Cynthia Bryant

At 14, Cynthia Bryant was in the waiting room of a Kansas City, Missouri, hospital. Her mother, a philanthropist, and father, an internal medicine doctor, had been taking her to eye specialists across the Midwest, concerned about her peripheral vision. On that day, her mother was consulting yet another physician.

Suddently, a hospital social worker sidled up to the teenager with brochures about welfare and other government support programs. Just as the woman began telling her that she would need these services someday, Cynthia’s mother appeared and shooed the social worker away. There would be no talk of government assistance, her mother told her, and no matter what lay ahead, she would grow up to accomplish whatever goals she set for herself.  

Not long after, Cynthia learned her diagnosis: a rare genetic condition called retinitis pigmentosa (RP). The disease slowly breaks down cells in the retina until all you can see are shadows of light. Having RP, she was told, meant that she’d eventually go blind. 

Now 61, Bryant is a professional mediator and chairs the board of trustees of The Seeing Eye, a nonprofit based in Morristown, New Jersey, that is the oldest existing guide dog school in the world, according to its website.

Bryant enrolled in the program in her 40s, two decades after she’d been declared legally blind and several years after she’d begun using a cane. She’s the first graduate of Seeing Eye to serve as board chair in the organization’s 95-year history. She’s also the first person of color to serve in the role, as well as the first woman to assume the chairmanship since Dorothy Harrison Eustis, who co-founded the organization in 1929.

Bryant is also a sought-after public speaker who uses the tools she honed over her 23 years as an attorney with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), and the skills she’s perfected as a negotiator—both during her time at the FCC and since her retirement in 2022. Now her goal is to “build a bridge,” she says, between the sighted and the sightless, the Black community and white, and those who share disparate worldviews.

Her empathy speeches, as she calls them, conclude with “sensory mindfulness walks,” which aren’t walks at all, but almost poetic renditions of her typical morning stroll. She explains that 80% to 85% of what sighted people take in around them is through their eyes, and they are missing out on the joys that their other senses offer.

Bryant has given variations of her speech via Zoom to audiences around the world, as well as in person in South Korea, throughout the U.S. and in venues closer to her Chevy Chase home. Her guide dog, Summer, a 9-year-old yellow Labrador retriever mix, is always with her. It’s Summer who gives her the freedom to walk with confidence, Bryant says. It’s Summer who sits at her feet as she delivers her speeches.

“It’s a cold wet morning; I can feel the dampness on my skin,” her “walks” often begin. She goes on to detail her journey from her townhouse in Chevy Chase to the Friendship Heights Metro station, including the scent of her favorite tree in bloom, the sounds of the “symphony of birds,” and noticing how the coos of doves and the drumming of woodpeckers give way to the whoosh of rushing cars and the crunch of shoes on roadway gravel.

A native of Kansas City, Bryant relocated to Washington, D.C., at 37, when she could no longer see at night, because the city had public transportation and the Kennedy Center, and she knew she needed both, she says. She’d studied both music and French as an undergraduate and had grown up playing three instruments and watching the Kennedy Center Honors on television. By the time her vision had deteriorated enough to enroll in The Seeing Eye, she had already worked as a preschool teacher outside Boston, attended the University of Kansas School of Law, and served as an attorney  with the Missouri Public Service Commission.

“She has a beautiful voice, and she has perfect pitch,” says Bryant’s friend Carrie Clark, who adds that at the end of Bryant’s speeches she’ll often “pick a song that has to do with [what] she’s spoken about, or something that she thinks will inspire people, and she’ll just sing the song.”

Bryant realized her gift of bringing people together during her early years at the FCC. She was representing Native American tribes in complaints against telecommunication carriers. It was so rewarding to get the two sides talking that she soon signed up for classes through the Harvard Negotiation Institute, entered a leadership program through Blacks in Government, and flew to Georgia to interview former President Jimmy Carter about his negotiating strategies during the Camp David Accords.

Now she encourages people not to focus so much on what they see with their eyes; it can drive people apart. Instead, she says it’s important to consider where others are coming from and, figuratively, to walk in their shoes. “The only way to master the story,” she says, “is to get back to interaction through our other senses.” 

Simona Cabana

Simona Cabana will never forget how she spent her first month in the U.S.—hiding behind the counter of the first and only Java Nation coffee shop and watching as the small staff interacted with the few patrons who walked through the door.

