My name is Madeleine Hill, and my husband and I moved to Ashland in 1972 after spending a couple years living in a Volkswagen camper and being hippies, traveling around Europe. After we moved to the Los Angeles area, after we both graduated from college, and I worked for Los Angeles County Department of Public Social Services where my husband got his PhD. And before starting our family and deciding where we were permanently going to live, I thought, let's just do our traveling now before we get tied down to regular jobs. So we saved a bunch of money and flew to Germany in 1971 and got a little used camper and lived in that. We traveled all around living in campgrounds, going to showering once a week by a train station or a campground or something, and found some relatives in Denmark, excuse me, relatives in Norway where my grandmother was from, and visited my mother's cousins way up above the Arctic Circle in Nezna, Norway. They told me I had cousins in Denmark, so we visited them in Denmark, and they told me that their son knew that they needed a professor at the University of Arhus in Denmark. So we were there in September, drawing by the college, took a chance, knocked on the door of the psychology department, and just that same day they hired my husband to teach in Arhus, Denmark. So we got to stay there nine months, and it was a changing point in both our lives, because what I was able to learn is comparing the social service delivery system and the health care system in Denmark to what I had seen in California, particularly with the welfare mothers and the children that nobody wanted, and the foster care children, and abused children, and handicapped children. And I came back, when we came back to the United States, I wanted to change from helping handicapped children to dealing with seniors, and incorporate some of the ideas that I had learned while we lived in Denmark, because they're so far ahead of the United States at that time, and I think they still are in the health care system, and how they take care of the older people, and handicapped people, and people with less education and less abilities. It's just wonderful what they did there. So I was a typical housewife. I put my husband through graduate school, rather than thinking of going myself. I just put him through, because that's what girls did. I think in hindsight, I probably could have been a wonderful lawyer or something like that, but nobody ever told me I could do that, so all I thought I could do was a teacher, because I didn't know any better. And in the early 70s, 72, 73, I was a social worker at the VA in White City, but again, I didn't like seeing people institutionalize. I thought people should not have to live in an institution like I had seen in Denmark, where people didn't have to live in institutions as much as they have to do here. So I said, okay, if I'm a social worker, and I could help one person one at a time, but how does change really happen? So I went to the Ashton Public Library, because we didn't have computers in 72 and 73. So how do you make a change if you don't have money and if you don't have a powerful person and you're not real rich? What can you do differently? And I started reading, I'm listening to public radio a little bit, public television, and just reading things about the women were thinking, maybe women could do more than we thought they could do. And I noticed when I, where I was working, my husband and I both worked for the VA federal government, but I was paying more into my health insurance and more for my retirement program than he was. And why was that? Because I was a woman. And that didn't seem quite right that I should have to pay more than him. Why was that? Why was it different? And I started just paying attention. And I read something at the Ashton Library, a little notice about a women's consciousness raising group. And I wonder what that is. I got out of my courage and went there. Some brave women had started a consciousness raising group in Ashton. And I'm sitting there once a week with these other women and they were saying things like, well, what movies do you like? And I would say, well, we like, and where would you like to go to dinner? And I said, well, we like. And all of a sudden it occurred to me, I didn't know what I liked. I only knew what we liked. And I had grown up in a family where everything was done together. And why hadn't I ever been out to dinner by myself to a restaurant? And why had I never done these things by myself? I had a very good marriage. I still just celebrated my 57th wedding anniversary yesterday. So I still have a very good marriage and a wonderful husband. But what am I missing? And so I started reading things. I read Betty Friedan's book, The Feminine Mystique. And all of a sudden I saw myself in that book and I'm still, I'm going to the consciousness raising groups and I'm reading this book and I'm thinking maybe my life could be a little different than what I thought. Maybe I don't have to just be a social worker working for somebody else. How can I change to make a difference? And then I started thinking about the National Organization for Women and reading about them and hearing about them and thinking, well there's no chapter of the National Organization for Women in Southern Oregon. Well, why not? So I started reading there, signing up, I sent them money and they sent me literature. I said, well, maybe we could start a chapter here. So we did. So there was a chapter, we started the first chapter of the National Organization for Women in the Rogue Valley and I said, well, we need a president and we need a board. Well, I couldn't do that. I've never done anything like that. Well, maybe I could. And I had learned in our neighborhood that there was, in Ashland, there was a land use decision that was going to happen. It was going to be somebody wanted to disrupt our little quiet neighborhood above the park, up on the corner of scenic and nutly where we lived and I said, well, maybe we could do something to not have this happen. Maybe the people that wanted to get rich doing development wouldn't have to just destroy our neighborhood to do that. So I went to the library again and read about how you make planning actions and how you deal with the city council. And pretty soon we were having meetings at our house with our neighbors to challenge what the city planning department wanted to do. And lo and behold, I was successful and I got my courage and practiced as my women's consciousness raising group and got my courage up and went to this, started writing letters and making presentations and all of a sudden there was a new amendment to Ashland City. Their first planning code was called the Hill Amendment after me. The Hill Amendment was to do with where scenic drive and nutly drive meet, it's called a Grandview neighborhood and there's a Grandview Drive and some very large houses up on Grandview and as nutly continued up into the hills above the Strawberry Lane area.  And the city was going to just allow rampant growth up there without doing anything with the dirt roads or the Strawberry Lane which was hard to get up and down without really looking at any very good traffic, traffic plans, traffic impact and so we thought that they should be have to do some traffic impact, traffic impact plans and research before they could go ahead and do that. And it was done all of a sudden there was a change in the comprehensive plan map but there were no minutes of meetings, there were no maps, all of a sudden it just changed, the comprehensive plan map changed with no background information and I found that because I couldn't see, they couldn't justify where they had made, who had made the decision to do that. I never did know who made the decision to change that map but they didn't get away with it. So there was a Hill Amendment to the first comprehensive plan and it was named after me because we were successful and that was my first experience doing something political and being successful and being around other people said well you could do this and then we started doing more of the getting together with the now group and we started looking around at what was going on and what was going on and you just read the paper. At the university there was a woman came to us, a young woman at the college came to us and said well this is might seem silly but in the PE department, in the girls in the PE department they have to take their PE clothes home and wash them and the boys get their clothes washed by the college for free but the girls have to take theirs home and well why is that? Well because they said well women like their clothes washed a certain kind of way and the men don't care. I said well that's ridiculous so we went and talked to the university and they changed it. Then another thing we read in the paper about we had started going to ACLU meetings and they were looking into women's issues in Ashland. There was an Ashland chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union and my husband ended up being on the board of the American Civil Liberties Union in Ashland and so we're both kind of getting involved in these things and we find out that at the jail in Medford the men have the men prisoners could have three or four times a week where they could have visitors where their wives or their families could visit them and the women only had one time a week where their family could visit them. So I went and interviewed the jail people and said well why is that? Well that's because there's fewer women in the jail than men so that the women's families could only visit them once a week but the men's families could visit them several times. Well that doesn't make any sense so we met we several of us women went together with ACLU and we got that changed and then it's time to look at there's a Ashland school school board was going to hire a new superintendent for the school board so some women who were teachers in the school board came to the group of us who are meeting the now group we're starting to get kind of famous by then people were paying attention to us I think maybe we had a lot of fun marching in the Ashland Fourth of July parade we had we started having we