Christmas 2019

May this blessed Christmas season bring you and your family joy! It has been a busy Christmas, starting even before I turned in my last (16 and 18 page) term papers at the Graduate Theological Union. So far, our adventures have included:

• Reading Charles Dickens‘ “A Christmas Carol. In Prose. Being a Ghost Story of Christmas” aloud with my Shakespeare Reading Group
• Hosting the Silicon Valley Lines and John‘s train club lunch group’s annual holiday party
• Dinner with my Education for Ministry class, after the Bethlehem pageant at Santa Clara First Baptist Church
• Lunch with the Interfaith Speakers of the Islamic Networks Group
• Shopping in Chinatown, San Francisco, with Sally Hambridge and Paul
• Receiving my certificate of appreciation from the US State Department for being a TechWomen 2019 mentor for Team Algeria (my 10th year as a citizen diplomat with TechWomen!)
• Dickens Christmas Fair day of music, high tea, and shopping with Jessica and Paul (including buying an amazing Christmas candle)
• Seeing the new Star Wars movie with John, Matthew, Jessica, and Paul
• Cheering on Paul for finishing the many Christmas orders for his reclaimed hardwood cutting boards
• Sitting with John and his teen video crew recording the Christmas Eve service at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church
• Bringing services to two Elmwood jail dorms with John on Christmas Day (on behalf of St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church and the Correctional Institutions Chaplaincy)
• Enjoying family, food, and gifts with John, Jessica, Matthew, and Paul at home on Christmas Day!

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Images Copyright 2019 by Katy Dickinson.

Best Mentoring Practices

Yesterday, I moderated a mentoring panel for the TechWomen Mentor Kickoff event (hosted by SurveyMonkey in San Francisco). The experienced and inspiring panelists were:

• Mentorship Advice: Katy Dickinson, Mentoring Standard
• Professional Mentor: Roojuta Lalani, Salesforce
• Impact Coach: Kiko Smith, Twitter
• Cultural Mentor: Jennifer Gieber, Glassdoor

Some of our advice:

• Katy: Look for long term success, this is a personal relationship in a professional setting
• Roojuta: Be flexible, make introductions, find people to help
• Jennifer: Create handouts for events, give good directions with pictures, be flexible, reach out to other mentors
• Kiko: Provide resources, help the group find value in each other, encourage teamwork, stay focused, show up and listen

I also offered my five best questions:

1. What problem are you solving? (define the challenge)
2. How do you know when you are done? (success/completion metrics)
3. Who is your customer? (target audience)
4. What is your data? (quantification)
5. What difference will it make? (impact)

These are on my Mentoring Standard website

I was proud to attend this event with my Co-Mentor and daughter, Jessica Dickinson Goodman. She is a Country Coach for Palestine and I am a Country Coach for Algeria this year.

Just for fun – some of my collection of magnets from the 22 TechWomen countries in Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia:

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Images Copyright 2019 by Katy Dickinson – with thanks to Jessica Dickinson Goodman.

Extra Gear? Gifts for Sierra Leone

My daughter Jessica and I will be visiting Families Without Borders in Sierra Leone next week with Terri Khonsari. If you have any extra laptops or smart phones we can bring – no matter how old or dead – the students will be delighted with your donation. Please contact me soon!

I have visited the inspiring and fascinating continent of Africa at least once a year since 2010. With TechWomen Delegations, I have been to Morocco and Tunisia in North Africa, plus participating in Delegations to Rwanda, Zimbabwe, and South Africa below the Sahara. With People to People, John and I visited Ethiopia. My only actual vacation in Africa was to Egypt in 2010 – a much longer trip than planned since our family was stranded there by the eruption of Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull volcano.  This will be my first trip to West Africa.

I bring gifts on each trip for our generous hosts and for new friends and colleagues. For my first TechWomen Delegations, I had custom pencils made but more recently, I have brought San Francisco keychains and geeky pens and toys given away at events like the Grace Hopper Conference.  For this trip, I bought keychains, the Willow Glen Wells Fargo Bank branch gave me a big bag of red pens, and I am also bringing packages of stickers for the children.

However, the best present for the students in Sierra Leone would be empowerment and greater connection to the wider world.  Your outdated computer gear can help them.  I hope to hear from you!

