Articles & Media
Beth Zemsky, Rebecca Voelkel and Barbara Satin celebrated their 60th, 50th, and 85th birthdays and their collective 195 years of activism on May 30, 2019, during an event hosted by the National LGBTQ Taskforce at the Dodge Nature Center in West Saint Paul, MN. In this video you can watch the event slideshow and hear Beth’s remarks. To read Rebecca and Barbara’s remarks, continue below.
Published on the Geraldine R Dodge Foundation Dodge Blog on January 8, 2019.
Beth wrote:
“Change can be challenging. It disrupts our sense of equilibrium, safety, and security. To manage change, we often try to overemphasize that which we believe we can hold constant. However, the only thing that is really constant is the ongoing state of change. Biologists call this “homeorhesis” — being in a constant state of change, development, and evolution. Organisms change and develop, people change and develop, communities change and develop — and so do our organizations. ”
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ISAIAH’s Story
In 2003 ISAIAH was a strong faith-based organization with 75 member congregations in the Twin Cities metropolitan region and in St. Cloud, Minnesota. They a history of developing strong leaders, capacity to hold large public meetings of up to 1,500, and the ability to win significant issue campaigns like gaining $60 million in public money for cleaning up contaminated sites for job development in the state. They saw that things were changing in the environment, opening up new possibilities for change that could address deep systemic problems impacting racial and economic justice. As they set their sights towards larger campaigns (larger turnout, bigger legislative issue) they began to realize the need for new structures and strategies to realize the potential power of what they had built.
Read more at the link below:
Building organizations in a movement moment