STIHL Tour des Trees, an annual 500 + mile cycling event that changes venue annually. The 2013 tour is a 585-mile route around Lake Ontario that showcases the historic trees, urban centers and favorite destinations of upstate New York and Ontario. (Unlike other biking events, however, key components of the Tour des Trees are tree plantings and community outreach.)

So what is Janet Bornancin doing for Earth Day? Keeping a lot of balls in the air – and you can help! To make a donation to help keep those balls moving, please click here. As they say at TREE Fund, Healthy Trees Are Rooted in Research. Now that’s a good message for Earth Day!

The AJLI Board made a commitment to Leagues during the last Annual Conference to continue to provide opportunities for education about human trafficking, whether for sexual exploitation or forced labor. Our commitment to addressing this global problem is reflected in a panel at this year’s Annual Conference in Washington, with representatives from two organizations – Polaris Project and FAIR Girls – intimately involved in combating it. The focus will be on how Leagues and SPACs can move beyond awareness and member education and build programs to address the issue, particularly child sex trafficking, at the community level.

This is not a new issue for The Junior League. In fact, we have been collectively honored by the United Nations Association of New York for League-based initiatives in fighting against human trafficking. The honor recognized the work done at the state level by the New York State Public Affairs Committee of The Junior League (NYSPAC), the Junior Leagues of New Jersey State Public Affairs Committee (NJSPAC) and the Michigan State Council of Junior Leagues (MSC) as well as more localized efforts by individual Leagues in Los Angeles, Atlanta, New Orleans, Owensboro, KY and Westchester County, NY.

The eight Leagues represented by NJSPAC, in particular, have been active in the fight, and were among the key supporters of the Human Trafficking Prevention, Protection and Treatment Act, which was unanimously approved by both New Jersey’s Senate and Assembly in March; the bill is now waiting for Governor Chris Christie’s signature. NJSPAC’s efforts came as part of the New Jersey Coalition against Human Trafficking, an alliance that includes the New Jersey Catholic Conference, the League of Women Voters and the New Jersey State Association of Jewish Federations.

Individual members also are involved at both the state and local levels. Sara Morley-LaCroix of the Junior League of Kalamazoo, for example, is also the co-founder of the Kalamazoo Anti-Human Trafficking Coalition (KAHTC), which was one of the key supporters of the new Michigan Commission on Human Trafficking led by Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette to raise public awareness, train professionals on the signs of human trafficking, provide services for victims and collect data on human trafficking.

KAHTC is also a regional member of the Michigan Human Trafficking Task Force and is working at the local level to provide training for Kalamazoo-area nurses, police officers and educators in recognizing the signs of human trafficking.

The comprehensive legislation, say its sponsors, will crack down on every aspect of trafficking by revising and expanding the state’s current laws to create a new human trafficking commission, criminalize additional activities related to human trafficking, upgrade certain penalties on existing human trafficking or related crimes, increase protections afforded to victims of human trafficking, and provide for increased training and public awareness on human trafficking issues.

A small step? Perhaps. But look to hear more about what has been done, what can be done, and how Leagues can step up the fight!

Widowed at the age of 37, it was her commitment to creating change that led her to such a varied career.

After serving as the president of three different businesses, Bobbie entered politics and was elected to the Canadian Parliament as a Member of the House of Commons. While in Parliament she chaired two Standing Committees, first heading up the country’s Ministry of Natural Resources and then the Ministry of Industry, Science and Technology, a post she was asked by the Prime Minister to take when it was created in 1988. In addition, from 1990 to 1993, she worked as Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Health, where her training as an operating room nurse came in handy.

Even after leaving Parliament, Bobbie remained in public service, taking leadership roles on the Calgary Southwest Federal PC Electoral District board, the Calgary Glenmore Provincial PC Association, and two medical boards, one of which studies the issues of infection, inflammation and immunity worldwide, and another that advises Calgary Laboratory Services.

