and Educator
“They all have PTSD. Many of them have seen their parents killed in front of them. The stories are heartbreaking and the kids are magnificent.”
When Cecelia Wambach was growing up as the second-oldest child in a family of fourteen children in Pennsylvania, she never dreamed she’d be traveling to Lesbos, Greece, to help refugee children from Syria, Afghanistan, Sudan, and other war-torn countries. She’s become an ambassador of compassion. Her bicultural Italian and Bohemian Jewish roots, along with a Catholic education, imbued Dr. Wambach with a calling to use her talents and gifts to create a better world. And the Jewish concept of Tikkun Olam spurred her desire to heal the world.
A PhD in Math Education from Fordham University led her, eventually, to San Francisco State University, where she started an urban education program in an inner-city school. While serving as both professor and co-principal of John Muir Elementary School, the Muir Alternative Teacher Education program she developed won the CCTC Quality of Education Award for Service to Teachers and Children.
Dr. Wambach, who has been married to her wife for over twenty years and is now a grandmother to four, retired as Professor Emerita. But her calling to help children was strong, and she soon found herself cultivating educational solutions for refugees “stuck” on the Greek Island of Lesbos, fewer than five miles from the Turkish coast. As the founder and Volunteer Director of Refugee Education and Learning International (REAL International), a 501(c)(3), Dr. Wambach brought all of her skills to bear in giving traumatized children creative educational experiences. She also fundraised for the organization, and recruited and trained volunteers.
Collaborating with the Greek non-government organization Together for Better Days, Dr. Wambach and the volunteers at REAL International have worked to create learning centers for asylum-seeking refugees. They help unaccompanied minors and young adults displaced by war and extreme poverty to learn about topics such as computing, ecology, languages, and humanities.
According to UNICEF (United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund), only 29 percent of the twelve thousand school-age refugee and migrant children ages six to seventeen in Greece received formal education during the 2016–17 school year, and refugee and migrant children have missed an average of two and a half years of school due to conflict and displacement. Dr. Wambach hopes to improve those statistics. Back in the States, she actively recruits volunteers and accompanies them once or twice a year, for months at a time. The safe space of school allows refugees to explore, play, and learn and affords Dr. Wambach yet another opportunity to practice Tikkun Olam, to repair the world.
Part 2
Business
Beth Ford
President and CEO, Land O’Lakes
“The mission of agriculture is a noble one: do the work to feed the world.”
Beth Ford is a living example of the American dream. She started small, worked hard, and climbed her way up the corporate ladder, becoming one of the top business executives in the United States. Ford was born in Iowa, and she has seven older brothers and sisters. Her first job as a teenager was de-tasseling corn and cutting out weeds in soybean fields for two dollars an hour. By age fifty-four, she was the first out lesbian CEO of a Fortune 500 company and just one of the twenty-five women CEOs in the same list. Ford got her undergraduate business degree from Iowa State University and her master’s degree from Columbia University. She went on to hold senior-level positions at large organizations such as Mobil Corporation, PepsiCo, Scholastic, and Hachette before joining Land O’Lakes in 2011.
Land O’Lakes is a farmer-owned dairy and agriculture company with ten thousand employees working in fifty US states and fifty countries. They have a farm-to-fork view of agriculture, and are focused on the challenge of feeding more people while using less water and less land. During her tenure at Land O’Lakes, Ford was able to get the company to invest in technology and R&D, resulting in more plant-friendly farming techniques. She led them through record performance and growth, and helped the cooperative move beyond its reputation of just selling butter. When Land O’Lakes promoted Ford to CEO in 2018, she had helped the fourteen-billion-dollar co-op become one of the nation’s largest food and agriculture cooperatives, ranking number 216 on the Fortune 500. The company’s press release welcomed Ford to the new role and detailed her extensive experience. It ended by saying, “Ford and her spouse, Jill Schurtz, have three teenage children and live in Minneapolis.” That statement made headlines around the world when people realized a company on the Fortune 500 would finally have an openly lesbian CEO.
In 2018, she was ranked number thirty on Fortune Magazine’s “Most Powerful Women in Business List.” At a time when a Human Rights Campaign survey has found that nearly half of all American LGBTQ workers are in the closet, Ford’s rise is impressive. “I made a decision long ago to live an authentic life, and if my being named CEO helps others do the same, that’s a wonderful moment.”
Rick Welts
President and CEO, Golden State Warriors
“I hope that my being here is some recognition for all the people behind the scenes for the sport of basketball that they love.”
Starting his career in 1969 as a ball boy for the Seattle SuperSonics, Rick Welts spent decades rising through the ranks to become one of the NBA’s top executives, and eventually one of the most respected executives in the industry. From 1982 to 1999, Welts worked at the NBA league office in New York, and eventually became the Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer of NBA Properties. During this time, he created the massively successful NBA All-Star Weekend, in addition to the marketing program for the 1992 Olympics “Dream Team.” When America’s interest in the sport soared, Welts was credited with enhancing the league’s image and making basketball the popular sport it is today.
One of his basketball legacies came about when he joined sports attorney Val Ackerman to create the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA). The two were instrumental in launching the women’s professional basketball league and securing partnerships with some of the biggest sports advertisers in the world, including Nike, Coca-Cola, and McDonald’s. Together, for their efforts, he and Ackerman were named BRANDWEEK’s ’97 Grand Marketers of the year. Later, Welts became the President and Chief Executive Officer of the Phoenix Suns, and they won three Division Titles (2005, 2006, and 2007) during his tenure with the team.
But one of his most meaningful moments was in 2011, when he publicly came out in a front-page story in the New York Times. By doing so, Welts became the first openly gay executive of a major sports team, and an inspiration to many. He received awards from GLAAD, GLSEN, and even served as the celebrity Grand Marshal in the 2015 San Francisco Pride Parade. He also became an Advisory Board Member for the You Can Play Project, an organization dedicated to ensuring the safety and inclusion of all people in sports, including LGBTQ athletes, coaches, and fans. Shortly after coming out, and weeks after leaving the Suns, Welts was recruited by the Golden State Warriors. During his time as President and Chief Operating Officer, the Warriors have excelled, winning three NBA Championships (2015, 2017, and 2018). Welts has had a remarkable career spanning over forty years, and in 2018, he was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame. In his acceptance speech, he acknowledged