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Image Copyright 2017 by Katy Dickinson

TechWomen Community Cycle

The TechWomen mentoring program has been since 2010 a big part of my annual planning. 90 Emerging Leaders from 19 countries in Africa, Central Asia, and the Middle East will arrive in the San Francisco Bay Area in about ten days to start working at local STEM companies.  I am already working with the 6 ELs from Tunisia as one of their 3 Impact Advisors. Our Impact Advisory group has been meeting remotely every Friday – I look forward to meeting the Tunisia ladies in person soon.  The 2016 Emerging Leaders will be in the USA until mid-October, returning home after a visit to Washington DC.

I am also enjoying supporting one of my 2014 mentees, TechWomen Fellow and Fulbright Fellow Mai Temraz from Gaza, who will be starting her MBA at Cal State San Bernardino next month.  Several of us visited Mai and her family in Gaza City earlier this year.  The Temraz family is staying with us in San Jose while Mai goes through orientation at UC Davis.  Last weekend, my daughter Jessica, Mai, and I did a road trip to help find an apartment in San Bernardino and to see the Cal State campus.  In a few weeks, the Temraz family will move to Southern California.

TechWomen is more than an Initiative of the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, it has become a beloved community and extended family for many of its participants.

Walaa, Mai, and Yazan Temraz in San Jose, California, August 2016

TechWomen Erin Keeley, Eileen Brewer, Mai Temraz, Jessica Dickinson Goodman, Katy Dickinson, and Aliya Janjua in Gaza City, February 2016

TechWomen Seham Al-Jaafreh, Mai Temraz, and Katy Dickinson, San Bruno Park, California, October 2014

TechWomen in Tunisia, with Impact Advisors in California, August 2016

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Images Copyright 2014-2016 by Katy Dickinson

Technovation World Pitch Summit 2016

Last week, I enjoyed attending the Technovation World Pitch Summit 2016 hosted by the University of San Francisco. Technovation was the single most popular formal mentoring program mentioned by the Mentoring Standard Certified Mentors (see the “First Mentors – What We Learned” report), so I have heard about its excellence from many sources.  Technovation was founded in 2009 to offer girls the opportunity to learn how to start a company and become high-tech entrepreneurs.  It is now a global competition reaching thousands of girls.  This year’s winners were:

• First Place, High School: Team A, “OOL” from Mexico
• First Place, Middle School: California Coders, “Loc8Don8” from the United States

The pitch videos from all of the finalists are well worth watching.  In addition to the awards given to the girls’ teams, TechWomen‘s own Dr. Amel Gouila (Bioinformatician at the Institut Pasteur de Tunis) from Tunisia was honored as The Technovation Regional Ambassador of the year.  In advance of the awards, there were inspiring speeches by:

• Andy Cunningham – (who said she was fired 5 times by Steve Jobs at Apple, NeXT, and Pixar), Founder and President, Cunningham Collective
• Debbie Sterling, Founder & CEO, GoldieBlox
• Tara Chklovski, CEO Iridescent

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Images Copyright 2016 by Katy Dickinson

Visiting California Missions

Laura Biche and Jessica Dickinson Goodman and I enjoyed a girls’ road trip on Saturday – part of our long-term “Visit All the California Missions” project. We went to San Antonio de Padua (Jolon), Nuestra Senora de Soledad (Soledad), and San Juan Bautista (in San Juan Bautista) – and ate ice cream twice!   Along the way, we also visited the Saint Luke’s Episcopal Church (near Jolon – on the Fort Hunter Liggett Army Base) and other sights of interest.

An odd thing we noticed: all three missions we visited had what looked like the exact same bronze statue honoring Saint Junipero Serra (who founded 9 of the 21 missions).  It will be interesting to see if the rest of the missions have the same one.

Looking at the Missions Map, we figure we need to go on at least four more road trips to complete our project:

4 Missions: Sonoma, San Francisco North Bay, San Francisco, Fremont Area

• Mission San Francisco Solano, in Sonoma
• Mission San Rafael Arcángel, in San Rafael
• Mission San Francisco de Asís (Mission Dolores), in San Francisco
• Mission San José, in Fremont

3 Missions: South San Francisco Bay, Santa Cruz, Carmel Area

• Mission Santa Clara de Asís, in Santa Clara
• Mission Santa Cruz, in Santa Cruz
• Mission San Carlos Borromeo de Carmelo, in Carmel

6 Missions: San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, Ventura Area

• Mission San Miguel Arcángel, in San Miguel
• Mission San Luis Obispo de Tolosa, in San Luis Obispo
• Mission La Purísima Concepción, northeast of Lompoc
• Mission Santa Inés, in Solvang
• Mission Santa Barbara, in Santa Barbara
• Mission San Buenaventura, in Ventura