did floats and we had we marched in with much trepidation marching in our first parade that Ashland's famous Fourth of July parade with the national organization for women with costumes and plaques and banners and noisemakers and our kids and our spouses and our partners and people started paying attention so I was back to the school situation so the teachers were scared to do anything but they said nobody is advertising this they're not posting this opportunity for either the principality for a principal or vacancy for the school superintendent position at that time there were zero women administrators national school district there were no women administrators at Southern Oregon University at very high level there were no women in the police department no women in the fire department and no woman who had ever run for mayor of Ashland let alone be mayor so so the teachers were kind of scared so I wrote a little statement and stood up in front of the Ashland school board meeting I don't have any children but so I wasn't scared that anybody was going to be able to hurt me and said why is it that you haven't posted this job anywhere except where the good old boys network because there's some women here who have masters and phd's already in your school system and they don't even know about this vacancy and so as a result of that they had to back down and start advertising it and a group of women called options uh was uh Nancy Peterson and Olive Streit got together and decided that they we kind of forced the school district to start having some education for their administrators and their teachers about about gender equity and and the fact that they're their list of history books and literature books there's hardly any written by women about women women's history was missing in the school district so they started examining in the Ashland school district why that was and trying to educate the rest of them the rest of the school people about what why that was important we now have since that time just jumping into this educational system we've had a a woman president of the southern barn university we've had a woman superintendent of schools we had women principals it wasn't that long ago that there were none absolutely none now there are women in the fire departments women in the police departments one of the reasons there's women in the fire departments is we we read in the paper that the medford fire department was doing testing for how who could be a firefighter and from the now literature that we were looking at we found we realized that the reason that that the women weren't passing the physical agility tests for the fire department was that the men were the ones doing the testing so we went out one morning in the cold to the place where the all the male firefighters were doing their testing and there were two women that were trying to be wanted to be testing and we say well what you need to do is take your own tape measures and your own stopwatches and interview and watch how long it takes the women to do each of those activities as well as how long it takes the men because what they were having the women do is lift up a very heavy ladder all by themselves where the men would tell us that it really takes two of us we always just have two of us lifting this really high level ladder onto the side of the fire truck it's not just one what they're making them do and because we were there we got quite a bit of tension on from the from the tv stations and the news stations of course and it made everybody aware what was going on and it forced them in a subtle kind of way to start looking at why they were turning away all the women and eventually it changed but it takes somebody to shake you up we realized that we had to start being more much more public we had a even had a little underground group i can't remember what they were called it was a group of older women it was a group of women that helped us the younger women because we were in our 30s and 40s at the time but there was a group of women in their 60s and 70s they call themselves the owls the older women's league oh the owls were josephine rothamel and lois newman oh i i have some of their names i could find them names oh they were just wonderful um they one of them one of them had been through the macarthur year they would have been through the macarthur year and they would tell us about the red baiting and the things that go on there another one was had been in the movie industry in los angeles someone tell us about about what that was like when they were in their 20s and 30s and going through that experience um and they would they were the they were the most outrageous group of of women you could imagine they were just wonderful and they were meeting once a week in ashland and they would come to us and we'd give us ideas of what to do so i remember one of their actions was they were watching a tv ad for a furniture store in medford and the furniture store had women sitting around in lingerie selling mattresses so what the women did is they started calling up calling up the furniture store and asking to talk to the lingerie department and the what are you why are you doing that and so well why do you have this woman in scantily clad women in an azure late negligee selling your furniture you're you're that's sexist that's not treating women with respect and i was trying to remember all the other things that we used to do when we would see sexist ads and women that ads degraded women we would we would come and complain one of the things we were able to do was with a jacks in jackson county had an advertisement for in the newspaper for we would start monitoring the help wanted ads in the newspaper still we didn't have we didn't have internet and computers much then yet either so you just read the help wanted in the newspaper and one of them would say help wanted mail help wanted mail and it would be for mowing the lawns and county properties and you would you just had to be able to push a lawnmower you didn't have to be you didn't have to be able to speak english you didn't have to be able to type you didn't have to have any education you didn't have anything and you would get this a certain salary but then they would also advertise for for clerical positions where you had to have education experience skills and you'd make less money than the person who just had to push a lawnmower all of whom were male and all the the clerical positions were all female and we were able to pressure the jackson county commissioners and changing how they were advertising their jobs and make them more make pay comparable to the kind of experience that one needed and then we started getting involved in politics this is still the national association for women group again and we saw that the democratic party was going to have was being taken over by some people that were wanting to not have were against the equal rights amendment for women were against having a sex education for children and against the right to choose and we didn't want that plank in our democratic platform here so we studied up about parliamentary procedure and several of us went to the democratic weekend platform convention in central point and we've we were able to change what what they were planning on doing because they had some people who were going to be pushing these planks against women's rights so we used parliamentary procedure and questioned how the agenda was done and how the votes were counted and we just used all these parliamentary procedure ploys and there was nothing they could other side could do because we knew what we're doing and we we were able to then put me and chairman of the human rights section of the plan there was there were letters to the editor afterwards who were those women from ashland where did they come from we laughed and laughed and laughed i'm just trying to remember all those some of those other little sneaky things we did and we we realized that it doesn't also just take very long to get on the front page of the paper in ashland because there's always a lot of news and so i wrote a letter to to the the the shakespeare the guild there that that was they they were they would ever they would sell tarts and things to raise money for the organ shakespeare festival that during the intermission and they could only they would only allow girls to be tart girls to sell they saw this this group of supporters of the festival would only allow girls and i said well that's not right little boys might want to be able to volunteer to to help money to raise money for the shakespeare festival as well so they changed but that that that gave us a front page article in the newspaper that was kind of fun that wasn't that we got that well we started raising we start we had a lot of it fun being in the ash and forth of july parade then we started having a booth in the ash and forth of july parade and one year we we um all dressed up as supreme court justices this was after um the year when santa day o'connor was the first woman who was on the considered for the first woman to be on the the supreme court so that was so we thought that was pretty exciting so so we got dressed up as supreme court justices that was that was a fun one and we go down to the parade and some people would boo but almost everybody shouted and cheered in her aid and that was that was kind of fun and along the way came women in transition which was part of what something came out of the university and i wasn't too terribly involved in that in back to my professional career uh i thought well i don't want to just be a regular social worker anymore because i want to be able to make some political change and i think how what do i need to do to change from just doing one on one counseling and social work types because i had read a book called the magic of thinking big and i'd had a wonderful supervisor in california who taught me about the magic of thinking big and how decisions are made and as a social worker you're always having budget cuts and you're having services cut because people who are making these decisions are the bean counters but they're not necessarily making the decisions based on what i thought was really what people