The Newspaper of the San Francisco Bay Chapter
Sept - Oct 2005
TABLE OF CONTENTS
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Volunteer of the month
Athena Honoré - a city kid who found her niche while volunteering for the environment
Athena Honoré has come full circle. She started volunteering with Save San Francisco Bay and the Sierra Club, and two years later she is at Save the Bay as a staffperson.
A Bay Area native who grew up in suburban Piedmont, Athena was a baseline environmentalist early on. She religiously recycled milk cartons and once wrote a pro-environment article for the high-school newspaper, but wasn't part of an activist community. It wasn't until she returned to the Bay Area after college, at the height of the dot-com boom, that she started looking for ways to deal with a nagging feeling that something wasn't right in the place she called home. "I came back after six years and found that I didn't recognize the place - people were making permanent changes to the landscape based on such irrational thinking. And I really started to worry about the people who were impacted by this."
Reading about growth helped her determine that she wanted to advocate for those without a voice in the planning process. She wasn't sure how to get started, though, and her job with McGraw-Hill wasn't getting her any closer. She contacted Save the Bay's volunteer coordinator for suggestions on how she might get involved in environmental/planning issues, and she was connected to a project she's still working on today. The North Richmond Shoreline Open Space Alliance is a community coalition working to protect Breuner Marsh, a shoreline parcel threatened repeatedly by development. "I came in and attended the working-group meetings, doing a lot of listening at first and learning what the issues were. Then people would find little projects where I could help, like `we could really use some letters to the editor around this issue,' and I would write something and send it in. Gradually I came to know the issues in much more depth, and started being a more active member of the group."
That's where she met Jonna Papaefthimiou, the Sierra Club Bay Chapter conservation manager. Jonna lauds Athena's willingness to take on responsibility. "She leads by example with a kind of quiet leadership," Jonna says. "If something needs to be done, she's the first to raise her hand to say `I'll do that.'"
Athena says, "I was able to see where the group needed help, where I could do some research or lead a meeting. Learning Sierra Club-style activism has also been key in becoming more effective. I've tabled at events talking to people about Breuner Marsh, gone door to door to raise awareness about it, gathered signatures on petitions and letters to the City Council. It's very exciting to go from being someone who's interested in issues in a vague way to someone who's working on a specific project and knows that their participation is helping the project."
Athena finds the Breuner Marsh story compelling for many reasons. "Breuner is connected to Parchester Village, the adjoining community, in a way I haven't seen anywhere else. Its history is intriguing, to say the least - it provided open space and recreation for a World War II-era subdivision created for African-Americans. And it's on the shoreline, where it provides habitat for birds and wildlife." As Richmond has grown around it, several developments have been proposed for the land. The latest would place 1,000 units on the buildable portion of the marsh. Athena is hoping that all the attention the Shoreline Alliance is getting will help with preservation of the marsh. The group wants the East Bay Regional Park District to acquire the land and add it to the adjoining Point Pinole Park.
Athena's eyes light up when she talks about "the great group of people" she's been able to work with through this project. "Everyone's got their own expertise and ideas. It's community involvement at its best." She's also enjoyed the freedom to choose what projects she works on; those have included the Shoreline Festival, workshops, and educating activists and the community. She says she loves working with older residents who have lived in the neighborhood since it was first built, and on the other end of the spectrum, with the younger people who are just learning about the history of Parchester Village and are becoming activists to help the community themselves. She's thrilled that she will be able to keep working on preserving Breuner Marsh through her new position.
Athena credits her partner of five years, Rebeca, with helping her find her way into environmental policy work. Never happier than where she is now, she is eagerly anticipating all that her 30th year has to offer. She feels a strong connection to the Bay Area and wants to continue working to make it a better place for everyone to live.
Athena summarizes her two years of volunteering: "I started out as a frustrated office worker - I wanted to get into some kind of environmental work for a living, but I wasn't sure what. I never imagined myself leading meetings or taking people out on precinct walks - I thought I was far too shy to do that. Now I have a much more clear idea of what I can do, and what I want to do. And now that my volunteer work has led to a staff position, I can spend more time working on the projects that have become so important to me."
She's come a long way as a volunteer.
© 2005 San Francisco Sierra Club Yodeler