While you get to be a sure age, each birthday is trigger for a celebration, proper? Effectively, the identical holds true for organizations just like the San Jose Girl’s Membership, which is able to maintain a free neighborhood celebration Thursday for its a hundred and thirtieth anniversary at its historic downtown clubhouse.
As the story goes, the membership was born in December 1894 when 9 girls — described as “public spirited” in a 1929 newspaper article — gathered on the downtown studio of Fannie Estabrook. San Jose historian April Halberstadt, who has been a member of the membership since 1995, says girls’s golf equipment proliferated within the period, when two of the massive subjects of debate have been girls’s suffrage and Prohibition. And there have been positively factors of disagreement.
“There was a misconception that all women wanted the vote and would hold hands and sing songs. Those women were considered too radical at the time,” stated Halberstadt, who served because the membership’s president in 2009-11. “How do you get people with divergent ideas together? Where is neutral territory?”
The San Jose Girl’s Membership supplied that venue and rapidly grew in dimension and mission. The membership and its members helped discovered the San Jose Day Nursery and have been early supporters of the Sempervirens Membership to save lots of the redwoods in Huge Basin. Through the years, the membership championed schooling and advancing girls’s rights. In 1939-40, the membership sponsored the San Jose Junior Girl’s Membership for ladies underneath 40, and one in all its first members was Betty Ann Chandler. At 107, she’s the membership’s oldest and longest-serving member and nonetheless makes occasional appearances at occasions.
Thursday’s celebration — with the theme, “Beginnings, Building & Belonging” — runs from 4 to six p.m. and actions will embrace an exhibit on the membership’s historical past (together with a celebrated 1939 go to by First Girl Eleanor Roosevelt), one other showcasing its neighborhood companions together with Subsequent Door Options to Home Violence and the Sempervirens Fund, dwell piano music and light-weight refreshments.
There’ll even be excursions of the historic Spanish Revival clubhouse at 75 S. eleventh St., which was constructed by architects Wolfe & Higgins in 1929, and a e book drive in partnership with Hicklebee’s for close by Horace Mann Elementary College. The occasion runs from 4 to six p.m., and you may RSVP at sjwc130.eventbrite.com.
The membership at the moment has 167 members — together with some males — and that quantity has been trending upward for the reason that COVID-19 pandemic, because the membership continues to host occasions for its members and lease out its Landmark Ballroom to different organizations. In April, it began a month-to-month Salon Discuss sequence, that includes interviews with native girls who work in artistic fields. Poet and artist Dorothy Atkins would be the visitor on the Might 18 salon at 2 p.m., and panorama designer Candice Stein shall be featured June 22.
Lynda Sereno, a membership member since 2008, stated that whereas girls’s issues have developed since 1894, the necessity for ladies to collect in solidarity and be taught from one another is simply as related as ever.
“Our work’s not done,” Sereno stated. “Women’s work is not done, especially today.”
SUNNYVALE CARES: Marie Bernard, the chief director of Sunnyvale Group Companies, shared some sobering statistics at its “Our Kids, Our Community,” fundraiser on Thursday night time. In one of many wealthiest areas of the nation, it helped 11,300 low-income residents final yr — together with 3,700 youngsters underneath 18; 20 % extra folks got here for weekly meals than final yr; and due to restricted meals donations from Second Harvest Silicon Valley, the nonprofit needed to buy 50 % of the proteins –eggs, milk and meat — that it distributes.
“I wish we could say that things have gotten better,” she stated.
Fortuitously, she was speaking to the appropriate crowd. The 170-plus individuals who gathered inside Sunnyvale Group Companies’ warehouse/headquarters on Kern Avenue helped surpass its fundraising objective by donating greater than $362,000. On the occasion, Sunnyvale Group Companies introduced awards to longtime supporters Shane Jacksteit, Mary J. Bradley and El Camino Hospital, which had CEO Dan Woods in attendance.
ART THAT MATTERS: Three Gilroy highschool college students gained $3,000 in prizes from the Santa Clara County District Legal professional’s Workplace’s “Justice for All” poster contest, which this yr challenged Santa Clara County College students to lift consciousness about on-line crimes akin to catfishing and cyberbullying.
Christopher Excessive senior Austin Abero obtained $1,500 for first place; Nataley Ramos, additionally a senior at Christopher, took second and received $1,000; and third place went to Maya Sanchez, a junior at Dr. TJ Owens Gilroy Early School Academy who obtained $500. The winners obtained their checks Thursday afternoon from Assistant District Legal professional Terry Harman on the Neon Trade in Gilroy, which homes the workplace’s Mariposas Resiliency Heart for victims of violent crime and in addition displayed all 36 pupil posters submitted for the competition.
The prize cash, by the best way, comes from belongings seized from drug sellers and different criminals.
WALK IN THE PARK: For these 50 or older, San Jose’s Completely satisfied Hole Park & Zoo launches one other season of Senior Safari occasions on Might 22. The month-to-month sequence runs via October — all the time on the fourth Thursday of the month — and offers these young-at-heart guests entrance to the park at 9 a.m., an hour earlier than it opens to the general public. There are normally senior-related cubicles and actions to take a look at together with the varied animals. Each admission and parking are free for Senior Safari attendees, although in the event you didn’t pre-register it’s possible you’ll need to arrive early. Get extra particulars at www.happyhollow.org/seniorsafari.
CHEERS: The San Jose Wind Symphony will present its appreciation for Edward C. Harris, who served as its music and creative director for 20 years, with its Might 18 program “For Ed” on the McAfee Performing Arts Heart in Saratoga. When he wasn’t wielding a conductor’s baton, Harris’ instrument of selection was the clarinet, so the Wind Symphony — now underneath the course of David Vickerman — can have clarinetist Steve Sánchez performing Oscar Navarro’s lovely “II Concerto,” which exhibits off the wind instrument’s technical capabilities.
The three p.m. live performance additionally options another favourite items of Harris’, and it’s my understanding that he’ll take up the baton as soon as extra earlier than the tip of the present. Go to www.sjws.org for tickets.
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