It was 2016, and Cabana was 20 years old and newly married. She’d just arrived from her home country of Belarus and spoke broken English. Her husband, Henry, a general contractor, had built out the Kensington shop four years earlier and hired a manager to run the place, but it hadn’t turned a profit. Henry was about to sell the business to a man who wanted to turn it into a Mexican restaurant—that was, unless his new wife wanted to take a crack at running it.

She did, she told him. But first she had to learn the language, study what the business was doing wrong, and figure out how to do it better. 

Fast forward to today. Cabana, now 28, is president and CEO of a local coffee and restaurant empire. She’s grown Java Nation to include four locations—in North Bethesda, Kensington, Silver Spring and Gaithersburg—plus a commissary in North Bethesda and a roastery in Frederick. Her staff now numbers more than 130, she says, and includes both an executive chef and a pastry chef who create an extensive menu of cocktails, salads, entrees, desserts and breakfast pastries that are trucked daily to each restaurant. This year, she says, Java Nation sales are expected to exceed $10 million.

Many of Cabana’s original employees have moved into leadership roles. A few had ties to small coffee farms in their home countries, and Java Nation, with Cabana at the helm, has provided equipment so these farms can grow the high-end beans used in Java Nation’s specialty brews. The company has even supported the villages where they are located, Cabana says, donating funds to one town after it was hit by landslides, and computers and uniforms to local orphanages.

“She made all the good changes,” says Java Nation District Manager Karla Hernandez, who was one of only five employees at the Kensington store when Cabana arrived. “To be honest, we were having issues,” Hernandez says, but then Cabana took over and followed through on nearly every suggestion offered by customers, including the addition of new menu items Cabana created, changing the coffee supplier, and eventually roasting her own beans in the back of the store, Hernandez says.

Cabana left her family home at 17 to move to Belarus’ capital city of Minsk, where she spent her days at the public library studying business strategies of successful entrepreneurs. While also freelancing as a graphic designer, a client introduced her to her future husband, who was in the U.S. and needed help with social media and menu design for his startup coffee venture. There was chemistry from the start, Cabana says, and soon Henry flew to Belarus to meet her and her family. He ended up proposing on the trip, and the two have been together since.

Cabana says she had to make the store a success because “it [was] already like part of our little family.”

Right away “I became the barista, dishwasher, executive chef, food and beverage director. … I’d take a shift, I would put myself in a schedule, work in the back and the front, opening, closing … and when everyone was gone, I’d stay and roast until 9, 10 p.m.,” she says. “I took the sales like from $200 a day to $600 … and from $1,200 to $2,400. And it basically started skyrocketing.”

Today, videos on large-screen monitors run at every Java Nation restaurant, showing the farms where it gets its specialty beans, and occasionally Cabana strolling through the fields with a farmhand or foreman. She likes the way the films help bring customer awareness to the coffee-growing process.

Still, the Kensington resident isn’t resting on Java Nation’s laurels. She’d like to start offering classes to customers—instructing them on different blends and roasting techniques—as well as entering Java Nation’s proprietary coffee in national and international competitions. And she’d like to do more to help small coffee farmers around the world. Later this fall she will visit several small farms in El Salvador. 

“When you are a young CEO, I think you have … to stay humble about what [you] know [or] don’t know,” she says. “I never stop learning, never stop educating myself, never stop trying to explore new things.”

Anne Derse

It’s a Sunday morning in May, and the Rev. Anne Derse, 70, is standing before about 150 parishioners at St. John’s Norwood Episcopal Church in Chevy Chase. Tall and elegant, wearing a long white robe and an embroidered stole, she holds a leather-bound red and gold Gospel book high over her head, then cradles it in her arms to locate the page she wants, and begins reading from the Gospel of Mark in a voice that’s strong and clear—honed from years of public speaking in English, as well as French, Italian, Azerbaijani and Lithuanian.

For more than 30 years, Derse was a U.S. diplomat and Foreign Service officer. She served as ambassador to Azerbaijan under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, and ambassador to Lithuania under President Obama. During her tenure in that Baltic nation, she was instrumental in encouraging the Lithuanian government to criminalize domestic violence against women, promoting LGBTQ+ and other human rights issues, and lobbying the political leadership to address the tragic legacy of the Holocaust in Lithuania.

Largely due to her efforts, Lithuania passed a historic restitution bill, awarding millions of dollars for Jewish property that had been seized by the Nazi government in Lithuania. It was only the third European country, after Germany and Austria, to pass such a bill. A “door is opening, and an awareness is gradually replacing ignorance,” she told a Lithuanian news outlet at the time.