In addition to being inspired by the AJLI conferences she attended over the years, one of Bobbie’s most memorable experiences was her work in the early days of JLC’s Next–to-New shop, which sold clothing to disadvantaged families in the city. Getting to know the mothers who shopped there taught her a lot about the world as well as the issues affecting women and children that Leagues like Calgary address every day. During her Active tenure, Bobbie was also deeply affected by her work in the 1960s with children with special needs and children with autism, a newly diagnosed condition at the time.

So it seems that a start as an unpaid volunteer can pay off – even in politics!

As President and CEO of the Centro de Investigación y Estudios sobre Sociedad Civil (Center for Research and Civil Society Studies) as well as Vice-President and Research Chair of the Mexican Center for Philanthropy, she has conducted important research on the relationship between citizenship and voluntary service in Mexico. Her academic work on the editorial boards of publications like Prometeo, the Mexican Journal of Humanistic Psychology and Human Development. She has also participated in the Initiative of the Americas of the Council on Foundations and the Advisory Committee of the Global Status of Philanthropy for The World Wide Initiative for Grantmaker Support (WINGS).

As head of JB Consultores, an international firm that provides training in human resources both for the corporate and nonprofit sectors, Jacqueline has been committed to the professionalization of volunteerism in Mexico and has presented papers, articles and speeches advocating for voluntary action and civil participation in seminars throughout the world.

She has also taken leadership roles at the Mexican Center for Philanthropy (Cemefi), the International Society for Third Sector Research, and the National Mexican Health Foundation the Patrimonio de la Beneficencia Pública, a Mexican government organization designed to support non-government organizations, or NGOs, in Mexico.

The child of U.S.-born parents who relocated to Mexico when she was five, Rivas joined Girl Guides, her church choir, and her high school yearbook staff before joining the Junior League of Mexico City at the age of 18. “Volunteering helps you grow as a person,” she says. “You can go through the motions, but if you really live it, it changes you.”

While her role as the Wicked Witch seemed designed to traumatize younger viewers, Margaret Hamilton, who was trained as a teacher, gained recognition for her work as an advocate of causes designed to benefit children and animals, and retained a lifelong commitment to public education. “It’s so ironic: I don’t think there’s anybody who loves children more than I do, and now I’m famous for being the woman who scared thousands of them half to death,” Hamilton told the Toronto Telegram in 1969.

Actress Margaret Hamilton in “A Little Night Music”

Her strengths as a character actor served her well in movies like The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and My Little Chickadee and, later on TV, where she played Morticia Addams’ mother, “Hester Frump,” in three episodes of The Addams Family and soap operas like CBS’ The Secret Storm. Among her many TV appearances was an episode of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, where she explained to children that she was only playing a role and showed how make-up transformed her into the witch.

Living in Manhattan after retirement, as a member of the Veterans Hospital Radio and Television Guild, she used her acting skills to work with disabled veterans and the blind, and appeared locally in television ads for groups that promoted companion animals for the blind and other disabled people. And, working under the auspices of the New York City Parks Department, she would often read stories to children gathered at the Hans Christian Anderson statue in Central Park.

Margaret Hamilton died in 1985.

Quite a life – and not just for the cinematic moment when she threatened Dorothy by hissing: “I’ll get you, my pretty — and your little dog, too!”

That’s the essential thought behind a truly ambitious program by the Junior League of Washington. In honor of its Centennial year, JLW volunteers have committed to purchasing and distributing 100,000 new books to students in schools in the greater Washington, D.C. area, focusing on children age 0 through 5th grade who may not otherwise have access to books outside of their school lives.

Called RESOLUTION READ, the program showcases the JLW’s narrowed focus on three key areas of literacy: the importance of reading out loud to children; placing age-appropriate books in the homes of children; and providing more books to schools and libraries.

JLW kicked off book distributions in June 2012 by providing over 6,000 books to D.C. students at 11 elementary schools and organizations.

By design, however, RESOLUTION READ is much more than just giving out books. JLW volunteers also give individual attention, including help in selecting books, reading aloud to kids, and offering a host of other small activities that will foster a passion for books and reading where it otherwise might not exist. At a recent RESOLUTION READ event, pre-teens at John Burroughs Education Campus not only received signed copies of author Mary Amato’s latest book, but had the chance to meet the author and work together to write a song, using her writing process. The energy in the classroom alone showed the power a book can have on a child.