needed so she she taught me about how you look at who controls the money and so what i decided to do is go instead of getting a master's degree in social work which was what i was going to do next my husband was willing to move away and we would go get i would go get my master's degree because i'd put him through his phd so i got all ready and i took the graduate rec exam to go to go to school social work somewhere else and i said well what can i do here what do i need to do so i took a year off kind of like my own sabbatical and i went to southern oren university part time and i took classes in political communication accounting and what was the third one and computers because those are things i thought that i needed to add to what i knew about being a case worker if i was going to make a change and so i did that for a year and during that year i also cited i'm going to volunteer to get experience but i'm not going to volunteer one-on-one i'm going to make a change so i wandered over to the county human services department and volunteered to be on the county human services committee and went around to different nonprofits in the valley and doing some mentoring for them on what i'd learned in danmark and i learned how things decisions were made politically for funding of human service agencies and learned about how to do what what what do the administrators of those different departments do until i finally got my first management job which was a director of helpline at that time helpline was had been started by some uh vista volunteers years several years before but it was pretty much a hippie kind of organization and when i took over as the director of my first management job i made four hundred dollars a month and the bookkeeping department was a pencil and a piece of paper at helpline we also were were the rape crisis council we sponsored the rape crisis council and we used to be the font the phone call the phone answering service for for the boo and dunhouse was started and it was my done dalt and was doing her things and so we were involved with that through helpline by by helping that get started as well but i wasn't primarily doing that when we also had a thing called help squad which would was doing was the first cases of of drug stuff at at concerts and things like that and help squad when people were overdosing and nobody was paying much attention to those things our volunteers were out we were going out and providing going into the domestic violence situations and helping women escape and we were involved in that when i was at helpline as well going into scary situations but just doing what needed to be done people that needed help you just i i don't know i think i just was the way i was raised and grown up that you just do it so at helpline i started seeing what was going on and i was seeing that the county commissioners county board of commissioners the county budget committee were making decisions about where money was going or not going in human services and i also learned that the ashland city council was not putting any money into human services even though they were getting uh title 20 block grants and i learned about type 20 block grants and so i looked those up at the library and i saw that they're supposed to to be they don't have to go just for administrative stuff for the cities they can go for housing and they can go for social services so i organized a group of people uh that i'd met through my helpline work and other agencies and we went en masse to one of the budget meetings the city council city of ashland budget committee hearings and started talking about what we needed what they needed to do was they had to give start giving some money to human services and they never had given any budget city budget money to human services and i remember that we got money for the first time jackson county was the legal aids jackson county legal aid got the money for the first time from the ashland city council after what we did and what i did is i figured out a strategy and i gave each person a piece of paper saying which order they were going to speak to and what issue they were going to speak to so that we weren't all saying the same thing over and over so we had it all strategize what we would say and we were very successful and also during that time i remember nancy peterson ended up being in the city council she and i were approached by the democratic party of oregon they actually flew down some guys flew down from from portland and salem to the medford airport met nancy peterson and i in the in the good restaurant and asked the jackson county airport trying to talk one of us into running for state legislature and nancy peterson did so the same group of women that had learned how to be do political stuff we've been learning that helping each other learn that stuff she uh nancy peterson ended up running and winning and another time nancy peterson had two girls and i she remembers nancy would tell me that one of her daughters said we were talking about the mayor the mayor of ashland though it's been a long time mayor of ashland there never been a woman mayor of ashland and we said well what are we going to do about this and nancy peterson's little girl said well mommy girls can't be mayor and we said well wait a minute maybe girls can so i had been learning some things in with through my human services volunteer work and through now and through the consciousness raising group and i got up my courage to run for mayor of ashland and i was the first time a woman had ever run for mayor of ashland i was a first then let alone never being a mayor there there was never one woman even run for mayor of ashland there was a good opportunity because um the the long time air was was uh what's not going to run so there was an open seat so seven of us running and i almost won i came in second but there was another liberal jim sims and i so we kind of split the the liberal vote so a very handsome retired conservative gentleman who had been an executive with g e or something one and um gordon madaris won he won first prize but i almost won and this the uh the next election a woman ran again and did not win but the next election after that a woman ran and did win and and kathy golden shaw was able to win finally for the first time but but i set the groundwork for that and through the various women's activities i had learned to to do um speak in public to ask for money to strategize to understand how these political decisions were made and so that's where i got my courage up to do that saying this is possible and as part of the equal rights and we really worked hard on the equal rights amendment really really hard on that and we actually were able to get the jackson county board of supervisors to boycott arizona because arizona was one of the states that was refusing to sign the equal approve the equal rights amendment and there was a judge in jackson county who wanted to go to arizona for a judges conference and we were able to convince that jackson county commissioners not to not to pay his way to do that and coincidentally at that time we had two women two out of three women county commissioners two of the two of the three county commissioners in jackson county were women isabel sickles and carol dodie that was pretty exciting and we all became friends and we're encouraging each other because women who are in political power and positions of power and southern organ needed support from other women because it wasn't always a pleasant environment to be in one thing the county commissioners did is they created a jackson county commission on the status of women that was a first and that was because of the work we all did together to do that and it's back to the equal rights amendment what we learned about we practiced how to talk to the media when what to do when you get interviewed and how you the people who are wanting to get news stories will sometimes trick you they will tell you the sort of things they're going to ask you and then when the camera starts rolling they end up asking you something else and so we learned how to never go by ourselves to always go with two of us in teams and to have the other one making signals in the back who wasn't on camera telling us that you don't have to answer that question or or just do a broken record technique some of the techniques we learned in consciousness raising broken record techniques saying just to say the same thing over and over to not get pulled into getting angry on the on the TV is running and I remember when I was interviewed once for about the equal rights amendment the the reporter did that to me and then talks about isn't it awful about we won't be able to have toilets that are just for men or toilets for women who have to have unisex toilets and they were they were not able to suck me into looking stupid to answer that kind of question because we've been practicing that together I had also we had learned Nancy Peterson and I were were very involved in in now at the time and she was also busy working with Sheila Drescher and two other women who met in my backyard at a party one day the women met together and started talking about what they wanted to do because their husbands all were working and their children didn't need them anymore and they got to get decided that they all liked books and so the idea of Bloomsbury books was born at a party in our backyard for Sheila and Nancy Peterson and there are two other women Denise and the little Bloomsbury books which is now a wonderful organization in Ashland that when I was it managed director of helpline I was my volunteer to be on something called the Jackson Josephine Health Planning Council that was a federal initiative to because they were tired of hospitals all doing one in their MRI machines and all mounting their big expensive equipment rather than cooperating and having one big piece of equipment in for all the hospitals in in a town or something so in a medical community hospital or a nursing home wanted to expand they had to get permission from the local health planning council so I volunteered and was appointed as one member of the Jackson County Jackson Josephine Health Planning Council and one of the