Derse was also among a small group of diplomats who established the new U.S. Embassy in Baghdad and she served as the final U.S. commissioner on the Tripartite Gold Commission in Belgium, working with colleagues from the United Kingdom and France to adjudicate claims of gold stolen by Adolf Hitler’s Germany from central banks across Europe. Even her roles closer to home were impactful. From 2005-2006, she served as director for biodefense policy at the Homeland Security Council at the White House under George W. Bush, helping to write the President’s Plan for Fighting Pandemic Influenza. “It was a darn good plan,” she says. “And of course, when [President Donald] Trump came in, he threw it out.”

Derse retired from the State Department in 2012 and in 2016 she returned to school to become a deacon in the Episcopal Church. She was ordained in 2018 at the age of 64.

The Bethesda resident has since become a passionate proponent of interfaith engagement and cooperation among religious groups that call Montgomery County home. As St. John’s Norwood’s minister for community engagement, she has led multifaith vigils—for gun-violence prevention, victims of COVID-19, and most recently for peace and humanity, where she welcomed faith leaders from across the spectrum in offering prayers and words of solace that were intentionally nonpolitical. She’s a regular at rallies and other events in support of any group whose basic human rights are being threatened.

Derse has also been the impetus for projects helping asylum-seeking families from Afghanistan, Africa and the Middle East settle in the county and for establishing Nourishing Bethesda, a food distribution nonprofit that feeds nearly 5,000 people each month.

“She’s mesmerizing,” says longtime friend and colleague Nancy Adams, a retired U.S. government trade negotiator who has known Derse since the 1990s, when Derse and her husband, Hank, were stationed in Asia with their four young children. “She’s got such a skill from her years in diplomacy … she’s a motivator [who] helps people recognize what they can achieve together,” Adams says. “When she speaks … it’s just with such a sense of authority, [yet] it’s not dictative, it’s really inspirational.”

Derse says it wasn’t such a stretch to go from career diplomat to church deacon and community leader. Even during her time in the Foreign Service, she says, “the things that touched my heart were the things that helped change people’s lives. … It was the human stuff that spoke to me.”

Still, her second career came to her as an epiphany. A few years after she returned from her final overseas assignment, she was idling in her car at a red light at the intersection of Bethesda’s Bradley Boulevard and Wisconsin Avenue and thinking, What am I going to do with the rest of my life? Then she looked up and saw the tower of St. John’s.

She pulled into the parking lot and went inside to see if the priest happened to be there. He was. “You could say it was impulsive, you could say it was a spur of the moment,” Derse says. “Or you could say I was guided to do that.”

Marissa Mitchell

Marissa Mitchell knew at the age of 9 that she wanted to be a journalist. “Unlike other kids that age, I didn’t run home and watch cartoons. I watched my local news and The Oprah Winfrey Show,” she says. “I wanted to be just like those women on television who delivered information that mattered.”

Today the four-time Emmy Award-winning journalist is FOX 5 DC’s main morning anchor and co-host of the news and lifestyle show Good Day DC. She’s also one of the most altruistic on-air personalities in the Washington, D.C., area, donating hundreds of her off-duty hours to charitable causes, from women’s empowerment to raising awareness for missing Black youths “who don’t get the on-air coverage that they deserve,” she says. 

Mitchell, 39, arrived in the D.C. area in September 2020 from the Fox affiliate in Atlanta and was recruited almost immediately to emcee online charitable functions and lend her presence at 5K and 10K runs. “I do have a bubbly personality … and I think it really stood out at a time [when] people needed to feel special and [be] seen and heard,” she says, referring to the COVID-19 crisis.

As lockdowns ended, requests for her time only grew. Then and now, the Silver Spring resident has continued to offer a resounding yes to nearly every appeal. “It was just a natural connection that just happened,” she says.

Among the first to reach out was philanthropist, motivational speaker and entrepreneur Tasheka Green. Weeks after seeing Mitchell on-air for the first time, Green emailed her to ask if she’d emcee the Deborah C. Offer Bulgin Memorial Foundation’s annual gala, named in memory of Green’s mother, who died of stomach cancer at the age of 53. The gala was being held online that year due to the pandemic. “I was just drawn to [Mitchell’s] passion. … I saw so much love, so much life, so much purpose in her,” Green says.