JLW comes to this project with an impressive list of community partners, including The Literacy Lab, First Book, An Open Book Foundation, Reach Out and Read, and Everybody Wins! DC, as well as Reading is Fundamental, the nation’s largest nonprofit children’s literacy organization. Perhaps not coincidentally, Reading Is Fundamental’s CEO and President, Carol H. Rasco, found her volunteer roots as a member of the Junior League of Little Rock.

But children’s literacy has been a major focus of The Junior League virtually since our founding more than 11 decades ago as an organization dedicated to helping poor immigrant families on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

When the National Literacy Act became law in 1999, Junior Leagues across the nation took the opportunity to renew and reinvigorate a commitment to focus on literacy issues in their communities. Individual Leagues continue that effort with many innovative programs and initiatives at the local level, and the 12 Leagues in Georgia even banded together several years ago to invest 1 million minutes of League volunteers’ time in reading to Georgia’s children.

But activity by the many Leagues devoted to children’s literacy is part of a larger national effort to close the gap in literacy achievement between disadvantaged children and their more affluent peers. The need can be clearly seen in recent data from National Center for Education Statistics, which show that only 20 percent of 4-year-olds in poverty can recognize all 26 letters, compared with 37 percent of their peers at or above the poverty level.

Other major national organizations deeply committed to the effort include Reading Is Fundamental, which provides 4.5 children with 16 million new, free books and literacy resources each year; First Book, which has distributed more than 100 million books and educational resources to programs and schools serving children from low-income families throughout the United States and Canada; and Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, which has mailed over 40,000,000 books to children in the U.S., Canada and the UK.

It’s a good fight…for the Junior League of Washington and all of the other Leagues involved in childhood literacy…and it’s a good fight for the many other organizations investing their time, energy and scarce funds to make a difference in this important effort.

Remember, teach a child to read, and you’ll never know what a difference it can make!

So who was Dorothy Whitney Straight? In her own way, she was a remarkable woman. Born in 1887 to one of the richest families in America, she was one of the young socialites that Mary Harriman gathered around her when she founded The Junior League.

What made Dorothy Whitney Straight unusual then was her commitment to creating lasting community impact, which is very much the mission of The Junior League today. She may not have called it that, however. Service was probably the way she looked at what she did – service to poor immigrants and working women, service to the arts and education, and service to progressive causes that belied her privileged background.

The daughter of William C. Whitney, a financier and Secretary of the Navy under President Grover Cleveland, she came into came into a substantial inheritance following the death of her father when she was 17.

President of the Junior League of New York from 1907 to 1909, she introduced formal training for members and was also the force behind its campaign to provide housing and other support to young working women in New York City. In 1921, she became the first president of the Association of Junior Leagues of America (now The Association of Junior Leagues International, Inc.), the umbrella organization created by the 30 existing Leagues to harness the strengths of the individual Leagues for greater community service and to train and educate League members for a lifetime of volunteer work. In that role, she was credited with doubling the size, power and potential of The Junior League Movement in ten years.

But her accomplishments went well beyond her Junior League leadership, as important as it was during a time of rapid growth for the Association.

During World War I, drawing upon her Junior League experience, she raised money for the Women’s Liberty Loan Committee, the Young Men’s Christian Association, and the Red Cross. She later chaired the Women’s Emergency Committee of the European Relief Council, which helped feed over three million children in Europe.

After her first husband, Willard Straight, died of pneumonia developed from a case of influenza in 1918 after serving in France with the U.S. Army, she continued on the path of philanthropy that she had shared with him.

On behalf of her husband, she continued their support to his alma mater, Cornell University, while also funding the creation of the New School for Social Research in New York and helping to found the progressive magazine The New Republic.

She remained an active benefactor of the arts, feminist, and pacifist causes as well as social and labor reform and lent financial support to progressive alternative education as well as scholarly research.

She met her second husband, Leonard Knight Elmhirst, an Englishman who was then studying Agriculture at Cornell University, and they embarked on ambitious plans to recreate rural community life at Dartington Hall in Devon, England. The Dartington Hall Trust today is a charity specializing in the arts, social justice and sustainability.