things that happened was Jackson County had an old nursing home on 99 in Phoenix and it was old and they wanted to close it down and they wanted permission to build a new nursing home Jackson County commissioners and I was able to convince the board then that to turn it down which was kind of radical and instead use the money for alternatives to nursing home care for the elderly which is some of the things that I had learned in in Denmark about how my how I back to what I learned there and I had also been appointed by the Jackson Josephine Health Planning Council as a representative on a 12 county board called the Western Oregon Health Systems Agency which was meeting once a month in Eugene so I was going up to that meeting as every month as a volunteer and I took the idea of turning that nursing home down and using alternatives for placement for seniors and disabled and Western Oregon Health Systems Agency agreed with me as well and then we took it to the state of Oregon and a state of Oregon was we convinced the state of Oregon they should create a research project and they did and Oregon ended up getting the first very first Medicaid waiver for title 19 in the entire country to use title 19 Medicaid funds which at that time only funded nursing home placement no funding for foster homes adult foster homes home delivered meals transportation in home care homemaker services the kind of things that I knew really would keep people at home rather than a nursing home and that was about in 1976 and 77 and so that was pretty theoretical ideas then at that time there were no there were two adult foster homes in all of Jackson County and I knew that because when I worked for the VA in White City as a social worker from 72 to 75 when we first came here that I would I opened I got arranged to have some adult foster homes and nursing homes licensed for the VA and at that time I learned more about how there was hardly any services other than institutions for seniors and disabled people here and it was because of the funding back to my first supervisor in Los Angeles who taught me about follow the money follow the money who's making the decisions and the people making those decisions were the ones were the politicians so Oregon got this research program and then they hired me state of Oregon hired me to be the research coordinator in southern Oregon so this research project was in five counties in southern Oregon Josephine Jackson Coose County Curry County and Douglas County and they the researchers were the big big muckety mucks they were in Salem at the Department of Human Resources and I was all by myself in southern Oregon and they gave me a state car and an office in a state office building in Medford and said make it happen so I went around and worked with county commissioners boards of health hospital discharge planners casework state caseworkers agency on aging directors who were getting money through the old americans act so there were two funding sources there was the older americans act funding source and there was a was a Medicaid funding source the title 19 funding source but they didn't talk to each other and didn't work together so I got both those federal funding sources and state funding sources working together one of the I didn't start this but the Oregon Project Independence OPI was had just been started at that time but there was nothing similar for Medicaid people and I did things like seminars and TV shows and educational things and getting people talking together to try to plan better for avoiding nursing home placement if at all possible which is what people wanted they wanted to be in their own home and stay at home but it's not what was happening because there was no funding for it well we were so successful that in 1980 the legislature created a whole new state agency called the Oregon State Senior Services Division SSD the Senior Services Division which was created out of a combination of the older americans act money and the Medicaid money and it was kind of complicated putting these two divergent systems together and my job was to teach people how to do that so the state of Oregon after they created the senior services division in 1980 they hired me and a social worker from Eugene and the two of us went around the state of Oregon teaching other counties caseworkers and hospital discharge planners in other counties what we had accomplished in southern Oregon and why it worked and what the philosophy of de-institutionalizing seniors and using the money and we actually ended up costing the state the state federal taxpayers less money for more care and i'm very proud of that it became known as the Oregon model of long-term care and to this day Oregon the state of Oregon has more seniors in home-based care community-based care percentage-wise in any other state of the 50 states and Oregon has the least number of seniors and disabled in nursing home placements there are fewer nursing home beds now in Jackson josephine counties than the where when we started and yet the senior population has really increased a lot there were assisted livings did not assisted living facilities did not exist because there was no funding source for them uh so a woman um uh karen brown wilson in in portland uh figured out how to do that and i was i would travel to portland and salem and help write the first rules for for licensing of assisted living facilities in Oregon and now they're now so there are now i don't know how many adult foster homes there are in southern Oregon at least a hundred adult foster homes there's all sorts of agencies there's geriatric care care managers there's homemaker agencies there's home health there's hospice uh there's just all sorts of things that didn't exist before because you follow the funding source and convince the convince through dollars the politicians to do what they should have been doing all along so all of that gave rise to this to mountain meadows because i was i was traveling all the time i was i was on the road all the time in my state car going to coose bay in clamoth falls and dealing with horrible elderly abuse cases and union grievances and employees that state employees that didn't particularly want to do what i wanted them to do and i said this is not my or my heart is why isn't anybody building some places for seniors and disabled people using my value system why is why aren't there anything like that here and so i talked to my husband about it and we said well maybe we could try that so i looked around and found um while i was i had a really good state really good state job at that point i was in 1995-96 i was um region manager for the state senior services division very high level well paid good benefits state job but i was still traveling all the time and so i i said well what do i need to learn so i started i need to learn about property so i started going to the library again and said how can you how can you be a developer how can you do a develop real estate when you don't have any money which we just we had only our jobs we didn't have anything other than that my husband and i so i found a realtor who told me about this piece of land in ashen been for sale for several years nobody wanted it was 22 acres but it was in the city limits of ashen but it didn't have sewer it didn't have zoning it didn't have paid road but it was in the city limits and i had learned by way back in my planning days in ashen that uh if you read all the rules you could figure stuff out so i was a good government employee i know how to read rules and how to read documents and ccnr's and legislative stuff and administrative rules so i i read it up and i said well it's in the city limits i could figure out how to bring it in the city limits i mean it's in the city limits but it doesn't have sewer she's sewer pretty basic so you got to start with sewer first so i said oh how do you form how do you get sewers well you form a local local improvement district of lid so i said okay i guess i'll form a local improvement district for sewers and this area out here where mountain metals is from the barricade bridge up to interstate five mountain avenue was a dirt road they used to plow it it couldn't even grade it or pave it it was just plowed with a plow because that's all the dirt it was just full of potholes and dirt and the houses the few houses there was only six or eight houses out here and none of them had sewer system they all had septics actually the land that i bought ended up they didn't even have a septic we never did find a septic tank here i think the people who lived in a funny little house here was here before never even had a septic but it took me it took me two years to figure it to convince the the neighbors out here that we should sign for a local improvement district which we did so i learned about how you figure where the sewer was and i learned i hired engineers and we surveyed it we they laid out of where sewer would go and i got a hundred percent of the landowners to agree to this local improvement district for the sewer and then i took another two years to figure out the zoning and when uh there was no zone the right zoning wasn't here for what i wanted i wrote my own zoning i wrote a senior i created a senior zone and i wrote several pages of a senior zoning and in front of the planning commission they decided to uh go with uh zoning called health care zoning which i already had which would allow what we wanted to do with mount meadows and i was still only thinking about a few houses and i brought the land because i'd also read in that library book about how can you be a developer when you don't have any money is it said well ask the person who owns the land to wait for their money until you get it all figured out how to do it so i wrote a letter to the lady who owned the land had been in her family a long time she lived in nevada at the time and there was nothing here except a junky old house and seven junk cars and dirt and barbed wire fencing and rolls and just nothing it never even been farmed and i said will you wait six years for your money and this is what i want to do i sent her our credit report and our resumes and said we have no debts with good government jobs