Green shared with Mitchell that the foundation awards a scholarship at the gala to a woman who has improved the lives of others so that she can continue with her professional education. “I shared the context and background … and [Mitchell] was like, ‘What a great way to honor and celebrate your mom’s legacy, by awarding women who give back to their community. … I would love to be a part,’ ” Green recalls.

Since then, Mitchell has participated in hundreds of events, from Prince George’s County’s Dancing With the Stars (raising thousands of dollars to fight domestic violence) to gatherings in support of the arts in D.C.’s Anacostia neighborhood to events here in Montgomery County. “She’s not just this distinguished journalist and media personality, but she [is] someone who exemplifies virtues of resilience and grace and determination,” Green says. “She always wants to shine the light on [other] people.”

Mitchell got her journalistic start as a teenager in Atlanta, co-hosting her high school’s televised morning news show, the same show anchored by television personality Ryan Seacrest a decade earlier. When it was time for college, she was offered a full-tuition scholarship to Emory University, not far from her home, where she majored in journalism and political science. After graduation and a couple of advertising and newspaper jobs in Atlanta, she was awarded another full-tuition scholarship, this time from the McCormick Foundation, to Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism in Evanston, Illinois, where she earned her master’s degree.

On-air reporting jobs followed: Chattanooga, Tennessee; then in Birmingham, Alabama; and later at Fox 5 in Atlanta, where she stayed for four and a half years before being offered a full-time anchor position in D.C.

Over the course of her career, she’s covered events from the 50th anniversary of the civil rights march on Selma to the 60th anniversary of the March on Washington. She has interviewed celebrities from Oprah Winfrey to Clint Eastwood to wellness guru Deepak Chopra. Many of her stories have earned national recognition, including her celebrity-filled tribute to the late “Queen of Soul” Aretha Franklin, which earned her a Salute to Excellence Award from the National Association of Black Journalists. She’s also been inducted into Emory’s Hall of Fame, and its 40 Under 40, which “celebrates young alumni who represent the very best in achievement and service,” according to the university.

The stories that mean the most to her, though, are those that show how regular people can inspire others, she says. This summer she won a Capital Emmy award for a discussion series she produced and hosted on mental health awareness, and earlier this year she introduced the weekly Fox 5 feature Motivation with Marissa, where she profiles local women who have overcome tremendous odds. She brought the idea to fruition “in hopes that [their] stories will inspire and empower others,” she says. “To develop trust and to be effective, you have to be a part of the community that you report on, and you should want to be.”

Karyn Onyeneho

It was 2014, and Karyn Onyeneho was feeling overwhelmed. “I remember in the parking lot walking to my car in the rain,” she recalls. “I didn’t even want to put up my umbrella. I was like, I don’t know if I can do this.”

At the time, she was holding down a full-time, high-security clearance position with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and driving almost daily from Silver Spring to George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, to earn her master’s degree in health informatics, a three-year program she was determined to complete in one year. She’d already graduated magna cum laude from Howard University, earning a bachelor’s degree in health sciences and management on a full scholarship in half the time of most students. 

“I know, it’s crazy … but I do thrive in challenging situations,” says Onyeneho, who went on to earn her Ph.D. from Howard in nutritional sciences in 2022, graduating at the top of her class while working full time at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda.

Now 41 and living in Burtonsville, Onyeneho is one of the nation’s leaders in the fields of human genetics and experimental nutrition. The first in her family to earn a Ph.D., she is senior advisor for federal policy on genomic data sharing and chair of the Data Access Committee at NIH’s National Institute on Aging (NIA).

It’s a complicated title, as many of hers have been. Suffice it to say she’s spent much of her adult life focused on improving the health outcomes of people from every walk of life.

Long before she became a geneticist and nutrition scientist, it was clear that she was going to make an impact, says her mentor, Charles Kenny, who taught her early on at Prince George’s Community College. Even then, he says, “She was leaps and bounds beyond the other students in the class.”

For the past 10 years, Onyeneho’s focus has been on the BIPOC community, which includes Black people, indigenous populations and people of color. She got her motivation after her dad’s mother died of Type 2 diabetes and hadn’t been well enough in her later years to travel from her native Nigeria to the U.S. for treatments. Her mom’s father succumbed to the same disease years earlier. 

Onyeneho, a first-generation Nigerian American, started investigating the genetic determinants of Type 2 diabetes in adults of African ancestry and the expressed genes that contribute to the disease. “I realized, wow, so this is a disease that impacts many people, particularly people of color … we actually are born with genes that predispose us to this disease,” she says. “That’s really what led me to want to continue to stay in the space of genomics.”