She died on December 15, 1968.

All in all, quite a life!

And somehow that homely fact fits well into the larger story of one of American’s greatest 20th century writers.

She was very much a citizen of Jackson. After college and, later, studying advertising at Columbia University, she returned home after graduation at the height of the Great Depression because she was unable to find work in New York.

She took a job at a local radio station and wrote about Jackson society for the Tennessee newspaper Commercial Appeal, later working for the Works Progress Administration, where she collected stories, conducted interviews, and took photographs of daily life in Mississippi. By 1936, she turned to writing full-time and slowly, one published story after another, became a famous author.

Even years later, after gaining a seat on the staff of The New York Times book review and a Guggenheim Fellowship grant that allowed her to travel to France, England, Ireland, and Germany, she returned to Jackson to care for her elderly mother and two brothers – all of them living together in the house that is now a National Historic Landmark.

Eudora Welty died on July 23, 2001, in Jackson, and is buried there. She never married, and she stayed close to her Jackson roots.

Born in 1928, in Santa Monica, California, Shirley Temple appeared in her first Hollywood feature film at 6, and by 1940 had 43 films under her belt. And she was a superstar. In the midst of the Great Depression, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt called her “Little Miss Miracle” for raising the public’s morale during times of economic hardship. He added, “As long as our country has Shirley Temple, we will be all right.” Temple’s song-and-dance routine to the tune “On the Good Ship Lollipop” in 1934′s Bright Eyes earned her a special Academy Award for “Outstanding Personality of 1934.”

Long after her movie career faded, however, Shirley Temple Black (her second marriage to California businessman Charles Alden Black lasted until his death in 2005) turned to public service, where she also became a star. She ran for Congress in 1967 but lost. From 1969 to 1970 she served as U.S. delegate to the United Nations and was appointed ambassador to Ghana in 1974. Two years later, she became the chief of protocol of the United States, retaining the position until 1977. In 1988, she achieved the rank of honorary Foreign Service officer of the United States. From 1989 to 1992 she served yet another public service role, as ambassador to Czechoslovakia.

Eleanor Roosevelt with a young Shirley Temple Black in 1930

In December of 1998, Shirley Temple Black’s lifetime accomplishments were celebrated in the Kennedy Center Honors at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington. In 2005 she received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Screen Actors Guild.

And, in case you haven’t seen one of her movies, she is No. 18 on the American Film Institute’s list of the greatest female American screen legends of all time, making her the highest-ranked living person on the list.

In case you missed it, according to a number of media outlets, Dan Friedman of The New York Daily News asked a source on Capitol Hill whether Chuck Hagel, who’s been nominated to be Secretary of Defense, had received speaking fees from controversial groups. Friedman made up the names “Friends of Hamas” and “Junior League of Hezbollah” as farcical examples. And the resulting uproar (more than 160,000 Google hits for the Junior League of Hezbollah in two days) certainly put The Junior League in the limelight.

So, for the record, here are a few facts about The Junior League (and let us start off by saying we are not a political organization and these comments in no way reflect an opinion of any kind about Senator Hagel or the Islamic world.):

• Since its founding in 1901 by social activism pioneer Mary Harriman, The Junior League has evolved into one of the oldest, largest, and most effective women’s volunteer organizations in the world.
• There are 293 independent Leagues with 155,000 members—but there is no Junior League of Hezbollah.
• While we have Leagues in four countries—the U.S., Canada, Mexico and the U.K.—we do not yet have a League in Lebanon.
• And recipes for making bombs? Weaponry need not apply, however, we are sure at least one of the 200-plus Junior League cookbooks (which have been published since the Junior League of Dallas published its first in 1924) contain recipes for making bombes of all kinds!
• Militant activities? I don’t think so, however, we are fierce as we work to build children’s museums, pediatric mobile clinics, address child sex trafficking, perinatal depression, childhood obesity and healthy eating, and so much more.
• “Junior League” is a registered trademark of The Association of Junior Leagues International, Inc. and we value our name.