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Equal Pay Advocate And Former President of Planned Parenthood On The Mentor She Didn't Know She Had

This article is more than 6 years old.

Photo courtesy of Laura Dominguez

This month in honor of National Mentor Month, we're sharing the stories of women who are creating new models of mentorship. Like the fast, fluid world we live in, mentorship today takes many shapes and sizes. Increasingly it is more about experience than it is about age. It’s about wisdom exchange with the goal of helping more women own their power and take their rightful place in the world. Gloria Feldt, cofounder of Take The Lead, an organization dedicated to achieving gender parity in leadership and pay by 2025  shared her story of a silent mentor who set her career in motion. 

Mentee: Gloria Feldt, cofounder of Take The Lead, author of No Excuses: 9 Ways Women Can Change How We Think About Power, and former president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Federation of America

Mentor: Mildred Chaffin, Head Start

The oil patch of Odessa TX is not the garden spot of the world, not the place where you’d expect progressive programs to even exist. The woman who started the Head Start program there in the late 1960s was not your typical manager. She was a journalist. She was crabby and crusty. A lot of people couldn't get along with her. Her name was Mildred Chaffin. She was my boss in my first full-time job, and she was my mentor though I didn’t realize it at the time.

She kept asking me to take on roles that I never would have raised my hand for. One of the projects was to develop a parent-child interaction program and create a report to present to people at our national leadership level. I'm happy to say that the program I developed is still at the heart of what Head Start does now – working with parents, not just children, to help the students grow and develop.

After five years of teaching at Head Start, the University of Texas opened a branch in Odessa and I left Head Start to go finish my degree there. I didn’t see Mildred for about a year. Then one day, someone told me that she was in the hospital with terminal breast cancer. I went to see her in the hospital. As I was leaving, she handed me an envelope. I didn't look at it at the time and just took it home with me. When I got home, I opened the envelope and found a letter of recommendation. To think that someone who knew she was terminally ill took the time to write letters of recommendation for people who had worked for her just boggled my mind. I started crying right then and there. It was so touching.

I put it aside. I was still finishing my last coursework, planning to do student teaching in the fall, and serendipitously, I was asked to apply for an executive director position at a small, relatively new Planned Parenthood affiliate in West Texas. I thought to myself, “Well, I'm eminently unqualified. I am in no danger of being hired, but I've never had a formal job interview before. It will be a very good experience to actually put together a resume and go through the process. I’ll learn something from it.”

I sent in the resume. They called me in for an interview. They called me for a second interview and they asked for references. The only real job I ever had of any significance was that job teaching at Head Start. I gave them the letter of recommendation from Mildred. Much to my surprise, they offered me that job. And 30 years later, I retired as the National President of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

In your life, you never know when you take just a little time—maybe five minutes, maybe 30 minutes—to do one thing for another person, how it may impact her entire life. I love to tell that story in honor of Mildred and to encourage others. I would have never considered Mildred a mentor. I would have never thought of her in that way, but clearly, that’s what she was doing intentionally.

I’m sure she wrote recommendation letters like that for other people, as well. Who knows what has happened to all of us as a result of Mildred taking the time to do that?