It's Off to Work We Go—Baby in Tow!

By Annie Feighery
Issue 128, January - February 2005

The nonprofit sector of the American economy was largely created and designed by women, and it continues to provide many women more family-friendly working arrangements that ease their struggles in balancing family life, financial needs, and career ambitions.

My introduction to the unique benefits nonprofits can offer mothers came a few years ago, when, after months of toggling childcare with my spouse, I began to look for a position with a higher salary and/or fewer hours than my museum position offered. I found a nonprofit group in my neighborhood with an intercultural focus similar to my interests as an anthropologist and writer. In my efforts to present myself as a capable, stable employee, I explained in my interview that I was a new mother, but that I would have full-time childcare for my five-month-old son. The director scoffed at the notion of putting such a young child in a program. She had founded the organization with a baby on her hip, and there was no reason I shouldn’t work with my baby on mine.

Remembering how young and malleable I was in those first months of motherhood, I feel eternally grateful for that wise advice. It helped set me on a career path that would forever include my children rather than separate me from them. Later, when I found out that the organization could not pay me at the level I needed, this detail was easily offset by the $11,000 I would not be spending on inner-city childcare each year.

The women who founded that organization, Multicultural Education and Counseling through the Arts (MECA), were Latina mothers who worked for their communities through
the church but had no paid positions. They served in this way largely because their cultural tradition so highly valued service to the community, and because 1960s and ’70s America—still trying to absorb into the workforce veterans returning from the war in Vietnam—offered few opportunities for women to have a paid career. In the 1970s, the US government opened up grants for community service organizations that sparked a wildfire of nonprofit organizations, largely run by women. In MECA’s case, a committee of an inner-city Catholic church had become so unified in its mission to educate children in their cultural traditions while providing after-school and summer programming that, with the new government funding, it became an autonomous organization. Its founders had always done their volunteering with their children at their side, and this didn’t change in the transition. The first paid careers for mothers working with their children beside them were created with the birth of the nonprofit movement.

The first obstacle I encountered as a professional working with my baby was my low self-esteem. I had to remind myself that women have always worked with their children, that only the industrial age had separated the family, and that I was made to multitask by thousands of years of evolutionary design. In her book Mother Nature, socioanthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy postulates that the baby sling was the most important tool in the advancement of our species—it put women in the workforce, doubling the number of adult hands gathering food and giving humans a competitive advantage that made possible their journeys beyond the continent of Africa. Inspired by my ancestors, I donned my baby sling and went to work.

My first days were filled with blushing moments of milk leaking through my shirt and feigned confidence as I wore my baby to meetings. But those days were also a gradual awakening. My motherhood was celebrated and recognized at MECA in a way that had been, until then, utterly foreign to me. I began to feel a part of a respected circle of women.

I was a mother.

Since the 1970s, nonprofits have changed quite a bit.

Today, service organizations often follow business practices established by for-profit capitalist businesses and corporations. While this more professional style has no doubt increased private donations, it reflects a great loss in the tradition of service. Furthermore, it removes the main outlet a woman had to contribute to her community and earn money to support her family while remaining connected to her children. Particularly because allowing women to work with their children supports the family unit, and allows cash-strapped agencies to attract workers at lower pay, I encourage the nonprofit culture to return to this fading legacy. The success of this arrangement depends on the temperaments of parents and children as well as the flexibility
of employers, but if all ingredients are present, the arrangement is a winning one for everyone. Aside from the financial benefits, working with your young ones offers them vastly different experiences that stimulate brain development and prepare them for a lifetime of exposure to people of different backgrounds. Employers who can offer such community-oriented support benefit from dedicated, appreciative employees and their own participation in a progressive, family-centered model.