Katharine Wilson says the next year at Berrey Hill will be full throttle, learning the land by trial and error to figure out what grows best on the property. Photo: John Robinson
A landowner and a farmer walk into an agriculture- themed social hour. Holly Maillet, a botanical artist and avid gardener, owns 55 acres of sun-splashed land in Madison County that she’d like to use productively. Katharine Wilson, a 26-year-old crew leader at Bellair Farm, has dreams of managing her own farm. They meet, recognize their shared vision for the land and launch a business together. The resulting partnership is a brand-new community-supported agriculture (CSA) venture at Berrey Hill Farm, delivering diverse produce, herbs and eggs from pastured hens to subscribers in Charlottesville.
Wilson’s excitement about the year ahead is palpable as she describes the start-up process, from seeding the fields to acquiring and housing 100 hens.
“It’s full-throttle right now, and it will be a year of that to get everything established,” she says. Learning the land will involve some trial and error. “To figure out what grows well, we may start with 50 varieties of vegetables and hone over the next few years.”
Record keeping for each crop is critical, as is gauging the demands of their customer base and accounting for potential loss at each stage. “Never stop planting is a pretty good motto for a CSA farmer,” Wilson says.
Before settling in Virginia, Wilson worked with nonprofits in east Africa to encourage community development. “I realized that food is a great root for a community to grow from,” she says, “and if I wanted to help farmers, I needed to know how to farm.” From her first season as an apprentice in southern Albemarle, she was hooked on working the land. Both women are passionate about the local food movement and are taking a holistic approach to ecological farming. “We’re building an ecosystem,” says Maillet, “not only with the vegetables, but we’re healing the soil and thinking about how livestock can factor in. We’re thinking about the native habitat around us and bringing in bees. It’s a really wonderful thing to be a part of.”
Innovations abound, the largest of which is a mobile chicken coop that Wilson built on site. The hens will be rotated through fallow fields, adding valuable nitrogen to the soil at each stop. Throughout the complex planning stages, the partners only really disagreed on one thing: beets. (Maillet is not a fan, but they’ll grow them anyway.) Future plans include raising pigs—“my favorite animal and my favorite meat,” admits Wilson—and blueberries, which will take a few years to establish.
Another modern adaptation is their “market-style” CSA, which allows customers to fill their own share bags each week rather than being given a pre-filled bag. This minimizes waste as there’s no getting stuck with unwanted produce, and the process adds to the sense of community that Maillet and Wilson are trying to build.
“We’re there at the pickup location for a few hours so that as people make their selections, they can talk to us and ask questions,” says Wilson.
The duo hope their project will be a model to young farmers of how to access land via partnering with landowners. The relationship is a serious bond, says Maillet, and rich with benefits. “We have open lines of communication and shared responsibilities. There are lots of like-minded people around, but the trick is finding each other.” And with that discovery comes a bounty for all of us.
You don’t CSA!
How much does a 2-acre CSA cost to start up?
Even if you provide all the labor yourself, here are a few key expenses:
The 79,000-square-foot building, designed by VMDO Architects, is nestled on the backside of a slope at McIntire Park. Photo by Stephen Barling
For the better part of 25 years, Kurt Krueger has harbored a vision.
“I remember learning to swim as a kid at a YMCA in St. Louis,” says Krueger, a UVA School of Law graduate and downtown attorney, and a long-time supporter of the local Y’s satellite youth sports programs. “I knew that a full-service Y facility could be much more than just another gym or pool,” of which there are plenty in town. A modern YMCA recreation center, he felt, could be a focal point for community engagement and a vibrant hub for the health and wellness of people of all backgrounds across the region. He dreamed of helping to open one in Charlottesville.
A week from now, after two decades, two lawsuits and hundreds of hours volunteered by people with the same vision, Krueger’s dream will become a reality.
In 1992, after a storefront YMCA on Park Street dissolved, the national YMCA organization asked a group of interested community members to figure out whether Charlottesville would support a new Y. Convinced that it would, 12 of that group—including Krueger, realtor Stephen McLean and businesswoman Suzanne Brooks—incorporated the Piedmont Family YMCA in 1994. With no physical presence except a small office, the Piedmont Y ran youth sports programs for the city and county on a modest budget, mostly by renting space from schools.
Successful for a time, the Piedmont Y began to face sharply increasing rental costs and capacity constraints. “It was clear we were going to run out of steam,” says Krueger. “We knew we needed to build a facility.” His hope was to partner with the city. “Parks and recreation departments always struggle with how much to centralize. Neighborhood recreation centers can be one way to go, but building eight or 10 of those would be phenomenally expensive. Most communities of our size start looking for a way to do something centrally.”
Piedmont Family YMCA Board Chairman Kurt Krueger envisioned a modern-day Y in Charlottesville that would become a hub for community engagement and health and wellness for people of all backgrounds. Photo by Natalie Jacobsen
Krueger became chair of the YMCA board in 2000, and he and former Y director Bob Vanderspiegel spread out a big map of Charlottesville. “The very center of the map was McIntire Park, which was a fairly underutilized public space,” says Krueger, and he set to work making the case for a brick-and-mortar Y to be located there. Both the city and the county had done studies that projected the need for another 100,000 square feet of indoor recreation space for the community within 10 years.
