Smith Club of San Francisco
and Marin
Alumnae Profiles
Gladys Stevens Thatcher '50
Fall 2001
Profile by Sarah Cross Mills '66
Part I
Dressed in quiet beige and moving with calm purposefulness, Gladys Thatcher strode into the room for our first meeting. Only one who possesses genuine humility about her own invaluable gifts to the Bay Area could so captivate me as she shared her personal story. A vein of gold runs through San Francisco, and it begins in Gladys. The thousands who have already tapped into this vein may never know her name, but they will know that their lives have been burnished.
Gladys has created the vision, planted the seed and nurtured the young life of five major non-profit community organizations since 1969. Each of them today is in midlife - secure, stable and successful. As a young girl, alone for long periods in the beauty of the Northeast countryside, Gladys developed a strong interior life of introspection, questioning everyday life and seeking beyond it for deeper meaning. The freedom she experienced and her love of nature fed her early growth and her creative expression in painting.
Gladys' life seems to have been guided by her artist’s sensibilities. With keen observation, what she saw and felt found expression in her art and writings in her early years, and in community organizations in more recent times. Listening acutely, giving full attention to what she has heard -- sometimes even the most casual of comments -- has often yielded treasured guidance for Gladys. In 1969, Gladys earned a Master’s degree in educational counseling from San Francisco State, while still raising her four children. This event reflected an earlier decision to begin a new path, after painting and studying art during her early years as a wife and mother.
Now Gladys stood on the threshold of the world of community service and philanthropy, a world into which her immense energies and deep passions have flowed for more than 30 years.
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Part II - The Move to San Francisco
A philosophy major at Smith, Gladys spent her junior year in Paris, studying French art and history, and traveling afterwards in Italy. In the middle of her senior year, she became engaged to Jim Thatcher, a Yale Law student whom she had met at Lake Tahoe the summer she was seventeen. They married shortly after her Smith commencement and moved to New York City where they began their family. They moved to San Francisco when Jim was invited to join his father’s law firm upon his father’s retirement. Initially reluctant to leave New York where she was enjoying her painting and their first child, Gladys soon enrolled in the California School of Fine Arts.
In the environment of 1950’s San Francisco, with its beat poets, interest in Eastern religions, and fascination with abstract expressionism in art, Gladys found more freedom in her own painting. By the early 60’s, she began to get involved in community work, serving on the board of a halfway house for young adults who had been hospitalized with mental or emotional problems. Through this role and parenting four young children, her interests in human behavior and, in particular, the psychological concerns of young people grew stronger, and she decided to act on the guidance of a colleague who suggested she pursue these interests in a master’s program.
In 1966, she began a part-time program in educational counseling at San Francisco State. Her oldest child was thirteen, her youngest four. From this point forward, Gladys’ life has been a stand for change, for children and young adults, for women and for older adults. Gladys has always tuned her ear and cast her eye on barren soil in the social heartland and found deep fulfillment, as she says, in “plowing back into the next generation.”
A method or pattern appears in Gladys' creation of community non-profits, which reflects her ultimate faith in the inherent good will of humans. Using her artist’s eye, she identifies a critical need, asks a key question, then arrives at a creative response -- a vision. Gladys sees her role as the vision-keeper and the midwife to others’ creative expression in each of the major organizations she has founded. Remarkably, none of these concerns has fallen victim to what is known widely as “founder’s syndrome.” In the world of non-profits, an individual with a passionate vision gathers a supportive board, but is often stronger than the board, and does not succeed in institutionalizing the organization so that it can live on its own after the initiator leaves. Gladys' vision has always included both nurturing the organization’s workers and providing meaningful programs for those whom the organization serves.
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Part III -- Founding Enterprise for High School Students & lifeprint
With Enterprise for High School Students, which she founded in 1969, Gladys first discovered this template for creating and maintaining a successful community non-profit. Working in educational counseling, she saw teenagers acting out in non-productive ways, and asked herself, “What if these kids were engaged in constructive work, mentored by adults, and could see their identities forming through the positive application of new skills?”
