Who We Are

The grand vision evolving in Nicteha Cohen’s mind and heart is something that could have benefitted her enormously if it had been available some years ago. It’s a place of beauty where people with chronic illness can find retreat and healing, where those transitioning out of this life can be supported, and where healthy people of all ages can offer and receive the gifts of each other’s talents and skills.  Nicteha knows her vision will take a substantial amount of money and time to become a reality. Meanwhile she is providing elements of the dream to herself and others through...

For many years Peter Anderson wasn’t sure whether his earliest recollection was real or if he had made it up. The memory was of a moment in time at about age two: He was sitting on what seemed like a huge, moss-covered boulder as shafts of sunlight filtered through trees near his family’s Long Island, New York home. Years later, he saw an old family slide from that time, and indeed, there was that big rock. His memory was real. And the boulder that made such an intimate impression on his young mind turned out to be a forerunner...

Growing up as a city kid in a working class neighborhood of Worcester, Mass.,Trevor Hollyer didn’t envision going to college. He’d been hustling to make his own spending money since he was old enough to push a lawn mower, shovel snow, deliver newspapers, and run a secret candy-selling business at school. He figured he would just continue working after high school. But his mother was a guidance counselor and strongly suggested he try college for a year. So he challenged her to tell him what he should study. Physical therapy, she replied. “In that moment, I trusted my mother,” Trevor says....

If Kizzen Laki had any interest in journalism as a teen, her South Side Chicago high school journalism teacher extinguished it. He was also the typing teacher, and as a holdover of patriarchal conventions in those late-’60s days, he required all the girls to wear hose to class. He inspected their fingernails for perfect polish. He couldn’t stand Kizzen, and even though she was an excellent student and handed in A-worthy work, he gave her D-minus grades. “I was such a nongirl. He gave me terrible grades because I didn’t have the proper subservient girly attitude,” she says. Then...

At 18, Chelsea Braden moved to Mexico to help open a restaurant with the Mexican sushi chef she’d been working with at a Fort Collins sushi bar. For her first three weeks in Mexico, she lived with the chef’s family in a small town that seemed left behind by the modern world. His family made tortillas, a neighboring family grew maize, another had cows. In the age-old manner of communal life, everyone contributed, traded, and helped each other. They were mystified by the idea of a teenage girl living so far from her family and home. “It was my...

Janet Woodman remembers staring intently out the train window every day during one section of her commute from suburban New Jersey to work in New York City as a young woman. The train passed through a wetlands area—deep grasses, birds, a tantalizing glimpse of natural wildness. She soaked it all in. “Then we’d go underground and come up in Manhattan and I’d trudge to my job.”  Trapped in a world of sidewalks and buildings, she understood how her father had felt for years. “He hated the city. He should have been a farmer,” she says and then smiles, adding, “He’s...