“Our reasoning was, if the city built a facility, they’d spend $10 million or more taxpayer dollars on it and then have to operate it as well,” says Krueger. “If, instead, the city helped us secure the land and we raised private donations for the building, and then of course as a Y we don’t turn anyone away, then it’s very close to a public facility at an enormous savings for them.”
Making the case
Over the next five years, Krueger appealed to anyone who might see his logic—the mayor, the city architect, the county executive, the city manager. Though other, more remote sites were available, the board felt that the community as a whole, both city and county, would be better served by a central Y. Slowly, Krueger’s plan gained traction, and in 2006 he and the board brought it before the City Council.
Though some on the council expressed support, the plan’s detractors were not easily persuaded. On the heels of the heated Meadowcreek Parkway debate, some councilors balked at the Y’s placement in the park, arguing against any diminishment of green space, while others questioned its potential benefits to city residents. Bob Fenwick, then a candidate for City Council and a member of the Coalition to Preserve McIntire Park, declared that the proposed lease was illegal and that construction of the Y would destroy the park’s softball fields and end the annual McIntire fireworks display and the Dogwood Carnival. For its part, the Y group pledged minimum disruption while emphasizing planned community partnerships and outreach.
Strength in numbers
The Brooks Family YMCA
Square footage:79,000
Cost:$19 million
Construction start to finish:19 months
Number of employees:90-100 part-time staff, 7 full-time employees
Number of fitness/activity rooms: 3 group exercise studios, 1 functional training area, 1 community room, 1 Play Zone
Number of lap lanes: 10 in rec pool, 3 in family pool
Number of basketball courts:3
Number of kids/teen areas:3
Number of parking spaces:158
After several rounds of meetings and refinements, the city agreed to the plan in a 3-2 vote in late 2007, and donated five acres of land on the far west side of the park in a 40-year lease for $1 per year. Todd Bullard, a long-time YMCA volunteer coach and owner of local design firm VMDO, and his colleague Jim Richardson were among the architects who prepared the original renderings and site studies.
“As a stipulation of the ground lease, the design was a very public process and required input and approval from the city’s Board of Architectural Review, the Planning Commission and the City Council,” says Richardson.
Public comment was invited and integrated into the plans. Four or five tracts in the park were considered, and the Y was eventually sited on a hilly, and thus architecturally challenging, location that preserved all of the existing athletic fields and flat areas of the park. Nestling the building into the backside of a slope meant the building would have a lower profile, scaled better to its surroundings.
The city and county donated $1.25 million and $2 million, respectively, to the project, which was matched by contributions from Piedmont Y board members and followed by the launch of a capital campaign to raise the remaining $8.5 million. The city’s donation was predicated on the Y’s promise to construct a diving well and lap pool to accommodate the Charlottesville High School swim team, and to give CHS priority access to the pool after school hours. Loughridge & Co., bidding against more than a dozen firms, won the construction contract, and the board planned a groundbreaking ceremony in 2010.
And that’s when the next major obstacle rolled into the path.
Law of the land
In May 2010, a group of private gym clubs led by ACAC founder Phil Wendel sued the city and county over their arrangements with the YMCA. The lawsuit claimed the city’s offer of a contract to build a fitness facility in the park was a public procurement, and thus unfairly excluded the private clubs from the bid process. The city countered that the lease and seed funding were a gift, not a procurement, as the city would neither own nor manage the facility. “As a gift to a charitable organization whose purposes were in line with the city’s purposes, the donation was legal,” says Krueger. “The language of the statute was clear.”
The Charlottesville General District Court agreed, dismissing the suits against both the city and county by 2011. The battle continued, however, as the private club owners appealed the decision to the Virginia Supreme Court. Though ultimately dismissed by the Virginia high court in 2013, the lawsuits drained the project of its momentum and created a new set of hurdles. “The legal process took three years to play out,” says Krueger, “and a lot had changed in the interim.”
During the delay, the Y was forced to ask City Council for repeated extensions on the lease agreement’s required start date. “The saddest thing about the lawsuits was that construction prices were going up every year,” says Richardson of VMDO. “That really stung. It meant we’d have to reduce the size of the building, or keep the same space with fewer attributes. Fortunately, Loughridge & Co. graciously agreed to manage costs and honor their original bid as much as they could.”
Regaining the lost energy for the project was a top priority for Krueger and the board, as was finding additional donors to bridge the gap created by the increased costs ($4 million more). Suzanne Brooks, an early and significant donor to the project, credits Krueger’s unwavering perseverance as the key to getting the facility built. “Really and truly, if it hadn’t been for Kurt’s stick-to-itiveness, it wouldn’t have happened,” she says.
The fitness room, which looks out on both the pool and gymnasium, includes cardiovascular equipment such as treadmills, as well as free weights and circuit training equipment. Photo by Stephen BarlingThe facility houses three basketball courts in a double gymnasium with an elevated running track circling around it. Photo by Stephen Barling
With the retirement of CEO Denny Blank in 2014, the board was faced with the prospect of a long national search for a replacement. Krueger and veteran Y manager Bill Blewitt sat in Krueger’s office and talked about the options. With a long-standing and cohesive board of directors in place, there was no need to bring in an old hand from out of state. On the contrary, says Krueger, “we needed a person whose heart and soul was in it, who was intelligent and could pick up a lot of things all at once, and who could quickly form bonds with people in the community and in the regional Y system.”
