Leading and Learning Spotlight on Arden O’Donnell, community activist in Houston and Africa by Marcia Chamberlain

The year after I graduated from college, I moved to Argentina for 18 months to collaborate with a group of women who were organizing themselves to meet the needs of their impoverished community. The experience radically changed me.

This week I got the chance to re-live some of those experiences when I talked by phone with community activist Arden O’Donnell, who is living and working with AIDS orphans in Zimbabwe.

O’Donnell is one of the first graduates of the Leading and Learning Project sponsored by the Greater Houston’s GLBT Chamber of Commerce. The primary purpose of the Leading and Learning seminar series is to nurture the skills needed to be a dynamic and effective community leader. In 1999-2000 O’Donnell was chosen as one of the chamber’s pilot participants. With a small group of colleagues, she had the opportunity to take seminars that covered a wide range of topics, including leadership development, diversity issues, advocacy and activism, and fund-raising strategies.

After successfully completing the project, O’Donnell left Houston and enrolled in a graduate program at Boston University. While earning her M.A. in public health, she opted this past January to put some of her Houston training to the test by accepting a six-month grassroots community-based residency in Zimbabwe. Stationed to work in a poor rural area 45 minutes outside of Harare, Zimbabwe’s capital, O’Donnell quickly discovered that she would have to utilize all the skills that she had learned in her studies.

For example, O’Donnell wryly notes that the Leading and Learning workshop on "how to be effective in a sensitive situation" helped prepare her mentally to survive as a lesbian in a country where the president has been quoted as saying that homosexuals are worse than pigs. During her first few months in Zimbabwe, O’Donnell organized a sponsorship program to raise money for the children she works with through the Tsungirirai agency. O’Donnell’s role is to assist the agency in its mission to provide home-based care as well as education, counseling, and assessment. The agency staff goes into the shantytowns to deliver a variety of direct services to people affected by HIV, especially children whose parents have died.

Gilbert is one of these children. His father is dead, and his mother may not survive to the end of the month. Gilbert lives in a sheet-metal shack without electricity, without running water, without beds, without food. O’Donnell teams up with local activists from the agency to try to decide how best to meet Gilbert’s needs with the limited resources available to them. Like so many others that they see every day, Gilbert’s situation is dire.

And yet even as her heart is breaking, O’Donnell says that she remains hopeful. During the day she does what she can to improve the lives of her clients, including distributing food and clothes. She sees the difference that a big smile, a simple word in Shona, and a little Neosporin can make. At night she tries not to let the day’s problems overwhelm her.

O’Donnell thanks her Leading and Learning teammates Coy Tow, Anita Renteria, John Michael Gonzalez, Terrance O’Neil, and Robyn Maguire for providing tremendous personal support, and credits Houston’s GLBT Chamber of Commerce for being "priceless in helping me to develop the confidence and leadership I needed to be able to work in Zimbabwe."

Arden O’Donnell’s challenging tenure in Zimbabwe will end this June. Afterward, she will return to Boston to finish her degree in public health. In the meantime, she admits that life in a village without white chocolate mochas and instant e-mail continues to stretch her. I can tell from talking with O’Donnell, though, that the rewards have been worth it.

If you would like to support the agency where community activist Arden O’Donnell currently works, please send donations, marked Orphan Program, to Tsungirirai, P.O. Box 107, Norton, Zimbabwe. If you’d like a more in-depth window into O’Donnell’s work in Zimbabwe, she has written a series of interesting and inspiring letters home which you can read at the OutSmart webpage at www.outsmartmagazine.com.

The chamber states that the idea of their Leading and Learning series "is to have members from all walks of life within the GLBT community come together to learn and grow, and perhaps build a coalition of cooperation among the leaders of the community." Meeting monthly for eight months, the next L&L series runs September 2001 through May 2002. Series tuition is $200 and scholarships are available through local underwriting. If you are interested in participating, please contact Coy Tow, coordinator and education chair for the chamber, at 713/218-8931 or e-mail jctow@hotmail.com. The deadline for applications is July 15. Graduates of the program, such as Arden O’Donnell, will be happy to tell you about the many ways in which they have used their training, locally, nationally, and internationally.

Marcia Chamberlain teaches creative writing to children in public schools, museums, and community centers. Outside of the classroom, she is working on a documentary film about ice cream trucks.