After raising money through GoFundMe to travel to Botswana as a doctoral candidate to compare dietary patterns of African and African American adults as risk factors for Type 2 diabetes, she took a job in 2018 with NIH’s All of Us Research Program, a historic initiative focused on treating every individual using precision medicine. As she moved into leadership roles at NIH, she found herself frustrated that there weren’t more resources or nutritional interventions tailored to people of color.

On her own, she founded a website, Color of Genes, that continues to gain traction in the field. She hopes it one day will serve as a digital health directory for people across the BIPOC community to connect with BIPOC providers who can help them understand their genetic disease predisposition to diabetes and other diseases, and can address cultural and language barriers that create obstacles to appropriate care.

“I thought, well, what if I were to develop an informational web page that … sheds light on … what is genomics, what is genetic research … why is the field limited in representation across different racial and ethnic groups, [and] how can we bridge that gap.”

For example, she says, “My grandmother … didn’t speak fluent English. It would [have been] great if … she could have had a provider that … [spoke] Igbo [a language spoken in southeastern Nigeria.]”

Profiled in Glamour magazine as one of its 2022 College Women of the Year, Onyeneho called herself a maverick for change. She still sees herself that way. As a woman and a Nigerian American, “I’m like a unicorn in the genomic space,” she says.

“There are … not a lot of … people of color who are … geneticists or even genetic counselors,” she adds, and that means there are too few people in the field who understand the cultural values that make certain communities hesitant to join clinical trials or donate blood for genomic analysis. If we better understood these communities’ cultural beliefs, perhaps we could better engage these communities, she says.

“I lost two grandparents to the same disease on different sides of my family. … If not for anything, maybe I can save someone else’s grandpa or grandma.”

Rosario ‘Paola’ Velasquez

As soon as Paola Velasquez opens the classroom door, a swarm of kindergartners drape their arms around her in a tight embrace. Little girls with box braids and pigtails, little boys with cornrows and close-cropped Afros—some with shy smiles, others with excited laughs—they quickly pile on, and the hug circle around their principal grows bigger and bigger. The same thing happens in nearly every classroom she enters.

It’s been five years since Velasquez, 44, took over the reins of Jackson Road Elementary School in Silver Spring’s White Oak neighborhood. It’s a Title 1 school with a minority population of more than 95%, where more than 75% of the students qualify for free meals. She started in the role only months before the pandemic hit. Since she’s been at the helm, the school rose from a 3-star rating to a 4-star, according to the Maryland State Department of Education, making it one of only four Title 1 elementary schools in the county (out of 40, according to Velasquez) to earn a 4-star rating for the 2022-23 school year, the most current rating year available. “Many schools throughout the state decreased a star, but we increased,” she says. 

The school now offers free evening English language classes for parents and guardians (along with free child care); a soccer program; two private-practice therapists who administer one-on-one mental health services to students at no charge; a dentist who cleans students’ teeth for free; and an optometrist who provides complimentary vision checks and eyeglasses, says Chris Callisto, Jackson Road’s Community School Liaison.

During the 2023-24 school year, Jackson Road  opened a food pantry, and it began sending bags of food home on Fridays to 80 families. “When you are a child … and your basic needs aren’t being met because of poverty, you’re not thinking so much about going to college … you’re more worried about getting something to eat or clothing or making sure that you’re not going to be homeless,” Velasquez says.

Velasquez knows what it’s like to grow up poor in Montgomery County. She came here from Peru with her parents and three brothers when she was 8. All six lived in the basement of a relative’s house in Germantown while her dad worked as a janitor and painter, and her mom cleaned houses. Her parents saved enough money to move into an apartment, and eventually to buy a small home in Germantown.

When Velasquez graduated from Seneca Valley High School in Germantown in 1998, she watched as other students went off to college. She hadn’t been instructed how to sign up for SATs, fill out college applications or plan for her future. Instead, she took a job as an aide at a day care center, saved money to buy a car, then to pay for classes at Montgomery College, and then to earn her bachelor’s degree in elementary education at the University of Maryland, College Park.

While working as a second grade teacher at Whetstone Elementary School in Gaithersburg, she took evening classes to earn her master’s degree in educational leadership and administration, and was propelled toward the principal track, she says, by something one of her professors, a retired MCPS principal, told her: When you have a classroom of 26 or 27 kids, you can impact that many students a year; when you are a principal, you can impact an entire school’s worth of students.