“We looked at each other, and we were each thinking the same thing,” says Blewitt. “We already knew the perfect person for the job.”
Jessica Maslaney, a dynamic young Y director with a head for organization and a heart for community recreation, was in the right place at the right time for a big undertaking.
Heart and soul
Maslaney grew up in Arlington and majored in English literature at UVA, “reading novels instead of textbooks,” she admits. In her fourth year she interned with the Piedmont Family Y for 10 hours a week, developing sports and camp programs for kids. Attracted to sports programming for its direct connection to health and fitness, she took the program director’s position that opened up just as she graduated in 2004.
Overseeing 2,400 children in the basketball program, 400 in lacrosse, 300 in flag football and an army of adult volunteers as coaches and coordinators, Maslaney quickly made connections throughout the Charlottesville/Albemarle region. “My philosophy has always been, the more people the better when it comes to recreation, and the Y is about inclusivity,” she says, “so my goal is always to grow the programs.”
In 2010, a group of volunteers in Crozet decided to make Claudius Crozet Park a year-round swim destination, and launched a capital campaign to enclose the park pool during the winter months. The project became a joint venture with the Y, whose job it was to run the operational side of the facility and to add other fitness elements. Maslaney ran the Crozet Park summer camps and became site director in 2012. Along the way, her family fell in love with Crozet and moved there in 2013.
“My ultimate goal was to be CEO,” says Maslaney. “I did have a trajectory planned, though I didn’t think it would come about for another 15 years.” When Blewitt, serving as interim CEO in 2014, met with each member of the staff, he didn’t have an agenda for the meetings, but Maslaney arrived with detailed analyses and projections for the Crozet Y. “I don’t like to go into any meeting unprepared, so I had all my ducks in a row.”
When Blewitt floated Maslaney’s name for CEO of the new Brooks Family YMCA, as it was to be called, Krueger knew instantly it would work. “The narrow mission of a fitness center is about you—to help you become physically fit, but the mission of [the] Y is all about connections between people with similar goals,” says Krueger. “So Jessica, being a program-oriented person, is perfect for us, because programs are how we get there.”
The optimist
Maslaney had to hit the ground sprinting. “I started on my birthday in January of 2015,” she recalls. “I was 33 years old, and on that very first day I went to City Council with Kurt [Krueger] to ask for another one-year extension on the lease agreement. Their message was, ‘Yes, but do not come back and ask for another.’” Construction had to begin in 2015 or the agreement would be null and void.
Amid critical updates to the construction contract and the board’s efforts to secure the remaining financing, Maslaney and the Y’s construction consultant, Jay Kessler, traveled around the state to the newest Y facilities to look at trends and meet other managers. “The joke is, if you’ve seen one Y, you’ve seen one Y, because they’re all so different,” says Maslaney. But she saw several things she liked, did some research and suggested a few modest but impactful changes to the design.
Piedmont Family YMCA CEO Jessica Maslaney helped design aspects of the new Brooks Family YMCA, set to open June 30, including a kids’ play space and teen area. Photo by Natalie Jacobsen
Architect Richardson says that Maslaney always focused on how program areas would best support membership. “She suggested that some extra locker room space could be converted to three additional fitness rooms to hold more classes, and so we did that without increasing the square footage of the building.” Careful budget management by Kessler allowed Maslaney to go ahead with construction of a large mezzanine, originally slated to be added in the future, that will overlook the double-height fitness room. “It’s always cheaper and less disruptive to build things while the crews are already out there,” says Richardson.
No stranger to job sites, Maslaney loved tagging along as a kid with her father, Jim, who supervised commercial construction. “I remember going with my dad to his site and climbing in cranes, standing behind drywall studs, getting in the pool before it was finished.” She gets the same thrill now when she dons a hard hat to watch the progress at the Brooks Y site.
Though accustomed to operating independently as director of the Crozet Y, Maslaney recognized that in the CEO position she would benefit from the experience of others. She relied on Blewitt’s advice to pull back a bit from her habitual micro-analysis of the details and concentrate on hiring talented staff to help with the workload. She also took his counsel and began to meet weekly with Krueger, so that her decisions were transparent and her plans in sync with those of the board.
“It was quite a feat to get to groundbreaking, with an almost overwhelming number of details to keep track of,” says Maslaney. “We made a huge countdown, we called it a moving-parts timeline, where we identified everything that needed to be done by category—fundraising, political, banking, construction and facilities, operations, marketing, communications—in long lists, and we’d just check things off as we went.” She refers to herself, half-jokingly, as a “naïve optimist,” and says, “There’s never been a day that I’ve doubted this would come to fruition.”
Maslaney’s immediate family is living the Y life as well. Her husband Chris manages UVA’s North Grounds Recreation Center, where they met when Jessica played club basketball in college, and has served as basketball site supervisor for the Piedmont Y. Their children, now 7 and 4, are true Y kids: She brought her son to work with her for seven months after he was born, and her infant daughter was the first (and for several weeks only) resident at the Y’s new child care program at the Jefferson School City Center. “My son has been holding off on his birthday party this year,” she says, “hoping to be the first kid to celebrate his birthday at the new Y.”
