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- Membership Gathering – April 21
  April 5, 2022Free Virtual Event via Zoom - April 21 at 7 PM Click Here for link to attend. Membership Gathering ALL ARE WELCOME! Please Join Us... This year's gathering will highlight our Dare to Dream Grant Program with grant recipients as our panelists and guests. The evening will demonstrate how your donations are supporting and uplifting women in our community, as we connect our members, both new and current, with one of our most powerful programs. Our host is Eka Kapiotis, our panelists are Hannah Bement and Jenny Statler Eka Kapiotis Current Board Member/2020 Dare to Dream Grant Recipient Eka is no stranger to this organization. She has been a helping and healing force among us for many years. Many of you here learned Reiki from her through the Valley Health training program she established and have experienced her healing work in her private practice. Eka is always seeking more effective ways to help others heal. She specializes in Cranio-Sacral Therapy, an advanced, gentle, and powerful modality, dolphin-assisted therapy, and helps women discover themselves through nature programs. Thanks to a Dare to Dream grant, Eka recently made significant progress on her dream of becoming a certified CST therapist at the very highest level - that of “Diplomate”. www.dreamweavingway.com eka@naturetransformation.com Hannah Bement Dare to Dream Committee Member/2017 Dare to Dream Grant Recipient Ms. Bement has an extensive background in science and environmental research but switched careers when she realized that teaching is her true passion. She loves “seeing the spark in a child’s eyes when they make a connection to the natural world…” She has worked with youth through many internships, volunteering, and contract positions including at Cleveland Metroparks Zoo, the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute, and the Smithsonian-Mason School of Conservation. She earned a Bachelor of Science Degree in Biology through the University of Akron in Ohio and a Masters of Environmental Science Degree through the Yale School of the Environment. She is currently working in her dream job, teaching biology at Mountain Vista Governor's School. Jenny Statler 2021 Dare to Dream Grant Recipient Jenny grew up visiting Front Royal on weekends at their family farm. She returned to the farm from working in Manhattan as the Corona virus was shutting things down. Her new time on the farm and the opportunity to meet up with a high school friend led to the development of a dream of starting a vineyard on the property. Jenny’s personal goals in starting the vineyard “are to fully align my creativity with growing a quality product for others to enjoy; to use the land I love, to share with others; and to positively contribute to my community in Front Royal and the world around me in my own small way.” Jenni has business experience managing a bar and starting a natural, biodynamic wine program in NY. She has also lived in Spain and Argentina where she visited the many wine regions and learned about the process of producing quality grapes and wines. Her business partner has nine years of experience in vineyard management and winery operations across the US and at a local vineyard. A detailed business plan has been written and Jenny is researching local and federal grants to help them get their feet off the ground. The land is being prepared and soon the first vines will be planted. Update: We will be planting the entire first field of vines including the first ones made possible by the FRWRC (3,800 vines total) on May 7th! New development, we are starting a community-supported agriculture (CSA) program on the farm and delivering fresh veggies to 10 lucky members all summer in the DC and Front Royal Area (still have 4 spots left!) to help fund the start-up costs of the vineyard. Jenny Statler, Co-owner of Tilt Vineyards, LLC. www.tiltvineyards.com info@tiltvineyards.com ... Read more...
- 2022 April Book Commentary
  April 4, 2022Donated Book Now Available at Samuels Public Library Front Royal Women's Resource Center and Nan Hathaway co-sponsor donations to Samuels Public Library that are by or about women. Nan Hathaway, Book Donation Sponsor & Coordinator, chooses our books each year. Thank You Nan! We highlight one of these books each month. Our Book Reviews and Commentaries are provided by JoEllen McNeal. Thank you JoEllen! The Empathy Diaries, a Memoir By Sherry Turkle The way we live now is an experiment in which we are the human subjects – treated as objects by the technology we have created….We are treated as objects when we are swept up as data to be bought and sold on an international market. Or when our attention is manipulated by our devices, not just to keep us glued to them but to determine what we read, what images we get to see, and what programs get to see us….When we are treated as objects , we are encouraged to objectify one another and, of course, ourselves. –Sherry Turkle For decades, Sherry Turkle has shown how we remake ourselves in the mirror of our machines. Here, she illuminates our present search for authentic connection in a time of unchartered challenges. As a woman and a humanist at MIT, Turkle has spent her career composing an intimate insight into our digital world. Now, marked by compassion, humility and insight, we have her own intimate memoir. In this vivid and poignant narrative, Turkle ties together her coming-of-age and path- breaking research on technology, empathy, and ethics. Growing up in postwar Brooklyn, Turkle searched for clues to her identity in a house filled with mysteries. She mastered the codes that governed her mother’s secretive life. She learned to never ask about her absent scientist father – and never use his name, her birth name. Before empathy became a way to find connection, it was her strategy for survival. Turkle’s intellect and curiosity brought her to worlds on the threshold of change. She learned friendship at a Harvard-Radcilffe on the cusp of coeducation during the antiwar movement, she mourned the loss of her mother in Paris as students returned from the 1968 barricades, and she followed her ambition while fighting for her place as a woman at MIT. There, Turkle found turbulent love and chronicled the wonders of the new computer culture, even as she warned of its threat to our most essential human connections. The Empathy Diaries captures all this in rich detail – and offers a master class in finding meaning through a life’s work. Sherry Turkle’s memoir is a page-turner. The reader may become so pulled in by the finely drawn characters and the story of her early life that it takes a while to realize that this is also a story about empathy. Her encounters with two of the most important men in her life - her scientifically driven father and her brilliant and renowned first husband – led her to discover that empathy is not just an interesting research subject or a feminine virtue, but what it became for her, a strategy for survival. From her varied life experiences, she shows us how empathy for another human being is a lifesaving necessity and potentially, a key to our survival as a species (Carol Gilligan, author). As artificial intelligence becomes more and more life-like, we are being seduced into believing that machines care for us and have our best interests at heart when all they really are, are sophisticated lines of code. We all need to heed Turkle’s advice to remember that as convenient and efficient as technology is, it doesn’t care about our feelings or for us, only another human being can do that. Sherry Turkle is the Abby Rockefeller Mauze Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT and the founding director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self. A licensed clinical psychologist, she is the author of six books, including Alone Together and the New York Times bestseller Reclaiming Conversation, as well as the editor of three collections. A MS. Magazine Woman of the Year, TED speaker, and featured media commentator, she is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Rockefeller Humanities Fellowship and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.... Read more...