Navigator

Afterlife: Nurture a Good Cause with Your "Stuff" By Melinda Gustafson Gervasi November 22, 2024 Earlier this month I read a short novel that explored the issues of sudden loss, grief, and human connection.  Afterlife by Julia Alvarez focuses on the newly retired Antonia who suddenly finds herself a widow.  A former English teacher, Antonia routinely pulls quotes and phrases from literature to apply to the situation at hand – and through the course of his novel she faces plenty of challenges.  In the year following her husband’s accidental death she is confronted with a sister in crisis as well as a young undocumented immigrant living on a neighboring Vermont farm who is about to give birth. Personally, while reading a specific passage in Afterlife I too had a quote jump to mind:  “What we have done for ourselves alone, dies with us; what we have done for others and the world remains, and is immortal”. - Albert Pike This quote by Albert Pike leaped to my mind when A...

Middle Class Philanthropy: How anyone can leave a legacy By Melinda Gustafson Gervasi November 8, 2024  "Predating democracy, capitalism, organized religion, and as old as humanity itself, philanthropy exists because things often go wrong, and things can always be better". I wrote these words back in 2013 in a small book titled Middle Class Philanthropist: How anyone can leave a legacy .  Eleven years later I find myself pulled back to those sentences.  When life takes a wrong turn, we can lean into our own power and push to improve our world.   Image by M. Gustafson Gervasi, 2024 At dinner this week my 16 year old son suggested our family add more charity runs to our family calendar.  “Mom, you know that run we are doing in March (2025) to support local refugees ... .are there more like that that we can do?”  My son knows that he can pour his cross country running ability and energy into a local organization to fuel a cause that he views as vitally i...