She is most proud of the new building’s kids’ and teen areas, which she helped design. “In the Stay and Play [kids] space, we have a jungle gym and we lined that area with benches because we want parents to come in and interact with their kids and each other,” she says. Elements of the teen center were selected by CHS students in the AVID college preparatory program. “They met with the architect and picked colors, graphic features and furniture, and they designed the invitations and the inspirational word wall,” which contains words such as collaboration, determination, generosity, integrity, caring and original, printed in varying sizes.
Bonding exercise
Krueger couldn’t be more pleased with Maslaney at the helm. “Jessica has two phenomenal character traits: loyalty and honesty,” he says. “She’s got the courage of her own convictions, plus a personality that makes people want to work with her.” The pair are like-minded about the real mission. “The focus is naturally on this beautiful new building, but for us it’s a means to an end,” says Krueger, “and the end is to improve the community by forging relationships between people of all economic classes and races and abilities and experiences and backgrounds.”
Toward that end, the Brooks Y staff linked up with the Center for Nonprofit Excellence in December to hold three half-day meetings designed to connect groups with similar missions in the community. According to Maslaney, the youth development aims of the Y connected with similar goals of the Boys & Girls Club, Big Brothers Big Sisters and City Schoolyard Garden at those meetings.
“What’s been gratifying about the Y is that as they considered how to use all of their new capacity, they wanted to first find out what was going on in the community,” says CNE Executive Director Cristine Nardi. The three packed sessions focused on the Y’s core missions: social responsibility, youth development and healthy living, and how the Brooks Y can fill gaps and extend resources.
The family aquatics center has a 10-lane fitness/competition pool and observation area, as well as a zero-entry recreation pool, a spa and dry sauna. Photo by Stephen Barling
One suggestion was that the Y could offer its demonstration kitchen to teach healthy cooking for community groups such as elderly populations or for people who have or are at risk for diabetes. Another idea that surfaced in the sessions is that the Y’s central and large presence can serve as a clearinghouse for information dissemination, so Maslaney was excited to install a community information wall where people can learn about all of the resources available in town in one place. In addition, the Y’s large community spaces can be used as a hub to help other nonprofits with training if they don’t have space of their own to hold larger meetings.
Maslaney is also part of an informal “leadership circle,” along with leaders from the Charlottesville Free Clinic, Big Brothers Big Sisters, CASA and Madison House, to share ideas and inspiration. “The opportunity for groups to partner on programs addressing issues such as autism, healthy food or inter-generational interaction is so exciting,” says Mary Davis Hamlin, CNE senior consultant. “The Y will be a community anchor—it will honor health, and all walks of life will use it. That’s remarkable in our segregated world these days.”
Suzanne Brooks, whose family name is on the door, says her devotion to the Y project stems from its fundamentals. “One of the reasons that I’ve stuck with it for so long is because of the principles that the Y teaches—caring, honesty, respect and responsibility,” she says. “Everything they do goes through those. Can you imagine if everybody in the world lived by those four values, what a great place it would be, everywhere?”
Laying the foundation
The first YMCA was launched in London in 1844 as a way to give idle young men something productive and healthful to do with their time, and the organization made its way to the U.S. in 1851. Today there are more than 2,700 Y centers across the country. A few facts about Charlottesville’s YMCA history:
• The University of Virginia was home to one of the first campus-based YMCA organizations, established in 1856. A permanent building for the chapter was completed in 1905, and UVA School of Law alum Woodrow Wilson delivered its dedication address. That building is the present-day Madison Hall, situated directly across University Avenue from UVA’s Rotunda. The large field behind Madison Hall (Madison Bowl) was also owned by the Y and used for track and field events. By 1933, the building had been converted to a Student Union.
• The large brick building on the corner of Second and Market streets in downtown Charlottesville housed a community YMCA from 1909 to 1927. The upper floors were hung for extra spring, the main floor was a basketball court, and there was a pool in the basement. This building now hosts the offices of VMDO, the architectural firm that designed the Brooks Family Y.
• Charlottesville benefactor Paul Goodloe McIntire, who donated land and funding for city schools, libraries and parks, as well as several major buildings at UVA, was a strong advocate of the Y. He was quoted at a Y board meeting in 1923 as saying that “to not support a YMCA would be a disgrace to Charlottesville,” and that “a YMCA was a necessity for a city of this size.” The Brooks Family Y now sits in a corner of the park bearing his name.
Boxwood Villa, the newest renovations project from the couple behind Grelen Nursery, The Market at Grelen and Spotswood Lodge, can host weddings, family get-togethers and corporate events. Photo: Kellis Photography
While inspecting an array of tall boxwood shrubs on a property in the town of Orange last year, Grelen Nursery founder Dan Gregg discovered more than he bargained for. The 1891 farmhouse in the center of the ring of shrubs was for sale, and Dan immediately saw its potential as a lodging and event space, complementing the Greggs’ ventures in nearby Somerset.