but this is what i want to do will you wait six years for your money and my realtor's laugh says nobody's going to wait six years for the money i'm not even going to show that to her well i said the book also said that realtors have to present all offers and there's an offer i've written it out i want you to present it to the woman owns property she said okay so he did and she accepted she said i said we'll just we'll just accumulate in an account how much will each one each year we'll accumulate how much the interest would be and i'll pay you and we were able to pay her out of the first constructs draw from a bank six years later when we got a bank loan to pay mountain at north mountain avenue and the first sewer put in the first sewer and paved napence avenue which napence road which was the first street where we started with a single family house so we got we had a bank loan to do that first paving and build a model home and that's and i was able to pay her back and i was able to buy the 22 acres from from bear creek all the way up to i-5 on this on the east side of north mountain avenue for i think i paid about 165 thousand dollars for it in 27 years ago something like that and that's how mountain meadows came about i was 50 50 partners with builder and 27 years later it's all done there's a three million dollar clubhouse which we gave to the community and there's 65 single family detached homes there's 161 condominiums all part of the mountain meadows community we also built skylark assisted living which is what had 75 apartments for life assisted living and 30 32 or 22 assisted living beds i can't remember it now and my actually my father ended up living there until well he died when he got dementia and we eventually my husband and i eventually sold skylark assisted living uh to a firm another firm it's not part of mountain meadows and then we were able to use that money to fund the um exercise gym we're sitting in today which is now serving as an exercise center and a support center an educational center for people with Parkinson's in the road valley and that's where we're sitting today because 13 years ago i found out that i had Parkinson's disease been 13 years now i'm now 78 years old and my Parkinson's is progressing very very slowly and a lot of it has almost all it has to do with the kind of exercise that i've been able to do that i've learned about through going to retreats in some national places and it really works and i'm encouraged i'm hoping to pass along my passion for how forced exercise can slow the progression of Parkinson's for myself and for other people like me who might have realized thinking that it's it's not it is a it is a chronic disease it has no cure it cannot be cured but it can be slowed down if you take control and i've just put everything that i've learned over the years into my current passion which is now nine of five skylark place and helping people with Parkinson's no it was hard oh no there have been many many times when we couldn't make payroll here at mount meadows and we were uh we had some news stories that were untrue and there were lies but you once you get in the newspaper you somebody think believe something that they see in the newspaper that they believe it even for lie you can't how do you how do you undo a lie you just i learned how to pick my battles i learned how to keep my own counsel and be cautious uh i'm still trusting i've been taken advantage of financially by other people big time but it never stopped me and i'm still here and i'm still going i think it was my norwegian upbringing of a family a working class family who just whatever happens you just help each other and kept going you you did whatever you needed to do i watched my mother and father my father exterminator in san francisco my mother drove a school bus for handicapped children my best friend in high school was handicapped she had cerebral palsy i learned about handicapped kids when i was people when i was 16 and we she and i would go to dancers or we would go to san francisco to go to to a movie or to the park and and she couldn't go where i could go i learned i've been advocating for that nobody should be institutionalized because of mobility issues from from my earliest days my my big my biggest mentor in high school was uh leo ryan leo ryan was a congressman who was assassinated by the in the jim jones suicide school aid thing in in in africa and he leo ryan ended up being a congressman and being assassinated there he was my high school english and social studies teacher and he taught me and the other kids at cappuccino high school in san bruno about about another way of looking at life besides just the way we were and being caring for everybody he was a wonderful man he was one of my mentors when i was in high school the girls could only take the girls could only do swimming in the when it was cold and it was dark about five or four five at night because the boys got the best time in the swimming pool and whatever whatever was going on in sports the boys always got the best of everything and the girls didn't and i never could figure that out that is it didn't seem fair and i i never was the girls never did any competitive kind of sports and so i never had that what you learn about being in a team is competitive and the kind of things that men boys would learn that would they would take on and how then when you go into business and politics and government later those are the games that they learned how to play that girls didn't learn how to play girls learned how to be don't don't speak unless spoken to if you can't say something good don't say anything at all be a lady don't cross don't cross your legs don't don't do don't do this don't do that be good be good be good be nice be quiet be seen and not heard and i believed all those things until i started getting to older and bumping into these other things that i was able to read and and get support i've helped a lot of women over the years learn how to invest in real estate and i have several friends now some of the ones some of the very ones that were in the first women's history week group the first consciousness raising group the first group of us who were in the national organization for women here in national and medford the first group of us working on the equal rights amendment some of them now are are as old as me are a little younger than me but they have whatever's happened with their relationships with their partners they have their own home is paid for they maybe have a rental or two that's paid for they're solid financially they will not be bag ladies they will be able to take care of themselves because they paid attention to me and came to some of the workshops i used to do for women on on how to financial planning for women i used to do that particularly around real estate AARP used to do a financial seminar that Sharon Sharon Johnson used to sponsor years ago and they had all these things but they never had anything about real estate and real estate is something that i learned how to deal with a backtrack when i said i had no money down the way i did is i learned about tax deferred exchanges i learned how the tax code is written to benefit rich people not poor people when i started making money by selling fixing up buying a rental fixing it up my parents and i would fix it up fix it up and sell it and then buy another one fix it up and sell it i never paid any taxes on that profit because i was able to do a tax deferred exchange each time and defer defer the payment and so i did have some money to give the woman who i bought the property here at mount mes from and it was about $50,000 that i was able to make that from selling fixing up other places and still because i did a tax deferred exchange into buying this property i didn't pay any tax property any income taxes federal state income taxes on the money that i'd made doing the real estate i personally think that's a terrible law but it is a law so i've been i used it to benefit myself and what i was able to do here to help help others that way because when i was working when you work for a paycheck you pay through the nose the same amount of money if you make it selling stocks or inheriting it or through real estate gimmicks you pay much lower rate and no people do not pay attention when they talk about the capital gains tax that's the one that helps the rich people not anybody else but that's we continue to this day to have a lower tax rate on capital gains non-earned income than what you work with a sweater your bow but for somebody else as a paycheck one of the volunteer activities i'd sign up was for the i was one on the first board of the ashland committee land trust and then ended up on the the ashland housing commission and i watched the process of that and i watched project after project after project that was supposed to help be for long-range helping for the housing situation for for working people and low income people in ashland and we missed the point that it was the planning actions that had the zoning and planning actions where people didn't want they were all for affordable housing but not in their neighborhood not in my neighborhood as long as it was down the street for me i didn't want it but somewhere else it was okay and time after time there would be approvals for a housing project for a big a big housing project that was supposed to have x number percentage for for uh subsidized housing or low-income housing or working-class housing and there'd be some loophole legal hope loophole that somebody would find in the city would would back down and the city would back down time after time after time i could take you around town and show you places that were supposed to be low-income rentals that are now condominiums time after time after time it gives in to the political pressures of a one issue issue people they never come back to the city they just go over and over for their petitions and their hysterical letters and reasons why it shouldn't happen in their neighborhood but then so they get their way and the city just tries again the staff keeps trying but the staff can't always buck the political power of the powerful people here and there's some