June 16, 2023
What the Refrigerator Mothers Taught Me About Being a Parent
JJ Hanley
After Dartmouth, I started a career in the financial sector, working on New York and London trading floors.
When one of my children was diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, my personal life and then my professional life shifted: I went against the recommended treatments of professionals to help my son, and I left financial services and turned my attention to helping address the social and economic barriers faced by the broader community of people with disabilities and their families. I produced the award-winning PBS documentary, “Refrigerator Mothers,” then founded a non-profit Yelp-style spot for consumer reviews of disability-awareness in business practices. Later I developed and launched a disability etiquette program for corporations and a workplace skills training program for people with disabilities, both of which have trained thousands of company employees and individuals with disabilities to successfully integrate.
I now serve the Illinois state treasurer leading a bi-partisan consortium of 19 states that offer “Achieving a Better Life Experience” savings and investment plans to more than one-quarter of the disability population nationwide.
Where to watch Refrigerator Mothers
Learn more about Illinois ABLE
Returning to Everest
Tom French
On my bedroom wall growing up was a poster of Everest. In my adult years, it was replaced with a different photograph, but it was the same mountain I looked at every day. Meanwhile, my thinking about climbing Everest evolved: from childhood dream, to something I almost did in my early thirties, to a feeling – influenced by press coverage – that the mountain had become overcrowded. A dream tarnished.
But I couldn’t let it go. Multiple climbers and guides told me the same thing: “Don’t believe all you read. Everest is Everest, and it is still incredible.” With my sixtieth birthday coming into view, I confronted the photograph on my wall and thought to myself: “You have been thinking about this your entire life and are running out of time. Do you really want to have never tried?” I committed to the climb and trained hard. In March of 2020, two weeks before I was scheduled to leave, the mountain was closed due to Covid. I postponed my climb for a year and kept training. Spring of 2021 found me on Everest, climbing the traditional southeast ridge route. Things were going great until, hours before we were to leave our high camp to climb to the summit, a cyclone hit the mountain. We were forced to descend from 26,000 feet in a blizzard, with one of my team members suffering from severe altitude sickness. Fortunately, we made it down ok.
When I returned home, I thought long and hard about whether to give it another shot. I finally decided to do it. Dreams die hard. In the spring of 2022, I returned to the mountain and tried again. I am intensely glad that I did. tdfrenchgapyear.com/
From Hanover to Kabul: How an Art History Major, C&T Chubber and Sigma Kappa Sister Found Her Purpose in the U.S. Foreign Service
Tina Dooley-Jones
I’ve had an amazing, almost unbelievable career that brought me many lifetimes worth of experiences. I left Dartmouth and went to UPenn Architecture school. With a choice between studying opera houses in Venice or studying slum upgrading solutions for the poorest of the poor living on a squalid river in Ahmedabad, India, I took the “road less traveled”. That experience forever changed my life’s trajectory. After getting my doctorate, I spent 30 years overseas, 27 working for the U.S. Agency for International Development. I managed development programs in dozens of countries throughout Southern, North and East Africa. My career culminated by leading USAID’s largest, most politically charged Mission in the world, USAID/Afghanistan.
While posted in Namibia, within the span of a day I met with three people and each one talked about work bliss. After hearing their stories, I was like “I need to get me some bliss in my life”. Ok, it’s not exactly bliss, but what I wanted in my life were moments when I felt perfectly placed in the world. When I was the perfect person in the right place to do something significant, impactful. In my world that outcome was saving lives, educating the next generation of kids in far flung villages, fighting AIDS and COVID and many other deadly diseases that we don’t have to think about here. It means helping people feed themselves, lift themselves out of poverty and find sustainable livelihoods. Helping women take their rightful place in democratic societies. When that happened, I knew my purpose. I felt enormous contentment, a oneness and connectedness with everything around me, a wholeness. Bliss.
I retired from the Foreign Service soon after leaving Kabul but will always be in pursuit of purpose.