Though well-kept, the house’s interior was dark and constricted, and needed a major overhaul to become a viable venue for larger groups. Luckily, Dan knew the perfect person for the job: his wife, Leslie. “My husband knows me and knows my favorite thing in the world is renovation,” says Leslie with a smile. “He does the outside and I do the inside.”
“Doing the inside” is often a heroic undertaking, but for Leslie, it’s also a creative thrill. In re-designing the farmhouse, dubbed Boxwood Villa, Leslie dispensed with an architect and instead worked closely with her builder, Lance Clore, a veteran of several previous projects with the Greggs. “I stand in the space and draw it in my head,” says Leslie. “Then Lance and I get together and bounce ideas around. We have a similar vision.”
A masterful jack-of-all-trades, Clore does everything except plumbing, electrical and drywall, and he prefers to work by himself. For Boxwood, that meant longer hours as he finished the project in only nine months. “I love the creative side of the job,” says Clore. “I can see what it’s going to look like before I even start. It’s like a puzzle, working out how it will all fit together.”
Photo: Kellis Photography
Several puzzles kept things interesting along the way. A steep, narrow back stairway to the third floor had to be torn out, and Clore extended the wider main staircase upward, incorporating matching spindles, newels and caps to make the whole structure appear seamlessly original. The extra space from the demolished stairway helped solve another problem. “The biggest challenge in old houses is bathrooms,” says Leslie. “There are never enough.” A clever L-shaped bath was added to a bedroom on the second floor, and below that a powder room, accented with exposed brick and beadboard, was tucked in off the kitchen.
To improve flow on the main floor, superfluous walls got the axe. “I always design to be group-oriented,” Leslie explains, pointing out where barriers between the kitchen and dining areas had been removed. She and Clore also dismantled a tiny vestibule in the front hall, allowing the large double front door, surrounded by windows, to highlight the entryway.
The attic, a dark, junk-filled space when the Greggs first saw it, proved an inspiration to Leslie. “We cleaned it out, insulated and carpeted it, and now it’s a beautiful place for meetings and small group events,” she says. Four huge, round windows at each point of the compass allow natural light to play on the soaring wooden ceiling beams and fresh white paneling. Yoga retreats, led by Bridget Baylin of Charlottesville, will be held here beginning this fall.
The five-bedroom, four-and-a-half bath house can sleep up to 10, and the front lawn, lush with Dan’s landscaping handiwork, could host a day wedding, family get-together, or corporate event. Leslie’s cheerful, intentional attitude toward decorating her renovation projects means that the interior spaces are never stiff. Mixing pricey antiques with bargain finds, she aims for an overall relaxed vibe. “Aesthetically, I want to be in rooms that make me happy, where people are comfortable and can just enjoy being together.”
Members of the Rivanna Rowing Club tout both the physical and mental aspects of the sport. Photo by Ron Paris
Imagine a fitness regimen that combines the fresh air of running with the low impact of swimming. A form of recreation that can be social or solo, casual or competitive, for ages 13 to 103. Housed close to the center of town yet away from traffic or hubbub, the sport requires no prior experience or special equipment of one’s own, yet provides a total body workout like no other.
Welcome to the Rivanna Rowing Club.
While many people are familiar with ergs, the rowing machines situated among treadmills and stationary bikes in their fitness clubs, few realize that rowing on the water is a viable option in Charlottesville. Indeed, Albemarle County is the only area in central Virginia that has a public outdoor rowing club, open to experienced adults as well as juniors and beginners. Five miles of calm water on the Rivanna Reservoir, accessible just off Earlysville Road, provides an ideal venue.
Learn to Row Open House Sessions at 9 or 11am Saturday, May 13 Meet at the rowing boathouse, 276 Woodlands Rd.
Open to ages 13 and up. Free; no registration required.
More info at rivannarowing.org.
Mary Maher, boathouse captain, is in her 23rd season with the club. She remembers returning from a rafting trip in Colorado and wanting to reconnect with the water here at home. She noticed an ad in C-VILLE Weekly for the Learn to Row program at the Rivanna Rowing Club, took a class and was hooked. These days, all sorts of folks try it out.
“Some people drive across the bridge over the Rivanna and see the boats below and think it looks peaceful,” says Maher. “Others just like to be on the water in a boat, any way they can. We get a lot of burnt-out runners who’d like to try something different. It’s the perfect sport for those who are physically fit and willing to train, but it’s not that hard on the joints.”
Rowing is a total body activity that tones your arms, legs, chest, back and abs. Though most observers assume the arms are doing most of the work, power comes from the legs, driving the body forward and back on a sliding seat as the oars pull through the water. While the training provides rigorous cardiovascular exercise, stabilizes the core and improves joint health, rowing advocates find the intangible benefits just as compelling.
Melanie Dick, 33, picked up the sport last summer and appreciates both the physical and mental aspects of rowing. “It’s very challenging,” she says. “There’s so much to focus on—your pace, your breathing, your hands—that you can’t think about other things like work deadlines or bills. It’s a rhythmic sport, very meditative, because for that hour or so you’re only thinking about rowing.”