powerful people in ashland that continue to be in power and make the decisions and little pipsqueaks like me coming in through the side angle through the side door and we do make some inroads but not not not always i do remember a lot about carol dodie who was county commissioner and during the uh all the time when the the spotted owl things were coming up and and cutting down on the o1c funds for the county because of not not cutting the timber and even though all the county commissioners were saying the same things she was the one that got recalled because she was a woman women are the target can be the targets when i was on the county budget committee as a woman uh some of the men just couldn't figure out why i was in the position of that kind of power and it and when i was when i watched women running for office even the last one with hillary clinton and if you if the woman doesn't agree with you on one thing she says one thing wrong or she's one one thing she doesn't support then you're not for her whereas the men can make all kinds of mistakes and you look at their whole pattern where as a woman make one mistake if you're not perfect then you're get to when i was on the county budget committee the libraries wanted money but then the human services wanted money but so we still also need money for the jail and you need money for roads and you need money for animal control and you need money for other things but i had some people that were mad at me because i didn't vote enough money for the library or enough money for human services and when you're passionate about just one thing you don't see the whole picture and i often there's one issue people they'll show up for one thing but not not look at the whole thing and i somehow learned how to look at the whole picture the big picture and the long haul and knowing there's a little details will get you there and one step at a time one foot at a time and you just things happen but you don't give up you just keep going you just keep going and i'm braver than i ever thought i could be and i've done some pretty stupid things that were probably if i'd been should have been more scared but i did them anyway and it was the right thing to do whatever's the right thing to do i've kind of been foolish enough to do that


So if you're familiar with the idea of extortion, then you know the feeling well. He's now upping the ante and suggesting that I extorted him. Well, just when we thought that Stephen Crowder's beef with the Daily Wire was over, he decided to seemingly out of nowhere, reignite the war specifically though with Candice Owens this time. And we're not simply talking about them taking pot shots here and there at one another on their shows. We're talking about an escalation that's so severe it could literally pit them against each other in court. So very, very big things we're talking about here and you love to see it honestly. I love watching these ghouls fight. So let's get to the actual spat. It starts with Stephen Crowder accusing Candice Owens of extortion. This is a word that he uses specifically when referencing something that she said. And first though, he reveals that he and his wife are getting a divorce, something that he's kept private in order to protect his children according to him. And that might seem irrelevant, but this is the key detail here. So let's watch. Since 2021, I've been living through what has increasingly been a horrendous divorce. Now, let me say on the outset to be clear, there is no infidelity, any kind of physical abuse at all on either side. And no, this was not my choice. My then wife decided that she didn't want to be married anymore. And in the state of Texas, that is completely permitted. It's been the most heartbreaking experience of my life. What I consider to be my deepest personal failure. And just so you know, my opinions on parenting and families have not changed. I've always believed that children need a mom and a dad. That divorce is horrible. And I still believe that children need a mom and a dad and that divorce is horrible. But in today's legal system, my beliefs don't matter. In Texas, divorces permitted when one party wants it, period. So for well over a year, well over a year, in the best interest as well as physical safety of my children, we've decided to keep this issue private and to resolve it privately with the appropriate attorneys. What have you, legal jargon? Now, before we get to the extortion claim, I have to point out that he referenced one party divorce laws in Texas and suggests that he would have unilaterally stopped the divorce from happening if he had the legal capability of doing so. And I find that really weird because in essence, he's admitting here that he'd forced his wife to remain in the marriage against her will if he could legally do that. And that might just be him trying to virtue signal to his evangelical audience who thinks that divorce is a sin because they do. But either way, it's deeply, deeply misogynistic and just cruel, but it's very on brand for Steven Crowder. It doesn't surprise me that he would do something like this even to somebody who he loves. And he pointed that out multiple times. That being said though, that's a little bit of a side point, he stressed that keeping the divorce private was essential to protect the emotional and physical safety of his children. And he absolutely has a right to conceal that information from the public. It's not necessarily something that's part of our business. I don't care about that. But he's going to point out that other people in this space knew and threatened to use that information against him, specifically Candice Owens. Here's what he says. Many other people knew about this behind the scenes. Some, not all, but some of them in positions of power, influence, leverage, knew of this. They also knew that the safety of my children included keeping it private. So if you're familiar with the idea of extortion, then you know the feeling well. Now some of these threats were so thinly veiled that I'm frankly surprised you didn't all guess immediately. Steven has a lot going on, I guess is the best way to say. He has a lot going on and that should be clear because people don't do stuff like this if there's not a lot going on in their lives. I would like to implore my audience and everybody that isn't paying attention to this situation not to condemn him but to pray for him. Sometimes people need a prayer. Sometimes people need a scripture. Stephen purports to be a Christian. I am unsure at this moment if it is my place to say more than that. Maybe if I feel in further defense, some things should be said or maybe if I feel that the public has a right to understand certain circumstances. Oh, my children have a right to privacy. Now, some other issues have been or I should say inferences have been more pernicious behind the scenes with demands and threats to use this information that they believe would be so publicly embarrassing to me and my wife in a difficult time that it could be used knowingly putting my children in harm's way. So to those self-styled Christians, conservatives, and allies, well, not in my book. Now, if you find yourself, I don't want to get into details so this is going to likely be the only time I have to address this or want to address this. If you're asking yourself, hey, did X person or did Y person know? The answer's likely yes, which will be made alarmingly clear as this process of discovery continues. And it also, by the way, makes me that much more appreciative of those who did know about this and in understanding the best interests of my family, my children, kept their word and used discretion. I can't thank you enough. Sincerely, I appreciate it, won't forget it. And I will say that what's in the best interests of my children is not internet drama, speculation, certainly not blatant or veiled shakedowns or dragging their father or mother. And I can't be clear on that enough or their mother through the mud. And to anyone who tries it, I'm no longer going to pacify, capitulate or sidestep because I love them a whole lot more than I love you. And I will continue to do whatever is necessary to protect my children, discussing the divorce any further on social media or on this show or in any public space is not what's best for them. I'll be handling this through the proper legal avenues and channels available as a matter of record in which I have more than full confidence. So I'd ask that you understand the need for and respect or privacy in what is obviously a pretty tough time. And I hope that none of this has to go any further than that. So make no mistake about it. He is ever so subtly suggesting that he's willing to take legal action against Candice Owens if she continues to speak out against this. So he viewed her tacit reference to his divorce as a threat. And if he didn't stop attacking the daily wire in his mind, he viewed her comments as, well, I'm gonna spill the beans about your divorce. That's how he perceived it. And I think that that is a fair way to interpret her comments. Now, I'm not sure if that'll actually hold up in the court of law. I think that she has some plausible deniability. But at the same time, it's not unreasonable to assume from his perspective that she is making a thinly veiled threat here. Although he suggests that he can confirm that Candice knew for sure, which, I mean, it's likely that she did know but in that video, he kind of admits that she probably knew not necessarily bulletproof in the court of law. But when it comes to Candice Owens, she addressed his accusation in video and on Twitter, we'll get to Twitter first. She says, Steven Crowder accusing me of extortion is so patently insane that it honestly makes me question how there are still people who cannot see how thoroughly undone he has become. This is not stable behavior. He is a man on a spiral, outright bizarre and concerning. If you are going to use your children as human shields to block people from digging further into your divorce, please do so without inserting me into the narrative. To remind people, the video Steven used in his show of me was a video of me responding to Steven's first set of bizarre attacks against the daily wire. Steven is not the victim, he never was the victim. He's just a bad person who continues to burn a lot of people. Okay, now to be totally honest, I think that Candice Owens is playing dumb here. I think that it's highly likely that she did know about his divorce and that was her implicitly threatening to leak that news to the public about his divorce to make him look bad if he didn't be quiet about the daily wire. But I also think that she's right. That Steven Crowder is using his kids to shield himself from this in order to cultivate sympathy, I guess, which is kind of weird. I get that protecting your kids is a necessity and I understand how keeping this from getting into the public sphere is a good thing for your children. But at the same time, saying that or implying rather that this is going to threaten their physical safety is just bizarre. And I think that she's right about that.  