Local heroes 2012

Most families have traditions surrounding the Thanksgiving holiday. Here at the Chico News & Review we celebrate this time of year by giving thanks for certain local folks. We’ve asked around for nominees, and this year we’ve chosen five individuals whose stories show a generosity of spirit worthy of recognition.

These are people who stand out by doing extraordinary things for their fellows, either locally, or in several cases, on the other side of the world. We thank them for their time and dedication to volunteering, and for making Chico and beyond a better place to live.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Saving lives through donations

Janice Walker

“In 2004, I literally prayed that God would give me something to do to make a difference in the lives of others,” said Janice Walker. Shortly after, Walker inquired about Project S.A.V.E. (Salvage All Valuable Equipment), the local nonprofit that collects used medical and dental equipment and supplies from area hospitals, clinics, organizations and individuals, and ships them around the world to countries in need.

At the time of Walker’s inquiry, Project S.A.V.E.—which was founded in 1996 by local physician and artist Phyllis Cullen—had gone defunct. The Enloe Foundation-sponsored program, however, was merely in need of someone to take the reins and move forward with distributing all of the “bags and bags,” as Walker put it, of medical supplies that had accumulated inside the Project S.A.V.E. office at 229-B West Fifth Ave.

“I had no idea what it involved,” said Walker, who volunteered to become the nonprofit’s director. “What I saw was good, usable medical supplies that needed to be put to good use.”

Since Walker came on board as director in September 2004, Project S.A.V.E. has sent “the equivalent of 98 20-foot sea containers of goods to 40 different countries,” she said. On the long list of recipients of everything from hospital beds and “C-arm” X-ray units, to laryngoscopes and Band-Aids, are the countries of Sri Lanka, Mongolia, Haiti, Guatemala, Papua New Guinea, the Republic of Georgia and the Philippines, and 13 African nations, including Tanzania, where Walker traveled on a humanitarian mission with several other Chicoans in 2009 to personally deliver much-needed medical supplies to village clinics and hospitals that would otherwise have had to do without.

Donations come from a variety of sources, including Enloe Medical Center, Feather River Hospital, Oroville Hospital and BloodSource (“They give us their outdated supplies, such as blood tubings … and 4-by-4 gauze bandages”).

Project S.A.V.E. also donates items such as wheelchairs and bedside commodes to needy local people through Butte Home Health & Hospice and Enloe HomeCare & Hospice, as well as in response to phone calls from private individuals: “If somebody needs something, all they have to do is call the office.”

Walker’s voice becomes emotional when she speaks of the lives that she has been told have been saved because of Project S.A.V.E., such as that of one particular little girl in Papua New Guinea whose doctor said she would have bled to death if not for the sutures provided by the Chico nonprofit: “Your heart just melts when you know you have sent something that saves the life of an individual.”

“The project works with all volunteer staffing, including the many workers who come in on Saturday mornings to load these giant containers for shipment,” noted Leslie Johnson, the local attorney and co-founder of the local ACLU chapter who nominated Walker. “The equipment and supplies are all donated, and many of these items would have ended up in a Dumpster if not rescued and passed along to Project S.A.V.E.

“Project S.A.V.E. freely collaborates with many other organizations, often making their equipment and supplies available at no charge to other nonprofits willing to raise the funds to ship them to another country.

“Janice Walker is a true Chico hero.”

Aiding African families

Alfred Koala

Chico’s Alfred Koala is doing his best to save the lives of dozens of the world’s poorest people.

He is the founder of the nonprofit Feeding Nations Through Education (FNTE), which gives aid and teaches sustainable-living practices to the starving citizens of one of the most destitute nations on earth: West Africa’s Burkina Faso.

In 2007 Koala, an impoverished native of that country’s village of Thyou, scraped up enough money to fly to New York to enroll at Chico State. Knowing almost no English or geography, he first asked people at the airport for a taxi to Chico.

After learning how much that would cost, he took a bus.

His father died soon after his arrival, which prompted his dedication to help his fellow countrymen, who were dying of AIDS, disease and starvation. The 32-year-old, who recently graduated from Chico State with a degree in business administration, devised a revolutionary plan designed to help those in need to help themselves in perpetuity.

About once a year his group awards five starving Burkina Faso families a “life-care package”: two oxen with a plow and enough rice to get the family through the year to the three-month rainy growing season. They also get access to a veterinarian for the oxen and training in growing crops, which previously had been planted by hand using crude, foot-long sticks.