Adding to the mystique, a time-honored lingo peppers the speech of rowers. “Weigh enough” is a command to stop rowing (as is “let it run”). You don’t want to “catch a crab” (get an oar caught in the water) or be the “anchor” in the boat (slow everybody down). Rowers enjoy the social camaraderie of the pastime whether they intend to relax or race, and most admit to a near-obsession with the quest to perfect their stroke. They are continually in pursuit of an elusive sensation: the “swing” of a boat in precise harmonic balance.
John Wray, captain of the Albemarle High School men’s rowing team, says it’s the kind of activity that gets in your head. “After you row a hard piece and put the boats up, even though you’re exhausted, all you can think about is going out again,” he says. “When you do it right, it just feels good.”
Anne-Marie Slaughter, president and CEO of the New America think tank, served as director of policy planning for the U.S. State Department under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. She returns to her hometown to talk about her vision for the future. Courtesy Royce Carlton
A Charlottesville native whose keen intellect and deep foreign policy knowledge led her to become the first female director of policy planning for the U.S. State Department under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Anne-Marie Slaughter has never forgotten her roots. She is one of this year’s Tom Tom Founders Festival Founders Summit keynote speakers, as well as a participant in the Hometown Summit luncheon, “Future city: America’s local innovators,” where she will talk about our shared future challenges and also highlight Charlottesville’s potential as an agent of connection and renewal.
When she visited Brussels, Belgium, as a little girl, Anne-Marie Slaughter’s formidable “grand-mère” instructed her on etiquette: “You are in Belgium, and here we speak French.” Young Anne-Marie did her best, though it was a struggle for the preschooler. Now fluent in French and a renowned expert in international relations, Slaughter is having a gemstone that belonged to her grandmother set into a pinky ring. “I want to be able to look down at it and remember grand-mère’s discipline,” she says. In truth, it could serve as a reminder of everything that set her on her path.
That path originated in Charlottesville, still a sleepy Southern town in the 1950s. Slaughter’s father, Ned, earned his law degree at the University of Virginia and later founded his own law firm (he’s now a lawyer at MichieHamlett on Court Square), while her mother, Anne, built a career as a professional artist, co-founding the McGuffey Art Center in 1975. The family lived west of town off Barracks Road, and Slaughter began her education at the K-8 Belfield School, the precursor to St. Anne’s-Belfield, because there were not yet any public kindergartens in the county.
“She had an extraordinary education, all the way through,” says Anne, who was often recruited to help with her daughter’s ambitious school projects. “For a second grade Middle Ages assignment, we made a chicken wire knight in full armor,” she laughs. “Anne-Marie has always loved to read, has always excelled academically.” While accurate, these are relative understatements. Her daughter once plowed through more than 100 books over summer vacation, and at St. Anne’s, originally an all-girls high school that only became co-ed two years before Slaughter arrived, she won the Bishop’s Prize, the school’s highest award, for “loyalty, courage, honor, leadership and especially for character.”
Anne-Marie Slaughter attended St. Anne’s-Belfield from kindergarten through high school and says longtime history teacher Pam Malone inspired her professional path of having high standards and fierce integrity. Family photo
Her youngest sibling, Bryan, also an attorney with MichieHamlett, remembers a more typical big sister. “She would babysit me and get to talking on the phone, and she’d burn my ravioli,” he recalls, though she did operate a successful bread-baking business out of their home kitchen for a time. (“After that, we had to replace the stove,” intones her father.)
Forever dreaming of owning her own horse, she made a deal with the neighbors to take care of their two in exchange for riding privileges, and she and best friend Janie Battle Richards roamed the countryside for miles around. “Charlottesville was an idyllic place to grow up,” says Richards. “We had wonderful freedom in the summers just exploring, having adventures on horseback.”
“Riding was important to me because it was something physical I could do,” says Slaughter, who was not particularly athletically inclined. “And life’s all about getting back on the horse, isn’t it?”
Codes of conduct
Summer trips to visit her Belgian relatives and other European cities gave Slaughter an appreciation of cultural differences, even with her nose in a book in the back of a VW bus. Her early life was populated by strong women, like her mother and grandmothers, who taught her the value of honorable behavior and forthright speech. True to form, when her Belgian grandmother visited the U.S., Slaughter (still pre-K) decided it was time to turn the tables. “Grand-mère!” she said. “We are in America now, and here we speak English.”
Pam Malone, a longtime history teacher and former headmistress of St. Anne’s, was a quieter influence during high school. Slaughter felt that in another era Malone could have been as famous as her father, Jefferson historian Dumas Malone, and says, “She has inspired me more and more as I forged my own path as a professional woman. She had high standards and fierce integrity.”
For similar reasons, Slaughter was drawn to her boss at the New Dominion Bookshop, proprietor Carol Troxell, who offered an ideal summer job to the young bookworm. Troxell, whose death in January shocked the community, was a smart, independent woman—well-read, fluent in French and a history buff besides.
“The bookstore had real resonance in my life,” says Slaughter. “Carol just made her own way,” and ran her business according to a code that has reverberated with Slaughter ever since: Do the right thing. To this day, it’s a code she tries to impress upon her sons above all else. “It’s the notion that you are not beholden to other people, you’re beholden to a set of principles.”
