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The Volunteer Powerhouse, Chapter 2

Next up on our schedule of serialized reading is Chapter Two of The Volunteer Powerhouse, entitled “New Roles for Debutantes.” It explores the first decade of The Junior League and brings to light several traditions and core principles that remain vital threads in the Movement’s fabric even today.

We are given an in-depth portrait of the energetic and strong-willed Mary Harriman, who was intent on not living the life of the stereotypical sheltered rich girl by doing something meaningful with her life – and convincing her peers to do likewise. While commuting to Barnard one day in her horse-drawn carriage known as a sulky — or floating in a lake on her parents’ 20,000-acre estate in Orange County, N.Y. on another (reports conflict as to the timing of her idea)–she is said to have mused exuberantly that she and her fellow debutantes would go to work in the settlements on New York’s impoverished Lower East Side, work she had heard about in a lecture by Louise Lockwood.

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The Volunteer Powerhouse, Chapter 1

It’s time for our next installment of high-quality Junior League reading material.

This time we’re digging inside The Volunteer Powerhouse, an excellent history of The Junior League authored by Janet Gordon and Diana Reische and published in 1982 by The Rutledge Press.

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Making of the Roadmap

In the spring of 2009, Susan Danish, Executive Director of The Association of Junior Leagues International, Inc. made a call to Heather McLeod Grant of The Monitor Institute, a renowned think tank consultancy for the nonprofit sector.

Danish and the AJLI Board and Staff, over the course of several years of research and analysis, had discovered a troubling trend. Junior League membership, since peaking at just under 200,000 in the late 1990s, had been in gradual decline for more than a decade.

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Girl…How Things Have Changed!

Eleven decades ago, when Mary Harriman and her fellow Junior Leaguers wanted to communicate, they likely sent a telegram or picked up a telephone receiver and asked an operator to dial an alpha-numeric code — “Murray Hill 2977” was the code at the New York City office in 1914 — over a crackly line. That is, if they weren’t dispatching a manservant to hand-deliver a handwritten note on parchment sealed with wax.
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The Junior League: 100 Years of Volunteer Service, Chapter 1

Over the years, The Junior League has been the subject of two books definitely worth a read, The Junior League: 100 Years of Volunteer Service and The Volunteer Powerhouse.

Loaded with important history, profiles of inspiring women, and compelling coverage of significant accomplishments with great relevance to The Junior League of today (and an occasional bit of juicy trivia), the titles are increasingly tough to get your hands on, so we decided to serialize them, chapter by chapter, here on connected to make them more accessible to members.

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A Q&A with Anne Dalton

A Q&A with Chief Officer for Strategic Initiatives Anne Dalton, who has spent the last 27 years in a variety of roles at AJLI, the last few of them largely on the road or phoning in from her home office outside Portland, Maine.
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Bragging Rights: The Junior League Takes Its Place at the Table for Vision 2020

You may have noticed in a recent story on connected online that The Junior League nominated several of its distinguished members to serve as delegates to Vision 2020, the decade-long gender equality initiative spearheaded by the Institute for Women’s Health and Leadership® at Drexel University’s College of Medicine to coincide with the 100th anniversary, in 2020, of the passage of the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote.
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