But I mean, you can kind of see how both of them are, they're both trying to use this, right? They're trying to finesse the situation to their own benefit. Remember, we're talking about inherently dishonest people here. So whenever they lob accusations against each other, it's not unreasonable to automatically assume the worst about both of them here. But the drama doesn't end there because things quickly escalated when she responded on her show and she also threatened legal action but much more explicitly than Steven Crowder did. That's it. That's the big scary story. I then went onto my platform and I said, pray for Steven Crowder, honestly because that's where he needs a prayer. And apparently nobody's answering those prayers right now because he's still acting erratic. He's now upping the ante and suggesting that I extorted him. I will not take that lightly, okay? I am not Hillary Crowder. I am not anybody in his family. I am not going to take somebody going onto his platform and alleging that I either harassed, threatened or did anything that would put his children at risk. That is very serious stuff that he is saying. And so what I did this morning after this clip was sent to me is I contacted a defamation lawyer and I am sending Steven Crowder a cease and desist and I'm going to demand a full-throated retraction to the idea that Candice Owens threatened him or extorted him. And not that I simply did a little math, one plus one equals two. A crazy man doing these sorts of things to his friends obviously means that something is going on personally. Honestly, this time I'm not even going to suggest anybody should pray for him. I am so deeply troubled by the idea that he is trying to insert me into this narrative pertaining to his divorce. I'm frankly angry about this. So I'm going to hope that he does the right thing, okay? That he does another one of his live feeds on the exact same platform via the exact same medium and offers me an apology and takes back every single word that he says. I'm enjoying this so much. It is all so goddamn delicious. Listen, Candice, I think you should do it. I think you should definitely sue him for defamation and Steven, make sure that you also take legal action against her immediately and let's make sure that we all harden our stances further and involve the legal system so as to make it as ugly as possible. I want them both to lose. I want them both to fight as much as possible. I just, I love watching all of this. I'm here for the ride. Now it's difficult to know whose side grifters in their orbit are going to be on but based on one preliminary response from a stinky motherfucker on the right it seems as if they're siding with Steven Crowder because the courtroom defended Crowder on Twitter and he took a thinly veiled shot at Candice Owens, writing, it's absolutely disgusting that people on the right would use Steven Crowder's divorce as leverage against him to use it against him to embarrass him. Divorce happens. It doesn't even sound like it was his choice. You expect it from the left but totally shameful from the right. Yes, because we all know that the left is known for using people's divorces against them. It's just, it's so good. Lines are being drawn and if you're on the right, you've got to pick a side. I'm sorry, I don't make the rules, they do. Now look, I want to make it very clear that I don't care about either one of these individuals or anyone involved. The optimal outcome for me and really for American democracy to be clear would be for each of them to inflict the maximum amount of damage on each other so they both hemorrhage as much money and support as they possibly can while dividing their conservative fan bases in the process. That's honestly what I want to see and considering the amount of rot that they've inflicted on the brains of Americans with their propaganda, I don't feel bad saying that. I don't feel as if I'm being overly petty. These are bad people we're talking about here and the hate that they've spread towards marginalized people, the LGBTQ plus community like I don't find it wrong to relish in their misery currently, including Steven Crowder's personal misery.  His phone number was leaked, he was harassed for years. So the fact that Steven Crowder's divorce has caused him great pain is just a small taste of the misery that he's inflicted on other people. So I've got no sympathy for him and I'd say that I hope this suffering will lead to his enlightenment because oftentimes there's this trope that when you suffer through something you'll come out stronger and have more wisdom but this individual is not an honest actor, right? It's not like he's going to be enlightened and this experience is going to get him to understand the impact that he has on the world. We're talking about somebody who has paid millions of dollars to lie for a living. So we all know that none of this is going to change him for the better. So I can't feel any sympathy for him. When a normal person goes through an experience like this they grow, they change, they learn more about themselves and their partner. Steven Crowder is incapable of introspection so I don't expect him to be a better person at the opposite end of this.  He's jealous, he's envious of queer people which is probably why he lashes out against them so much and furthermore I've just got to point out that in 2015 he wrote this sanctimonious article for Fox News suggesting that his marriage was oh so special because him and his wife decided to not live together and didn't have sex until marriage and he wrote, let me preface this column by saying this my wife, I have to get used to saying that and I not only waited sexually in every way no we didn't pull the bill Clinton and technically avoid sex sex but we didn't shack up as livens and most importantly we courted each other in a way that was consistent with our publicly professed values. We did it right, feeling judged, I couldn't care less. You know why? Because my wife and I were judged all throughout our relationship. People laughed, scoffed and poked fun at the young celibate naive Christian couple. Yeah, not so smug now, are we Steven Crowder?  So by them responding I'm sure he's saying, oh well I felt judged but really I know people like this, right? I grew up in evangelical circles these folks made it seem as if their relationships were better than everyone else's relationships because they did it the right way, God's way but it turns out that that doesn't actually matter and yeah, you were the judgmental prick and now you kind of have to eat crow and now you've kind of been proven wrong.  I'm gonna come to the castle.


Educators like Rick Erickson deserve our utmost gratitude for all that they do every day to help their students learn. Every year we honor public school educators for instructional excellence, advocacy for the profession, and attention to diversity with the NEA Foundation Award for Teaching Excellence. Listen to what Rick has to say about his experience, learn how students benefit, and prepare to be inspired. When my state affiliate president informed me that I was being nominated for the NEA Foundation Award for Teaching Excellence, I was very excited and very honored. The opportunity to fill out the application form and to go through the interview process gave me a great opportunity to reflect on my 30-year teaching career, and that was very exciting. It also was very exciting to know that I was representing a lot of my colleagues and very excellent teachers across the country. We stand on the shoulders of giants. We really have a lot of people to thank for helping to develop who we are and maybe more than anybody, our students. I mean our students have really shaped who we are as teachers and developed us over our careers. It's important for our students to learn about their own culture, but it's also important for our students to learn about other cultures. It's a very important aspect of education and the NEA Foundation Award for Teaching Excellence along with the Global Learning Fellowship provides that opportunity, not only for the teachers, but then for us also to bring it back to the students to learn about other cultures. Bringing students to another culture, bringing students to Siberia for some students who have never been out of the state of Wisconsin and to travel across the world and to go to a place like Siberia and to watch them learn, to watch them experience what's out there is just an amazing feeling. I mean I love the camaraderie also. I love my teaching colleagues. They're great people. It's just a very important job. Public education is crucial to our society. It's a pillar of our society and it has to remain strong. And the NEA Foundation has an opportunity through these awards to recognize that commitment to public education and a commitment to public school teachers. Every NEA state affiliate has until May 1st to nominate a public school educated for this prestigious national award. All awardees are invited to join the NEA Foundation Global Learning Fellowship. This 10-month professional development opportunity provides educators with the knowledge and skills to prepare their students to thrive in our flat world. Find out more information about the awards, the fellowship and the NEA Foundation at NEAFoundation.org.