Slaughter remembers the Charlottesville of her youth with affection, but also knows that by the end of high school she longed to move to a bigger city. “In the ’70s, it was not that easy to be a smart girl,” she says. “I spent a lot of time at football games and parties, basically acting dumb, and going off to college was an escape.” That teenage lens has long since fallen away. “As I’ve gotten older, now I see the close-knit community and the physical beauty of the place. My kids laugh that my accent starts to deepen as we near the Blue Ridge.”
On the ground
The word used by every friend, family member and former teacher when describing Slaughter is “grounded.” Given her lengthy résumé and the professional heights to which she’s ascended, the descriptor seems a stretch. She holds four degrees (bachelor of arts from Princeton, juris doctorate from Harvard, masters and doctorate from Oxford), and has held various professorships, a deanship and a director-level position in the U.S. State Department. But her easy laugh, warm presence and self-deprecating manner set people at ease. “She doesn’t change,” says best friend Richards. “She’s totally authentic.”
From her scholarly work on international relations to her personal interactions, Slaughter strives to create links with people and their ideas. “I’d rather be at the center of a web than the top of a ladder,” she says, referring to alternate models of accruing power. “I have a more horizontal view of the world, and I want to be as connected as I can.”
“At New America, I am more and more convinced that we have to tackle our problems in this country from the hometowns out. I grew up wanting to get to Washington, but I now think places like Charlottesville are going to be every bit as important in figuring out solutions to all sorts of issues, from the environment to work to health care, and the hometown summits of the world are much more important than they ever have been in my lifetime.”—Anne-Marie Slaughter
Friends and family say she achieves those connections better than most, even under the stress of a heavy workload. “She is so mentally and emotionally agile that she can pivot,” says Richards. “She taps into an emotional thread with people and situations, and she quiets all the outside noise and focuses just on them.”
Most of all, Slaughter loves new challenges. Unflinching in the face of obstacles, she nonetheless had to overcome a serious dread of public speaking to get to where she is today. Her family remembers her terror before her first moot court competition and when giving speeches to accept awards. “Just breathe!” exhorted her mother Anne.
Eventually Slaughter mastered her unease, and also learned to assert herself early in her career in a male-dominated business world. “With those first internships, if they weren’t calling she would pick up the phone and ask, ‘Why aren’t you hiring me?’” says Anne, chuckling. “And then they would.”
The big leagues
Countering the image of a typical ’60s dad, Ned Slaughter discussed career options with his daughter from an early age while other dads plotted marriage strategy for their girls. “She decided by age 6 that she would be a lawyer,” says Ned, “and we joked about our future firm, Slaughter and Daughter.” Though her path ultimately shifted away from practicing law and instead toward teaching it, she and her father have always been close, and he remains a confidant today.
As it turned out, Slaughter was never at a loss for employment. “It’s evident that I’m restless,” she laughs, and hesitates to name a favorite job. “They’ve all been pretty wonderful for the phase of life I was in. When I first became a law professor, I remember thinking, ‘I can’t believe people pay me to do this, to read and think and talk.’” She never expected to be in academia, but she realized that teaching allowed her the connections with students that she enjoyed.
Anne-Marie Slaughter’s newest book, The Chessboard & the Web, prescribes a network of linked, like-minded entities that can work in tandem with the traditional chessboard moves of geo-political strategy.
In 2002, she left Harvard Law School to become dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, settling there with her husband and two young sons. In that position she gained leadership experience and honed her worldview, writing three books and dozens of scholarly articles about America’s strategic interests and its place in a new world order. But even as her academic career steadily progressed, there had always been one job in her sights.
“If you’d asked me in 1980 what was my dream job 30 years down the road, I might well have said director of policy planning for the State Department,” says Slaughter. An assistant secretary-level position responsible for developing the long-term strategic view of the U.S. in foreign affairs as well as managing the requirements of day-to-day diplomacy, the job was created in 1947 and had never been held by a woman. When Secretary of State Hillary Clinton offered her the post in 2009, she jumped at it.
The changes this new job entailed were significant, not least of which was having to leave her family in New Jersey and commute to Washington, D.C., during the week, returning home only on weekends. There was also a new set of rules to learn. “Honestly, the hardest thing was the politics of the place,” says Slaughter. “I really hated being as cynical as you needed to be to flourish there, but I learned it.” The upside was worth it, she says.
“There I was sitting down at 8:45 every morning with the secretary of state and offering my opinion, and being able to do some things myself that really did make a difference. You do have an impact.”
Her next impact, though completely unanticipated, would be just as far-reaching.
Pivot point
While serving in the State Department and balancing the work/life trade-offs with her husband, Andrew Moravcsik, a professor of politics at Princeton, Slaughter began to worry about her 14-year-old son, who was struggling in school, acting out and rejecting adult intervention. Increasingly she realized that despite the all-in support of her husband, she simply couldn’t be the caregiver she wanted to be from a distance, and so at the end of two years in her dream job, she stepped down and returned to Princeton.
Her decision was dispiriting because she loved the work, but not wrenching: Family came first and it was the right choice for her. More unsettling was the reaction to her choice from some of her high-powered female colleagues, which ranged from dismissive to derisive. Most surprising of all was the immediate response to her essay about the whole experience published in The Atlantic in 2012, entitled “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All.”