Families in Burkino Faso average 12 members each and suffer, on average, one or two deaths annually from starvation or sickness. Since Koala implemented his plan in 2009, only one member of the 10 awarded families has died: his own brother, who succumbed to complications from HIV.

One of the beauties of Koala’s program is that each family must invest the profits from its excess crops every three years into sending another of its children to school.

“Our plan has worked beyond expectations, with each family sending their first child to school after only two years,” Koala beamed. “They all have food, the kids are healthier, and none of them are starving.”

Since many of the villagers were also dying from drinking out of the contaminated, hand-dug well or polluted river, Koala brought a Chico delegation there in 2011 and built a sturdy, cement well and trained the locals in its upkeep and maintenance. He also brought 1,300 pairs of glasses, and his Sacramento optometrist, Dr. Larry Morse, taught the villagers self-eyecare.

In keeping with his main focus of “education as gold,” this year Koala purchased 50 acres to build a school for the village’s seventh- to 12th-graders, their first ever. In December he will award a third set of five families their life-care packages. He plans on expanding FNTE to the rest of his native country, as well as to the impoverished neighboring countries of Niger, Mali and Chad.

Koala has earned many awards and academic honors, including the Chico Mayor’s Award and Chico State’s President’s Advisory Board Award for outstanding community service. Throughout it all Koala remains grateful and inspired.

“I am very thankful and love the Chico community with all my heart,” he said. “Let’s get together and change the world.”

Anything for art

Thomasin Saxe

Like most of the people we highlight in this Local Heroes issue, Thomasin Saxe shies away from the spotlight. In fact, one of the first things the longtime Chico arts supporter said upon sitting down for a conversation is that we should instead highlight another local arts maven, Christine “Sea Monster” Fulton.

“Christine is a doll. I’d rather you wrote about her. Get her before she’s 63,” she said.

With all due respect to Fulton (a busy artist and co-director of MÁNÁS Art Space), she still has a lot of hours to put in before getting to Saxe’s level of service to Chico’s arts community—service that garnered her a Mayor’s Award on Oct. 2 “for her work as a patron, volunteer, and curator.”

Besides, Fulton is the one who nominated Saxe as a local hero! “She’ an absolute Chico treasure,” Fulton gushed.

Since moving to Chico in 1975 to work as a financial-aid adviser (followed by stints in the publishing department and directing special projects for the College of Humanities and Fine Arts) at Chico State, Saxe has been an integral part of some of Chico’s most vital and productive arts organizations: member of the 1078 Gallery since its inception in 1981; board member for the Blue Room Theatre for several years (back when it was called Chico Creek Theatre Festival); and since 2005, she’s also served on the board of the 1078.

Additionally, before she retired from Chico State in 2010, Saxe was, at various times, publisher of the school’s now-defunct Arts & Letters magazine, organizer of the University Film Series and curator for the Humanities Center Gallery (which she started in 1999).

Saxe is a beloved fixture in the local arts scene, one who (despite her modesty) brings her attractive personality and honest warmth and enthusiasm to her interactions—whether she’s sharing ideas about art with patrons and artists or sweating out the details of organizing a function with fellow board members.

“I just love being around it,” she said, adding that she relishes in her role as “a producer and a supporter,” especially when it comes to being around the artists and fun-makers—“all those outrageous people” like Fulton, or even her artist/filmmaker son Jesse Karch (who lives in New York City)—who are motivated to create and perform for the sake of the art, not money.

“I’m just drawn to the purity.”

The bulk of Saxe’s donated time these days is to the 1078 Gallery. In addition to sitting on the board since 2005 (when she was asked to help write a grant that ended up saving the gallery from folding), Saxe is currently the exhibitions committee chairwoman as well a member of the gallery’s film, finance and site committees.

Since joining, Saxe and her fellow board members have accomplished a lot—moving the gallery to its beautiful new building and establishing it as a hub for all forms of original artistic expression (music, theater, literature, film, in addition to the visual arts). This year the 1078 celebrated its 31st anniversary.

“That’s a pretty long run for a nonprofit,” Saxe said. “Mostly on the shoulders of volunteers all this time.”

A life in song

Gwen Curatilo

Gwen Curatilo will be 80 years old on her next birthday, Pearl Harbor Day, but if she’s slowing down any it’s hard to tell. She’s a woman of boundless enthusiasm—for opera and singing, which she taught at Chico State for 23 years; for art, which fills every available space in her Durham home; and for people, with whom she remains deeply engaged as a teacher, hospice volunteer and arts supporter—and she fills her days with joyful activity.