5 Missions: Los Angeles and San Diego Area

• Mission San Fernando Rey de España, in Mission Hills (Los Angeles)
• Mission San Gabriel Arcángel, in San Gabriel
• Mission San Juan Capistrano, in San Juan Capistrano
• Mission San Luis Rey de Francia, in Oceanside
• Mission San Diego de Alcalá, in San Diego

Pictures of Mission San Antonio de Padua (Jolon)

Pictures of Mission Nuestra Senora de Soledad (Soledad)

Pictures of Mission San Juan Bautista (in San Juan Bautista)

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Images Copyright 2016 by Katy Dickinson

Suggestions to Improve Willow Glen Road Diet

Although the pro-Road-Diet faction is distributing a handout declaring success, the controversy is still very active indeed here in Willow Glen.  The San Jose City Council will discuss making the Road Diet (“Lincoln Avenue Pilot Project”) permanent at their 28 June 2016 meeting. Please join me there if you want your voice to be heard on this contentious local issue.

Good news is that the Willow Glen Neighborhood Association (WGNA), one of the loudest advocates in favor the Road Diet – which has not held a WGNA Board meeting in over a year in violation of its own By-Laws and the California Nonprofit Public Benefit Corporation code 600b – has just scheduled a meeting for tomorrow night (23 June 2016: 7:00p.m. – 9:00p.m., at the Willow Glen Public Library Community Room, 1157 Minnesota Avenue, San Jose).  This is the first community meeting on the topic since 18 June 2015.

Note after publication: The WGNA changed their 23 June agenda to take off discussion of the Road Diet.

What Next?

John Plocher and I have been discussing what our own recommendations are in response to the unhappy Road Diet feedback we have heard this last year from local business owners.  The five categories of problems I described in my 17 June 2016 post are:

1. Traffic safety and speed
2. Parking
3. Bicycles
4. Delivery Trucks
5. Community Trust

Of these five, parking is the biggest concern to local businesses (and the problem least addressed) in the current Road Diet improvements.  I was in San Francisco yesterday for a business meeting and noticed not only how many public parking garages there are (in addition to many private garages and lots) but how excellent the signage is to those parking garages (see photos).  On Lincoln Avenue, we have one public parking lot with minimal signage (behind the Bank of America building on Lincolnshire Way).  Several of the business owners I interviewed said that their customers did not know about this one parking lot.

Comparisons:

• Willow Glen’s central business area on Lincoln Avenue is 0.7 miles long (from Minnesota to Willow) with one public lot.
• University Avenue in Palo Alto, where the central business area is 0.8 miles long (from Middlefield to Alma), has at least seven public parking lots and multi-storey garages.
• Downtown Campbell lists ten parking garages and lots for their downtown.
• Murphy Avenue in Sunnyvale is surrounded by large parking lots – including the lots for Macy’s and CalTrain.

Proposal!

1. If there were at least two multi-storey parking garages on Lincoln Avenue, it would change the dynamics of traffic significantly for the better and would eliminate many of the problems of the Road Diet.
   • Additional public parking would make it easier for Lincoln Avenue lunch customers t0 get in and out – helping to reverse the current drastic reduction in lunch traffic described by so many business owners.
   • More parking would reduce traffic by the number of cars circling to find parking, and would help to keep Lincoln Avenue customers from parking on neighborhood side streets.
   • Getting cars off the street would also make more space for trucks to park for deliveries.
   • Public parking structures would also include more Disabled Parking Zones.  As you can see from my diagram, there are few Blue parking spaces on Lincoln Avenue now – and none from Lincolnshire to Willow.  There are Blue parking spaces in private parking lots – all clearly marked with signs saying some variation of  “Customer Use Only” (some of the lots have private guards to keep out non-customers).
2. Add more and better signage to parking.
3. Two areas to consider placing new multi-storey garages on Lincoln Avenue:
   • The fenced and empty dirt lot at Willow and Lincoln, across the street from Willow Glen Town Square
   • Behind the Bank of America building (which I understand was recently sold), where part of the lot is now available for public parking

Multi-storey garages need not be ugly: the structure at San Jose Airport decorated with artful hands is a good example of civic art combined with parking.

Lincoln Avenue Diagram

Click here to see the entire Willow Glen Road Diet Series.

Images Copyright 2012-2016 by Katy Dickinson