One of the magazine’s most-read articles of all time, the piece ignited a furious debate about the role of women in the workplace and at home, and about how society and systems might change to accommodate the balance. For Slaughter, the debate turned into a multiyear diversion from her foreign policy focus but she took it head on.
Addressing the concerns of a generation of young women struggling with societal expectations, she shared her views in scores of lectures and interviews, as well as in a book, Unfinished Business: Women, Men, Work, Family. She’s been stunned by the outpouring of emotion on the subject. “When young women come up to you and say, ‘You changed my life, you made it okay for me to do something that I was dying to do,’ that’s huge,” she says.
It is also a confirmation of what Slaughter has believed all her life: In doing the principled thing rather than the thing many people expected of her, she has become exactly the kind of independent, “go your own way” woman she admired in her youth.
Hometown heroine
As ever, Slaughter is excited about the future. Currently president and CEO of New America, a think tank devoted to “renewing American politics, prosperity and purpose in the Digital Age,” she sees countless opportunities for interconnected solutions to the nation’s—and the world’s—toughest issues. At the upcoming Tom Tom Founders Festival’s Hometown Summit, she’ll come back to her roots to talk about her vision.
“At New America, I am more and more convinced that we have to tackle our problems in this country from the hometowns out,” she explains. “I grew up wanting to get to Washington, but I now think places like Charlottesville are going to be every bit as important in figuring out solutions to all sorts of issues, from the environment to work to health care, and the hometown summits of the world are much more important than they ever have been in my lifetime.”
She observes the rapid pace of change and thinks that the place to be working out solutions is on the ground, rather than in slow-moving government or university enclaves. “Part of what’s wrong with this country is that we’re so disconnected, and it’s ironic because we’re all connected all the time, but we are disconnected from our own communities and from people who are different from us.” She feels that it’s much easier to be connected to people of different backgrounds in a smaller town.
“The places I see renewal are exactly the small-town size—like Charlottesville, Columbia, South Carolina, and Indianapolis—places that are big enough to have an economy but small enough to still have communities, leaders who are familiar with each other, people who know each other from church or the rotary or Little League or whose kids go to the same school, and who have connections. I feel really strongly that we cannot demonize people that differ from us. We have to see others as fully human, who want the same outcome as us but may have different ideas of how to get there.”
Slaughter remains an avid reader—her routine is nonfiction in the morning, fiction at night—and communicator. “There’s a part of me that is never happier than when I’m reading and writing and thinking and left alone, but I know I need to also be in the world,” she says.
Her newest book, The Chessboard & the Web, prescribes a network of linked, like-minded entities that can work in tandem with the traditional chessboard moves of geo-political strategy. Wonder what Slaughter’s next move is? Look for her where she’s most challenged, right in the center of the web.
Hometown feel
The word innovation has been something of a local buzzword of late, most recently with the sale of the Main Street Arena building to Taliaferro Junction LLC and Jaffray Woodriff, who plans to build a 100,000-square-foot structure in its place. The building will serve as a tech company incubator, in hopes of attracting innovative companies and retaining established businesses that might otherwise leave the area.
New to the Tom Tom Founders Festival (runs through April 16) this year is the Hometown Summit, which brings together more than 140 speakers in 50 workshops, panels and discussions. The participants, from more than 40 small, thriving cities, will share innovative ideas and how to make them realities. Charlottesville native Anne-Marie Slaughter will take part in the plenary luncheon titled “Future city: America’s local innovators,” on Friday, April 14. Joining her on the panel will be Charlottesville Mayor Mike Signer, Chattanooga Mayor Andy Berke and UVA Darden School of Business Tayloe Murphy professor of business administration Mike Lenox. Here’s a look at some of the innovations in other cities—could Charlottesville take a cue from their playbooks?—that will be discussed at the summit:
Chattanooga, Tennessee: Since Andy Berke was elected mayor in March 2013, unemployment has dropped more than 2 percent and more than 6,100 new jobs have come to the region. The city’s biggest claim to fame, though, could be its connectivity: Every home and business is tapped into a fiber optic network that provides 10 gigabit-per-second service. Chattanooga has also established an Innovation District—an 11-story building with more than 60 businesses in the downtown area that brings together startups, creatives, existing businesses, scholars and students. “We’re seeing amazing connections occurring,” Berke says. “A lot of businesses are congregating around the area, meeting at coffee shops, having after-hours socials. We want to build a network for people so that we grow tech companies here.”
Charleston, South Carolina:Steve Warner, co-founder of Charleston’s Creative Parliament, an “all-volunteer adhocracy” of creative professionals dedicated to helping Charleston realize its full potential as a creative community, will participate in the “Cultivating Industries of the Future” and “Getting It Right: Downtown Development Districts” panels on Thursday, April 13.
Syracuse, New York: The Gear Factory, a 65,000-square-foot building being redeveloped with green infrastructure and a crowd sourced design layout, is located at the cross section of several diverse neighborhoods, and houses studio space for artists, musicians and entrepreneurs. Gear Factory owner Rick Destito will speak on two panels: Thursday’s “Does Your City Seduce Talent?” and Friday’s “Neighborhood Placemaking.”