Take the Red Pill: A Mind-Bending New Treatment for Anxiety and Chronic Pain
Brad Fanestil MD
After Dartmouth I did an Internal Medicine residency at UCLA, followed by a 2-year stint at a free clinic for the homeless and uninsured in Los Angeles. While there I married Mimi Ward ‘85.
We moved to Boulder where we raised 3 kids, and where I practiced Internal and Hospital Medicine for the next 27 years, including as the Director of Inpatient Care at our local hospital.
In 2018 I started reading about new ideas in neuroscience and discovered a small but growing community of clinicians and researchers who were using these ideas in patients with chronic pain. As I started applying these insights to my own patients, I was astounded at what I saw. One of many examples was Linda, who had hardware up and down her spine after 8 spine surgeries, and who had been using Fentanyl patches daily for over 10 years. The day Linda walked into my office and told me “I’ve stopped the Fentanyl and my back pain is gone” is the day I knew I had to try to bring these ideas to more people.
After other doctors and the hospital administration saw the real-life improvements that patients in their community were making using Mind Body Medicine to treat both pain and anxiety, I partnered with Boulder Community Hospital to open the Boulder Community Health Center for Mind Body Medicine. I have been the Director of that clinic for the past 4 years and remain enthusiastic about using these ideas for chronic pain, anxiety and other hard-to-treat medical problems.
Get ready to open your mind to the new neuroscience, and a new way of understanding how your brain is creating your reality.
Creating Pu′uhonua: Places of Refuge for Migrants Adapting to Global Change
Katie Stearns Friday
Program manager, Forest Stewardship and Forest Legacy, Hawai′i and the U.S.-affiliated Pacific Islands; State and Private Forestry / Institute of Pacific Islands Forestry, USDA Forest Service. Hilo, Hawai′i.
Polynesian tradition is for a visitor to introduce herself with not a biography but a genealogy! The first Stearns arrived in Massachusetts in 1630; my mother’s family came from Scotland via Canada to Maine. I grew up in Old Town where my parents were professors at the University of Maine at Orono. Old Town is the seat of the Penobscot tribe; my introduction to land tenure and indigenous rights was the 1975 court ruling that Maine tribes had valid claim to two thirds of the state’s land. At Dartmouth, I majored in computer science but refocused on ecology as graduation neared. I went on to the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies for a Master of Forestry degree. With J.B. Friday ’82, I joined the Peace Corps and spent four years in the Philippines as an agroforestry extension volunteer and then trainer. My ideals were shaped by the collaboration between environmental, social-service and Christian programs in the Philippines. Since then, my work for the Forest Service has given me extraordinary opportunities to learn about agroforestry and social forestry across islands and across time. My responsibilities now include grants enabling island/state forestry agencies to acquire forested lands and conservation easements. The context is shifting with climate and rapid cultural change. Polynesians and Micronesians who used to be tied to the land are increasingly emigrating from small islands to larger islands, and to Hawai′i and the U.S. mainland, seeking refuge, community and opportunity.
Trees to People
J.B. Friday
My career really started during the Dartmouth bio stretch in Costa Rica in the winter of 1982. Or maybe earlier, in ecology class or, better, on Moosilauke. A love of trees and forests, and worry about losing them, especially in the tropics, led me to a master’s degree at the Yale School of Forestry after graduation. Katie Stearns ‘82 (who by that time had decided she’d rather be a forester than a computer programmer) and I then joined the Peace Corps, where we served in the Philippines for four years. Even before returning to the US, Katie heard about a job with the US Forest Service in Hawai‘i where she could continue in tropical forestry, and soon after that we moved to Hawai‘i. I studied agroforestry for my doctorate at the University of Hawai‘i and joined the faculty as extension forester 25 years ago. In my job I work with landowners and managers to protect and restore tropical forests, both here in Hawai‘i and on other Pacific islands. We live on the Big Island, surrounded by forest and mountains on one side and the ocean on another. We have raised two children here, watching them grow up in an environment very different, both ecologically and socially, than where we grew up.