Billionaires for Wealthcare — Guerilla Theater

[Side note: Frances Perkins appears as a character in the original musical "Annie," on which this piece is based. I think she would have appreciated this effort to humorously expose the opponents of reform.]

The Center looks ahead to 2010 and beyond

On September 15th, the Frances Perkins Center held a planning session attended by all board members and several friends of the Center. The meeting was facilitated by Carol Wishcamper and was divided into two sections: Programs & Activities; and Finances.

The agreed-upon priorities for programs and activities in the next 18 to 24 months are:

1. 75th anniversary of the Social Security Act as a theme for 2010 (yearlong celebration, including January film screening and panel discussion, national conversation/Internet “jam,” book of essays about importance and meaning of Social Security, possible curriculum)
2. Oral History project
3. Historic Structure/Cultural Landscape Report
4. Continuing Outreach through awards program, senior college seminars, etc.
5. Fellowship Program (Perkins Center Scholars)

In discussing the Center’s finances, we focused on ways to generate revenue:

• Earned income (sponsorships for events and publications)
• Grants
• Individual Donors

We set two ambitious financial goals: to submit five grant proposals by December 31, 2009 and to raise $225,000 by next summer. Since the meeting, we have submitted two grant proposals and have raised about $14,000 (only $211,000 to go!).

The meeting ended on a very positive, energetic note. If you’d like to support the Center by making an online donation, go to https://npo.networkforgood.org/Donate/Donate.aspx?npoSubscriptionId=7344 and designate the Frances Perkins Center as the recipient of your contribution. Thanks!

Frances Perkins Center welcomes new board member, Sarah Peskin

We’re thrilled to have her. Here’s a little bit about her:

Former chief of planning and legislation for the National Park Service north atlantic region, Sarah Peskin has guided the preservation and interpretation of many nationally significant historic places and managed major new facility projects from concept to operation. A graduate of Smith College, she holds a master’s degree in urban planning from New York University and was a Loeb Fellow at Harvard University.

From 1979-90 she was planning director of the Lowell Historic Preservation Commission, the public/private entity that helped develop Lowell National Historical Park. From 1990-2009 she did feasibility studies and worked on legislation to establish new areas such as Weir Farm National Historic Site, Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historical Park, Boston Harbor Islands National Recreation Area, Erie Canalway National Heritage Corridor, New Bedford Whaling National Historical Park and the Lower East Side Tenement Museum National Historic Site. She led the recent planning effort for the Schoodic section of Acadia National Park where a navy base was transformed into an educational campus to serve multiple audiences.  Award-winning projects she managed include the Mogan Cultural Center, Boarding House Park, and the Lowell Park Trolley System.  She wrote “Cultural Tourism: Where Culture and Economy Meet” (Boston Foundation, 2004) and “America’s Special Landscapes: The Heritage Area Phenomenon” (Ferrara, 2001).  She has recently retired from the National Park Service to spend most of her time at her home in Walpole, Maine, just across the Damariscotta River from the Perkins Homestead.

Frances Perkins Center featured on public television

Written by Sichu Mali, summer intern

On July 3, 2009, the Frances Perkins Center was featured in “Maine Watch with Jennifer Rooks” on the Maine Public Broadcasting Network (MPBN). The program included an interview with the executive director, Barbara Burt, who mentioned that Cynthia Otis, Frances Perkins’s grandmother, had been a major influence on Frances. She also shared the vision of the center with the show host Jennifer Rooks, which includes creating a digital archive of Frances’s documents and a conference center in her name.

Tomlin Perkins Coggeshall, Frances’s grandson and a board member of the center, who was also featured in this program, talked about the fire safety practice he and his grandmother had at The Brick House.

At the MPBN studio, Rooks was joined by Kirstin Downey, author of The Woman Behind the New Deal and Dr. Christopher Breiseth, the immediate past president and CEO of the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute. Downey discussed Frances’s role in the New Deal and the Fire Safety Code. Dr. Breiseth, who knew Frances personally as a student at Cornell University, spoke about her personality. He mentioned that when he had asked Ms Perkins about her most important accomplishment, she had replied, “Social Security.”

To watch the program, click on the photo below.

Click to watch the video

Our summer intern

We are very pleased to welcome our first summer intern to the Frances Perkins Center. Her name is Sichu and she’ll be a senior at Mount Holyoke College next fall. Sichu is an international student and hails from Katmandu. She’s a sociology major at Mount Holyoke, and plans to go to law school after graduation.

Yesterday, we took a tour of scenic places near the Frances Perkins Center. Here's Sichu on the rocks in front of the Pemaquid Lighthouse.

Sichu will spend the summer cataloguing papers and memorabilia at the Center and helping with office tasks.

Is a sense of fairness and a desire for equal pay hardwired?

There’s an interesting article in Salon this morning called Free the Chimps! by David Stipp. The part that pertains to the issues that concern The Frances Perkins Center is this:

In a provocative 2003 study titled “Monkeys reject unequal pay,” [Emory University primatologist Frans] de Waal and a colleague showed that nonhuman primates have a sense of fair play, and that violating it makes them uncooperative. The researchers taught capuchin monkeys to exchange small pebbles for pieces of cucumber. Working with pairs of female monkeys, the scientists sometimes gave one of the animals a grape, which are much yummier to capuchins than cucumbers, in the pebble-trading game. When the other monkey saw she was getting a raw deal for her pebble — the usual cucumber — she went on strike, and sometimes even threw her cucumber piece on the floor.

