“I was a young girl who never felt comfortable in her skin or content in my body,” Jesse Bennett says. “I was good at being positive and caring to others, but I wasn’t kind to myself.”
“When I started practicing Pilates and yoga in college, it was a gamechanger,” she continues. “I fell in love with how the practices changed how I felt in my skin. I want to give that gift to other people, to empower women to love who they are and where they’re at.”
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What happens when a child in foster care reaches 18 and “ages out” of the system?
“Far too often, kids lose where they live when they age out,” Suzanne Guinn says. “My good friend spent his whole childhood in foster care, got bounced around a lot, and on his 18th birthday became homeless. He didn’t understand that was coming. Sometimes it’s a surprise to the children.”
Guinn says 25% of foster care kids experience homelessness after aging out.
“It’s hard enough to be 18,” she says. “The decisions you have to make and things you have to do to become adult are challenging enough, but especially if don’t have parents to support you. It’s overwhelming. AcademySTAY does all of that.”
As a kid, I spent many hours at the Crocker Art Museum. Between school trips and weekend jaunts with my artist parents, I wandered the halls finding favorite paintings and artifacts.
One constant was the presence of Lial Jones, the Crocker’s Mort and Marcy Friedman director and CEO. Deeply kind despite an imposing presence, Jones would greet us with a smile. I was star-struck, knowing she ran the place.
Now Jones is retiring. In January, she leaves a 25-year Crocker legacy that could fill volumes.
Under Jones, the collection grew by 23,000 objects, attendance and membership doubled, and programming expanded. She oversaw the tripling of the Crocker’s physical footprint with the addition of the Teel Family Pavilion.
One recent afternoon, I stood in a Midtown workout studio called Her Elevated, dressed for movement with other women. We were learning to defend ourselves.
I was ready to throw some punches. But when instructor Lisa Thew, owner of self-defense training company Diamond Defense, started the class, I was handed a binder and asked to sit on a couch.
For the next hour, Thew took the group through lessons in risk assessment and awareness that form the basis of Rape Aggression Defense.
If there’s one thing Kamika Hebbert knows it’s this: “It doesn’t matter what you come from, you can be the change. Don’t let your negative circumstances be your outcome.”
She could be speaking about herself. Hebbert grew up between foster care and her biological family. Many of her relatives were incarcerated. At age 9, she started writing letters to family members behind bars to provide them with an emotional connection, care packages and even financial support.