She began her career as a featured soprano with the San Francisco Opera Company, playing key roles in major operas (Madama Butterfly, La Bohème) and touring the world as a performer. But then she married and, eager to raise a family with her husband, Joe, turned her back on stage fame and took a teaching job at Chico State, eventually becoming head of the Opera Workshop. She turned it into one of the most successful training programs on the West Coast, graduating students who went on to excellent careers in music or teaching. She did so in part by raising significant amounts of money for scholarships that attracted superior students from around the state.

One of the ways she located those students was by taking her university charges on traveling performance tours (“I even got a bus driver’s license!” she says) to high schools up and down the state. She urged any interested students to contact her and told them about the financial aid that was available.

I once accompanied the group on one of those trips, to Biggs High School, where her talented and playfully creative students delighted their farm-town audience.

Perhaps her most famous fundraising creation was the annual Opera Ball, which for many years was the premier social event in Chico. She made opera fun, even for people who thought they didn’t like it.

She retired from teaching in 1999, and her beloved Joe died of cancer the following year. He received hospice care, and she was so impressed by it she soon signed up as a patient-care volunteer, bringing her “youthful spirit” and “many different talents and interests,” as Enloe Hospice charge nurse Anna Marinelli put it, to caring for the dying.

She continues giving private voice lessons, but she teaches two students in the Chico Children’s Choir at no charge. She also opens her house to the choir several times a year to host fundraising parties and retreats (the kids love the swimming pool!). “I have a house full of bodies,” she says, giggling.

It’s a beautiful house, and she opens it often. A couple of months ago she held a fundraiser for the Museum of Northern California, lassoing some of her voice students to perform and cooking for the 20 guests herself. She’s held similar fundraisers for other groups.

I’ve been writing about Chico and Chicoans for more than 30 years, and I’ve never met anyone who has given more to this community than Gwen Curatilo has. She has shared her passion for music and love of the arts unstintingly, and she’s done it with such grace and charm that she’s made it seem almost effortless.

Teenage wonder

Zoe Willingham

Chico High School senior Zoe Willlingham isn’t a typical 17-year-old girl. She enthusiastically speaks of things like “stepping outside of school for learning” and the “intoxicating pride and energy” that come with community activism.

Willingham becomes visibly excited when she gets rolling on issues she feels passionate about (and there are quite a few). For someone not yet old enough to vote, she has been astonishingly active in the community—she hosts two radio shows on KZFR Community Radio, regularly volunteers with the Chico Peace & Justice Center, and serves as the editor-in-chief for Chico High’s student-run literary magazine, Seven-Eighths Under Water. Willingham was most recently involved with the local “Right to Know GMO” campaign; she described Proposition 37’s defeat as “devastating.”

“For me, it’s not so much about GMOs and how they’re going to give you cancer or infertility,” she said during a recent interview. “It’s a consumer-rights issue, and it ties into a much bigger picture in my mind—checking corporate power.”

One of Willingham’s KZFR shows, Issues International, sticks to the same broad-scope approach. The program reports on specific world affairs (particularly under-reported human-rights abuses), but always strives to provide contextual information as well.

“We like to give background,” she said. “A lot of the conflicts in foreign countries have these histories behind them, and American audiences don’t have the benefit of that background.”

Her other show, Underwater Air, is an extension of Seven-Eighths Under Water. The hour is devoted to “playing with language,” sharing author bios and reading short works.

When considering her work with the Chico Peace & Justice Center—which has involved volunteering for fundraising events, editing their monthly newsletter, Peaceful Action, and assisting in counter-military recruiting efforts—Willingham is mindful of something more meaningful than padding college applications and job résumés.

“I wanted my volunteer experience to be something worthwhile to me,” she said. “Because I’m so passionate about social-justice issues, when I have an assignment I try to turn it into something that’s really of personal value to me.”

So, why does she care so much? Willingham related her difficult experience as a fourth-grader.

“Girls can be really mean at that age,” she said. “I was feeling a little lonely, I didn’t know what to do with myself. So, my mother suggested I read The Legacy of Luna by Julia Butterfly Hill.”

The detailed account of Hill’s 738 consecutive days in a redwood tree to prevent the clear-cutting of an ancient grove inspired Willingham greatly, prompting her to seek causes of her own to champion.

“It showed how just one person could give something to their community and the world just by caring,” she said. “Small things can really add up.”