Kathy LeMay is an everyday woman living in Massachusetts. Kathy learned early on from her mother to always help those in need. She grew up in a small mill town in a working class family that didn’t have a lot of money but she knew she was smart and insightful and had great things to offer the world. Activism became a way for Kathy to channel her passion to make a difference. At the age of twenty-four, she left her job to volunteer in war-torn Yugoslavia where she worked with women survivors of the siege and rape-genocide camps. This life changing experience affirmed her commitment to increasing the assets of women worldwide and building a critical mass of women leaders. For fifteen years, Kathy has been a professional social change fundraiser, raising millions of dollars in the fields of women’s human rights. She has trained hundreds of groups and organizations in philanthropy and fundraising. She launched Raising Change to help progressive non-profit organizations raise the capital they need to advance social change agendas. Kathy has been featured on Oprah and on the Oxygen Network. In 2009, she wrote “The Generosity Plan” a practical guide to philanthropy. It’s an inspiring and empowering how-to on “sharing your time, treasure and talent to shape the world.”
What was your ah-ha moment when you knew you had to share your story and the Generosity Plan with others?
It was actually someone else’s ah-ha moment. I had been doing some philanthropy advising with a colleague and she suggested sharing it with people as a book, which had not dawned on me that this work could even be a book. I hired a book coach who asked me to make a visual of a woman who needs the book. Where is she? Who is she? And what does she need to hear to make a difference in her life? Hearing that helped break open what the book could be.
You begin the book by encouraging people to go back to “their giving roots” to learn what was significant to them growing up. How much of our adult philanthropic decisions are based on what we learned from our parents?
Some of us are unconscious of those roots, but if we take the time to reflect back, you will see and can explicitly name it. I also think a lot of people don’t know they have traditions to lean into. I really encourage people to go back to how their ancestors lived and realize we stand on some amazing shoulders.
Do you think the need to make a difference is learned or an innate human trait?
I think it really is innate. It is socialized a little out of you, through the culture or family, but community unleashes it. I feel pretty lucky I get to witness it constantly.
Making changes requires focus. A lot of the Generosity Plan is about becoming clear on what is important to us in life.
I hear this statement the most, “I don’t know what I'm most passionate about”. I once witnessed a great activist speaker ask a room of activists, “What breaks your heart?” I invite people to sit with yourself quietly and ask yourself that. Don’t do what you think you should do, do what you want. You will stick to it then.
What role does passion play in the Generosity Plan?
Central. Right there in the heart of it. It is so fun to be passionate about what breaks your heart and motivated by it. The trick is to keep the passion going when you’ve been in the work so long. It’s like a marriage. How do you keep the passion alive? How do you stay mission connected? Passion keeps your curiosity alive. If you keep that part alive, you’ll stay connected. Having long-term tangible goals keeps social change moving in a real healthy way.
You talk about being the hare and busting out in the race and that energy is needed to ignite things but that change comes slowly and we must also learn from the tortoise. Was that a difficult lesson for you to learn?
Brutal, it made me so angry. I remember being in my teens and twenties and feeling really angry that there was so much suffering. I was frustrated we couldn’t switch the switch overnight to end it and devastated that I didn’t know how. Over the years, I started my activism at 14 and I am now 40, I have learned we are working in transformation, nothing happens overnight and if it does, it doesn’t last. There was a moment when I began to trust myself and realized what I can do every single day is to wake up, love people, do really good work, go to sleep and do it again. In that steadfastness there is huge possibility. From the dictators around the world to the news anchors on MSNBC yelling at one another, it is all noise, and not where the world really lives. I know love, where once I was so mad, love is the quiet steady pace of change.
What is your message to women around the world?
I keep going back to the June Jordan quote, “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.” I’m absolutely certain, something we all know in a deep intrinsic way, that the time is now for women’s leadership - not a top down but rather a bottom up grassroots way of leadership. We will do this. We will change the way the world works for the better.
Kathy LeMay will speak along with other special guests Nina Simons of Bioneers, Tiffany Dufu of The White House Project, and Dr. Jean Shinoda Bolen at See Jane Do’s 2nd Annual Passion Into Action Conference, April 29 & 30, 2011 at the Holiday Inn Express, Grass Valley. For more information or to register go to www.seejanedo.com
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