Hi, this is Sean Brotherson, Extension Family Life Specialist with NDSU Extension. This is the third in a series of short videos on the topic of understanding and managing key stresses in farming and ranching. Thank you for your interest in this topic and how it might be of relevance in your life and work. The main objectives of our discussion on this topic are to explore the use of coping strategies in managing stress and to identify four key coping priorities that can assist you in managing stress in farming and ranching. Every farmer or ranch operator wants to do a good job in managing the farm or ranch operation. We might use assessments like hours worked, acres planted, or bushels per acre as a gauge of our success in managing the farm operation. However, it's critical to remember that the most important asset on any farm or ranch operation is the health of yourself or others involved in the operation. This is because a person's health allows him or her to function every day, make decisions, and do the management of the farm or ranch operation. Stresses on the farm can negatively affect physical or mental health, so good stress management should be the highest priority in managing your operation. You want to protect and maintain your most important asset on the farm operation, your health. Good management of your farm or ranch operation begins with good stress management and prioritizing your health. Let's explore the tools in your coping strategies toolbox and four key coping priorities to focus on in managing farm and ranch stress. Most farmers and ranchers have a toolbox available with a variety of tools to help them in handling different tasks on the farm or ranch operation. What's the question? What's in your toolbox when it comes to managing stress? We often recognize that sometimes we don't have the tool that would be most useful in our current toolbox, so we may need help in getting it from someone else or learn how to use a new tool that works better in solving a problem than other tools. A helpful quote says, tools are designed to do very different jobs. Find the right coping strategy or tool to fit the situation and remember to change strategies or tools if the one you're using isn't working. When the task is managing stress on the farm, you also need a variety of useful tools for handling the tasks of dealing with such things as physical fatigue, low mood or strained relationships. Think about the tools you're using to manage stress. What are you doing? Is the tool or approach you are using have a helpful effect or a harmful effect? We all use different tools to handle stress when it comes our way, but there are some common coping methods that are less effective tools or approaches to dealing with the concerns of stress. If one way a person handles stress is to overeat or self-medicate with alcohol or cigarettes, these are tools or strategies, but they are less effective options that could be replaced by a more effective option such as daily exercise. Other less effective tools we sometimes use in managing stress include eating too much or eating unhealthy foods, drinking alcohol to excess or using drugs, ignoring our financial situation or pushing it off to another time, talking negatively about others or blaming someone else for our difficulties, avoiding others withdrawing from spots in the community like the coffee shop, elevator, gas station, cafe or church. You may be able to think of other approaches that are less effective in handling stress and you want to reduce usage of those tools. Finding more effective tools to use in managing stress is an important priority in farm management. Ask the question, what helps you to relax or feel better in a positive way? Some useful tools to handle stress when it comes along that are more effective include getting some regular or daily exercise, 15 to 20 minutes, even 5 minutes of walking, stretching or other exercise is very effective in relieving stress and improving how you feel. Go for a drive or get out in nature and observe for a few minutes. Call a friend and get together for breakfast, lunch or just a visit over coffee. Watch a funny movie in the evening and laugh, which is a great stress reliever. Identifying other positive strategies that work for you is important in learning to manage stress effectively. Among the tools available to you, I now want to emphasize four key coping priorities that can help you to more effectively manage stress and focus on wellness. Among coping priorities, a few should receive emphasis. These will enable the individual farmer or rancher to cope better through time. The first coping priority is to rest and renew one's own well-being. As an example, a quote reminds us that sustainable farming includes sustaining the farmer. A few key points to consider. You can't care well for your farmer family if you don't care for yourself. Self-care involves attention to your stress levels, engaging in activities such as consuming a healthy diet, getting enough sleep and exercise, and giving yourself time to renew your energy. Next, explore sources of personal renewal that you value and help you to feed your spirit. Examples might include walking or hiking outside in nature, engaging in faith practices or mindfulness, spending time on a hobby that interests you or catching some laughter through watching a funny movie. Next, build in personal time-outs or rest breaks on a daily and weekly basis. For example, the Thrive with Five initiative encourages people to take five-minute breaks during the day and reset their focus or energy. On a weekly basis, set aside time for breaks to spend time with family or connect with sources of support. Finally, connect with others in your life who can lend strength and support to you. This might include family members, friends, spiritual leaders, or community professionals. A second coping priority is to focus on open, continuing, and healthy communication. If you're feeling stress, simply bottling it up inside and not finding ways to process it can lead to emotional frustration and difficulties in communicating with others or making decisions. Healthy and regular communication with others helps to short-circuit that cycle and helps the individual maintain a healthy pattern. A few key points to consider. First, be willing to share your stresses or concerns with others. One of the largest obstacles to healthy communication is being unwilling to share with others due to feelings of pride, stubbornness, or inadequacy. Seek to open yourself up to talking with others. Next, the process of talking or sharing with others helps a person explore ideas, see different perspectives, relieve stress, and make better decisions. Identify others who understand your situation or who you feel able to trust and seek to talk and share with them. Listen to one another as part of the communication process. This may include listening to a spouse, parent, child, sibling, business partner, employee, counselor, or others who can share ideas and support. Finally, avoid anger or withdrawal as a primary mode of communication. These types of communication typically increase stress rather than help you cope with it. A third coping priority is to focus on relationships that are important to you and can help sustain you, particularly family relationships. Many and other relationships that are positive and healthy provide a large source of support, but they may become a drain if they're not maintained. A few key points to consider. Reassure family members and others you care about of your love and commitment. Stress on the farm can include long hours and limited family time, so sending messages of reassurance takes on greater importance. If conflicts with family members or others arise during times of stress, take time to work through any concerns and resolve stresses in the relationship. Conflicts that are unresolved can become a continuing source of added stress. Also follow consistent family routines that give security, such as family meals together or a daily cup of morning coffee with a spouse. Next, think of taking time away together as a couple or a family, adjusting for what is possible according to the circumstances in your farming or ranching operation. Taking away from immediate daily stresses can be very helpful to reflect on things with other family members, take some renewal time and return with new ideas or perspectives. Relationships can be a buffer to stress and be a resource to help you bounce back when things feel challenging. Giving attention to the relationships around you, whether with family members or farming partners is important because healthy relationships are a key coping resource. A final coping priority is to connect with resources that give you the tools needed to manage concerns. Just as you would connect with a neighbor to access a piece of equipment to help on your operation, you should seek to connect with informal or formal resources that help in managing stress or provide support. Again, remember that your health is your most important asset as a farmer or rancher and that a key to your health is stress management. A variety of organizations furnish useful resources to assist those in farming or ranching to manage stress. The most important thing to do when dealing with stress is to just get checked, especially to access resources that can assist with your health and stress management. If you as an individual feel a need to access physical or mental health supports or services, or if you feel concerned about an individual that you know who is under stress and may have difficulty coping, connect with or refer someone to a local health care provider. Most rural communities have access to a health care provider and health care providers typically deal with a wide range of health issues, whether physical or mental or emotional health, and can help you take next steps in attending to your health. Sources you may connect with or refer to include a counselor, clergy member, medical professional, social worker or local law enforcement. There are a variety of other useful resources available to assist with health and stress management. If you as an individual feel a need to access mental health supports or services, or if a person feels concerned about an individual that he or she knows who is under stress and may have difficulty coping or has suicidal feelings, the resources listed here provide a starting point for information in North Dakota and the Upper Midwest. To begin with, you can call the 211 helpline number 24 hours a day, which is staffed by individuals and counselors who can provide information, services, referrals or crisis counseling. Additionally, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is available at any time by calling 1-800-273-TALK or 1-800-273-8255. Please don't hesitate to call on your own behalf or on behalf of someone you know or are concerned about. Remember, your health and the health of others needs to be your first priority. The NDSU Extension Farm Stress Website also has a wealth of resources on farm stress that you can access, and it can be accessed at www.ag.ndsu.edu backslash farm ranch stress. This concludes video number three in the series, Understanding and Managing Stresses in Farming and Ranching. Thank you for viewing this resource. We encourage you to seek out further understanding on farm and ranch stress by viewing the other short educational videos in this series. These and other educational resources can be accessed on the NDSU Extension YouTube channel or on the NDSU Farm Stress Website. This educational resource has been supported and brought to you by the North Dakota Slaving Council and NDSU Extension, extending knowledge, changing lives.