Serving Your Community. Serving Your Neighbors. Growing as a Human.
Jessica knows the local impact of service. She embodies community service. She worked as a set decorator on numerous feature films before beginning an academic career teaching art history and working on NEH funded grants for K-12 teachers. She is an active volunteer in her community, taking a leading role at a local food pantry during COVID, for which she won a community service award in 2021. She is also a founding volunteer for Allies of our Afghan Allies, an organization helping to settle refugees in Cape Ann, Massachusetts, where she lives.
Here is her story:
Service builds character. For ten years, I taught at a large public university, where I worked with a diverse group of students, immigrants, first-generation college students, older students resuming their studies, and military vets. All with complex and compelling stories quite different from my own. My students taught me to slow down and listen, to ask more questions, and to be flexible in my expectations and approach. As I learned about the challenges they faced, I recognized their resilience and creativity, and in turn, I grew through serving them.
Following my retirement, I began volunteering at our local food pantry, The Open Door, where, during the pandemic, they had pivoted from in-person shopping to curbside pick-up. I witnessed how a small organization with exemplary leadership harnessed the power of community for the greater good. Yet problems remained.
Chiefly, how could we distribute random donations to the folks who wanted them? Organizational problem-solving is what I do. Empowered by my supervisor, and with a clear objective, we created an online system to distribute not just peanut butter and pasta, but hot sauce and brownie mix to the people.
This helped me understand how much character, competence, and accountability matter. It made it clear that principled leadership is what I want from our government, not corruption, self-dealing, and cynical manipulation.
In August 2021, I watched with anger and frustration as Kabul fell. Determined to help our abandoned Afghan allies but having no idea how, I joined a Zoom meeting with a group of local religious leaders and Neesha Suarez, one of Congressman Seth Moulton’s staff. Together, we formed an organization, Allies of our Afghan Allies, to sponsor and settle refugees in Cape Ann, Massachusetts. Leveraging my experience as a set decorator, I volunteered to coordinate in-kind donations and set up apartments for arriving Afghans.
It is humbling to work with refugees who have lost everything. We still have not been able to reunite one of our Afghan refugees with his family. They remain under threat in Kabul. The door has only closed tighter since January 2025, a result of bad and broken policy by morally bankrupt politicians who have chosen to turn their backs on individuals who helped keep Americans safe at tremendous risk to themselves and their families.
Elections do have consequences. The character and integrity of those we entrust with power, with our votes, with our lives, matters deeply.
