Jane Sanders, a tireless leader for human services throughout the Pioneer Valley who led Community Action from 1996 until 2011, died Jan. 25 at Yale New Haven Hospital in New Haven, Conn. She was 62.
Sanders, who grew up in Highland Park, N.J., and graduated from Douglass College of Rutgers University, worked for the Metropolitan Milwaukee Fair Housing Council before moving with her husband, Richard, to western Massachusetts in 1978 to both work as community organizers for Massachusetts Fair Share, a statewide citizen action organization.
As a co-creator, at age 24, of a shelter, Womanshelter/Companeras, for abused women and their children in Holyoke, she became its administrator and served also as president of the Massachusetts Coalition of Battered Women Service Groups.
After leaving for a year to head Philadelphia’s Voyage House for runaway and homeless youth, she returned in 1986, she returned to the region to become head the Community Adolescent Resource and Education Center in Holyoke before being named to become the second executive director of FCAC.
Under her leadership, the antipoverty agency, which merged in 2005 with its Hampshire County counterpart to become Community Action of Franklin, Hampshire and North Quabbin Regions quadrupled in size and created over 20 new programs, ultimately employing over 300 staff and serving more than 27,000 people.
Sanders created an annual Rural Poverty Conference that brought together citizens, organizers and advocates, as well as elected officials, “to dig deeper into identifying the challenges” facing rural communities and to find “creative solutions that would build on the vitality and strengths of the people who lived there.”
After moving in 2011 to Portland, Ore., Sanders and her husband returned to this area.
“Jane did an incredible job running FCAC and expanded it incredibly with new programs supporting children and families in the county,” said Clare Higgins, who took over as executive director in 2011, and who knew Sanders from the time she ran the Holyoke shelter. “When Hampshire Community Action was on the rocks, she did an amazing job integrating that agency’s programs. She was really beloved by the people who worked for her and in the larger community.
“Jane had core belief in the dignity of all people, a passionate commitment to justice for everyone, and a deep empathy for the challenges that the participants in Community Action’s programs face every day,” Higgins said. “Her spirit lives on in the work we all do every day.”
Deerfield Town Administrator Wendy Foxmyn, who knew Sanders as a friend and worked as a mediator for FCAC’s mediation program before Sanders’ arrival, said, “Jane had an extraordinary commitment to the mission of the agency. She was such a great leader, and you really felt supported. She was an advocate without being an agitator. She was a wonderful role model, and I don’t think she walked away from any part of the job. She just ‘got it.’”
Several friends and former employees pointed to Sanders sense of humor and her level of caring for the community, innovating with creative initiatives like having Community Action purchase Harmon Personnel Services in 2007 and turning it into a nonprofit “alternative staffing organization” to help people move out of poverty.
“Jane was an authentic fighter for justice when she took the helm of FCAC,” said Cate Woolner, who ran FCAC’s Franklin Mediation Service before spinning it off. “It became so much more than an agency that worked with under-served people and folks with out resources. It became committed to a much loftier vision because of her. I think she really kept in the front of her mind, ‘What can we do for low-income folks in Franklin County?’”
Woolner said, “As a manager and a leader, I know she was a mentor to so many women coming up — women who in other workplaces might not have been encouraged to take leadership roles. I really admired her for that.”
John Henry, who headed Community Action’s energy programs, said, “Jane really was important in being in the community into the agency and the agency out into the community, and within the agency, she was very good at bringing people together. She worked hard at creating relationships and set a tone that made a real difference.”
“Jane was always very tenacious,” said Roseann Martoccia, executive director of LifePath and formerly a Community Action board member. “She was very kind and thoughtful — she thought everything through and persevered. She was a real advocate for social justice and economic justice,” and was highly regarded by state and regional officials as well as her peers around the state.
Sanders helped established the Community Health Center of Franklin County and served on its board for 15 years, as well as serving on the Franklin Hampshire Regional Employment Board, the Massachusetts Association for Community Action and Rural Development and other organizations. She was a founding member of the Western Mass. Women’s Network/Women’s Statewide Legislative Network.
A memorial service is planned for March 25 at 2 p.m. at Greenfield Community College. Donations in her memory can be made to the Jane Sanders Community Action Fund for Women, Children and Families at Community Action, 393 Main St., Greenfield, MA 01301.