Gathering friends in her living room, Gladys sought the help of other women to manifest a vision, and found that safety and strength came from joining with others who had similar goals.
Gladys describes it best: “A successful organization provides a nurturing garden for seeds to grow naturally.”
Enterprise today involves 2,200 students a year in work apprenticeships, providing skill development, career exploration, work readiness workshops, and a job referral network.
A few years later, when Gladys' living room could not expand along with Enterprise, the group secured foundation support, hired a director and moved out. In 1974, while serving on the Smith Alumnae Association Board, Gladys asked herself another key question: “How could the local Smith Club be strengthened by involving alumnae in a program that would directly benefit them?” What seemed to be missing for most women in the work world were the benefits of networking, long taken for granted by men. Again in her living room, a steering committee was formed, reference books gathered, and Smith Resources was born.
Today, Alumnae Resources, recently renamed lifeprint (www.lifeprint.org), has 3,000 individual members, 200,000 client visits a year, and involves 100 companies. It offers a full range of career development and other life enhancement programs and is nationally recognized in the field of career management.
In 1979, San Francisco’s public schools were suffering the fallout of Proposition 13. Glady was asked to help write a proposal addressing the question, “Can corporations, foundations and individuals provide financial resources and enrichment to help meet the schools’ needs?” As a result of the proposal, Gladys became the founding Executive Director of the San Francisco Education Fund, a position she held until 1990. One of the nation’s first education funds, it forged a new link between community capital and classrooms, unique in its ability to operate with the trust of the school bureaucracy. To date, the Fund has channeled $16 million into San Francisco’s public schools, encouraging teacher innovation, increasing the range of educational opportunities available to students, and promoting parent and community support for public education. Before long, Gladys saw the need for networking among other education funds that were sprouting throughout California, so she founded the California Consortium of Education Foundations and presided over this organization until 1990. This Consortium now supports over 400 education foundations in the state, promoting collaboration and sharing among foundations and with other community-based organizations.
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Part IV - Founding LifePlan Center
In August 1989, the year before she was to leave the San Francisco Education Fund and the California Consortium, the bounty of the natural world spoke to her again. From a mountain summit, toward the end of an eight-day Sierra backpack trip, Gladys absorbed a landscape with a message:
“There is an end to the path, but it’s on a distant horizon. Careful steps will take you along the route of your deepest values, and you can travel with anticipation of discovering what lies along this path.”
Gladys was ready to refocus her own life, and again she asked herself a question: “What are others’ needs for life fulfillment when they are making the transition from fully-committed work to the years that remain?”
With its own foundation support and Alumnae Resources serving as fiscal agent, LifePlan Center began in 1992, Gladys serving again as Executive Director. The model for LifePlan was similar to Alumnae Resources’, but the issues were quite different: focused on supporting men and women in finding meaning in later life. LifePlan Center was recently joined with Alumnae Resources under the name lifeprint.
Today, Gladys views her role as a mentor to younger people, encouraging them to use their passions to reveal their true selves and to risk stepping beyond to create something entirely new. A statement that might sum up the approach to her life and work is that “the most compassionate act you can do for anyone is to stand by the truth of your own life and live it as fully and passionately as you are able.“
Asked what’s most important to her now, Gladys' quick and heartfelt response was, “Love. Love other people. Love what I do.” Only someone who has honed the focus of her life and mined her vein of gold for its nuggets can voice her life’s meaning with such clarity and simplicity. “The task of later life is to be filled by doing less,“ she says. Gladys believes there is deep nourishment in leaving behind the urgency to be productive.
Awarded the Smith College Medal in 1992 and honored by more than a dozen other local and national awards, Gladys has built a legacy far larger than her living room. The next generation faces a far more positive present because of Gladys Thacher’s immeasurable gifts.
NOTE: This article is an excerpt of a much longer profile on Gladys Thatcher. For a copy of the full-length article, please contact Jennifer Foster ‘89 via e-mail at jennfoster99@hotmail.com.
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