Ellen Sweet

My first job out of college and grad school was as a high school English teacher in Westchester County, New York. I wasn’t much older than my students, which meant that a few of the boys had crushes on me and many of the girls confided in me like a girlfriend. I managed to maintain a professional distance while delighting in their idealism, their hopes and dreams, and especially their eagerness to learn. I also loved keeping in touch with them after they graduated to see what directions their lives had taken.

When I left teaching to pursue another long-time ambition, becoming a writer and editor, I continued to enjoy mentoring the interns and junior staff members of the magazines I worked on. This was especially easy at Ms. Magazine, where I worked as a senior editor for many years. At Ms., we committed ourselves to nurturing many bright young women on staff who went on to become media stars. One became editor-in-chief of Time, Inc. Another won a Pulitzer for commentary. True, I had the opportunity to work with famous authors like Joyce Carol Oates, Margaret Atwood and Tillie Olsen. But these writers needed only the lightest of editorial touches. Even more exciting was the opportunity to discover and nurture new talent, a role the magazine played in many younger authors’™ lives.

From magazine journalism, I transitioned into nonprofit communications and management, working mainly for women’€™s reproductive health and rights organizations. One of my goals was to capture in writing the stories of the women and girls who desperately needed reproductive health care. I tried to imbue staff with the importance of gathering and conveying these women’s lives as a valuable advocacy tool.

Retirement, for me, turned out to be a welcome opportunity to share my skills in communications and nonprofit work as a volunteer in my encore. A close friend recruited me to join the board of directors of Girls Write Now, a New York City-based nonprofit that matches underserved public high school girls who aspire to be writers with professional writers who mentor them all the way to college. Joining Girls Write Now has been one of the most worthwhile decisions of my life. Early on, I met Paldon, a Tibetan refugee in her sophomore year of high school and a Girls Write Now mentee. Her mentor was Alice, an 80-year-old New Yorker whose family had survived the Holocaust. An unlikely pair. Yet, based on her own family history, Alice had much understanding and sympathy for Paldon’€™s background, and the two hit it off beautifully. Paldon is now in college and hopes to become a human rights journalist.

I serve on the executive committee, where I have the opportunity to help the director and her staff implement their exciting new plans for growing the organization. Girls Write Now is also seeking to expand its board of directors. If you are reading this essay, you may well be a great candidate for our board. You can apply through this link.