De Waal subsequently showed that chimps similarly reject unequal pay, and in another follow-up study demonstrated that the greater the effort that monkeys must expend to get food rewards, the more negatively they react when the rewards are unequal. De Waal and other scientists have also shown that when primates must cooperate to get food, as they do when hunting in groups, greater sharing of the rewards increases cooperation, which boosts the chance of success and the gains for all the members of the group. Again, de Waal is careful not to push his data too hard — primates have a prototypical sense of fairness and enlightened self-interest, he has noted, not the full human thing.

Here’s the part that pertains to us humans:

Still, the rise of the obscenely overpaid executive has given us our own version of de Waal’s socially disruptive game, undermining the cohesiveness that has always been America’s great strength during crises. President Obama’s recent blunt words about the trend appeal strongly to our inner primates, and his effort to stem the socially toxic trend toward economic inequality initiated during the Reagan administration represents a vitally important part of his agenda…

So while it’s important that we forgo the simple-minded anthropomorphism that inspires keeping primates as pets, let’s not get unreal about it — they have more to say to us than many people would like to admit. And the next time you see a cartoon trying to demean someone by comparing him to a chimp, consider this: If more of our own alpha males were as attuned as their primate counterparts to “the basic solidarity that makes life bearable,” as de Waal puts it, we might pull together and get out of the current mess a lot faster than we otherwise would.

Maybe we should all send bananas to those alpha male bankers who still don’t seem to get it. Or would they prefer grapes?

Thank you, Maine Initiatives

We’ve launched our 2008 membership drive (have you joined up?) and would like to give a shout out to our friends at Maine Initiatives, our fiscal sponsors.

If you become a member and make a contribution to The Frances Perkins Center, that donation — which goes through Maine Initiatives — is tax deductible. This makes it possible for us to raise funds while we’re in the process of filling for our own 501(c)3 status from the IRS.

In addition to this, Maine Initiatives featured The Frances Perkins Center in its most recent newsletter with a very nice article about Frances Perkins and the Center. And on the last page, they featured this wonderful FP quote:

The New New Deal and the 21st Century Workforce

The Frances Perkins Center is working on the agenda for a conference May 2nd at the Hutchinson Center in Belfast, Maine. (Email bburt@francesperkinscenter.org to get on the list for information.) Yesterday, I met with Maine’s Commissioner of Labor, Laura Fortman, and Deputy Commissioner of Labor, Jane Gilbert, to discuss potential conference topics. Our ideas centered around what’s being called the “New New Deal,” focusing specifically on the changes in the U.S. workforce since 1933 and how this new version of a works progress program would affect workers who didn’t fit the 1933 profile.

Today, President-elect Obama released a YouTube and radio address that speaks directly about what he’s considering in this 2009 stimulus package:

To recap what President-elect Obama says, there are the three major pieces of the package at this point:

a massive effort to make public buildings more energy-efficient.

the single largest new investment in our national infrastructure since the creation of the federal highway system in the 1950s.

a sweeping effort to modernize and upgrade school buildings that this country has ever seen. As we renew our schools and highways, we’ll also renew our information superhighway.

Those are important goals. But as we look at the kinds of jobs they’ll create and the workers who will benefit from those jobs, we need to ask ourselves, “Who is being left out?” Will part-time workers benefit? Will women workers be fully represented? Will “contract” workers get any help? How can we make sure that the benefits of a stimulus package reach the broadest possible spectrum of workers?

That’s what we’ll be considering on May 2nd.

Welcome to the blog of the Frances Perkins Center

Hey, we’re up and blogging! This is the official blog of the newly formed nonprofit Frances Perkins Center. In the coming months, we’ll tell you all about Frances Perkins, who was an amazingly accomplished woman — FDR’s Secretary of Labor for 12 years, the first woman cabinet secretary, principal author of the New Deal, and dedicated advocate for social justice. And we’ll keep you informed about the progress of the Center — upcoming events, programs, and other news.

Located on the banks of the Damariscotta River in Newcastle, Maine, the Frances Perkins Center was the homestead of many generations of the Perkins family. The Brick House, as it is known, and surrounding countryside were a source of solace, renewal, and inspiration to Frances. It’s a fitting place to commemorate her legacy and to nurture the philosophy and policies embodied in that legacy. (You can see lots of photos here: http://FrancesPerkinsCenter.org.)

The Frances Perkins Center will serve two functions. First, as a center for the study of her accomplishments and the policies that she implemented: scholars and students from Maine, the U.S., and around the world will visit to immerse themselves in Frances Perkins’s papers (both primary sources and collected facsimiles).

Second, the Center will nurture progressive leadership to carry her legacy into the future. In 2009, we plan to co-sponsor conferences in Maine (tentatively scheduled for May 2nd at the Hutchinson Center in Belfast) and Washington, D.C.

In coming years, we will sponsor retreats, symposia, and conferences—both here at the Brick House and in other locations—bringing together elected officials, labor leaders, historians, policy makers, students of all ages, and others interested in honoring and building upon Frances Perkins’s commitment to working people around the world. And we will share the writings and lectures of these visitors through publications such as The Perkins Report.