She worked at Weller Road Elementary School in Silver Spring and at Jackson Road, before being named the assistant principal at Germantown’s Sally K. Ride Elementary, and principal intern at Poolesville Elementary. When the top spot opened at Jackson Road, she applied and was selected.

Now the Germantown resident and the single mom of a 15-year-old boy conducts her meetings in English and Spanish so that new families feel welcome, says staff development teacher Jacqueline Cody. And she doesn’t spend her school days behind her desk. “She is in classrooms, responding to support calls and meeting with parents,” Cody says. “This may not sound so significant, but I have worked for several principals, and I can tell you that it is.”

Under Velasquez’s leadership, the staff receives extra trauma response training because so many Jackson Road students require extra emotional support. “This is something we have invested a lot of time in this year,” Cody says, “because she saw the need and created the space for us to do this.”

“Sometimes, you know, we have kids who … are having a hard time, they’re going through … a crisis, basically [and] it can take … hours out of my day for me to talk to that child,” Velasquez says. “They’re not ready to learn.”

But her goal is to keep them learning and all the while feeling confident and supported. After all, she says, “they’re going to be the ones who are going to be leading us in the future.” 

The post Meet Bethesda Magazine’s 2024 Women Who Inspire recipients appeared first on MoCo360.

Silver Spring may have gotten its name from a small spring discovered in the 1800s, but today it’s better known as one of the most diverse cities in the U.S. And with nearly 30 Ethiopian restaurants—not to mention Senegalese, Nepali, Creole, Thai and other dining experiences—located in or just outside its compact downtown district, Silver Spring also boasts one of the country’s most diverse food scenes. 

Pair a new cuisine with a concert, theatrical performance, movie or poetry reading and make a day or an evening of it. Arts and entertainment venues The Fillmore, Silver Spring Black Box Theatre, and AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center all sit on the same block of Colesville Road in the heart of town—and if a jolt of caffeine is needed, nearly two dozen locally owned coffee and tea shops are within walking distance, too, many owned by folks from across the African diaspora.   

Play

Home to three pools, a gymnasium, a seniors lounge and the Montgomery County Sports Hall of Fame, the Silver Spring Recreation and Aquatic Center is the county’s newest and most state-of-the-art recreation complex. Opened in February, the 120,000-square-foot, $72 million facility offers free or low-cost programming to county residents—everything from water aerobics, fitness and art classes to pickleball, basketball and badminton. 1319 Apple Ave.; montgomerycountymd.gov  

Sip

Sleek, upscale Citizens & Culture is a recent entry into the downtown Silver Spring scene. Head upstairs for a bar with a retractable roof and a wall of plants. 8113 Georgia Ave.; citizensculture.com

Party

With its festive decor and Cuban vibe, El Sapo Cuban Social Club is the place to enjoy some ropa vieja and a lavender margarita any day of the week. But if you can catch one of El Sapo’s drag brunches, held every other month, all the better. Host Brian Rivera—known as Ashley when in drag—sews his own outfits, makes five costume changes per performance, and “keeps it classy,” he says, so the whole family can partake. 8455 Fenton St.; elsaporestaurant.com

Drink

Now open in the space formerly occupied by Astro Lab Brewing, Third Hill Brewing Co. has quickly established a loyal clientele who come for its curated assortment of microbrewed IPAs, pale ales and lagers. Plus, there’s Capital Trivia night every Thursday. 8216 Georgia Ave.; thirdhillbrewing.com

Shop

For one of the best selections of bras for large cup-size women—and a personalized bra-fitting by a pro—stop by Dor-Ne Corset Shoppe. The small but well-stocked retailer has been around since 1932 and carries bras up to size 52 O. 8126 Georgia Ave.; dornecorset.com

Splurge

Treat yourself to either “sugary” or “chewy” (or both) at The Original Velatis, which began selling its handcrafted Italian-style caramels back in 1866 at its long-shuttered D.C. location. A fixture of Silver Spring since 2009, the enticing little shop sells them by the piece and in boxes themed for nearly every holiday and occasion. 8408 Georgia Ave.; velatis.com

Browse

Just blocks from the town center, the new Analog Market serves coffee from its sister company, local purveyor Bump ‘n Grind, as well as vintage clothing and crafts by Silver Spring-based artisans—from hand-painted lamps to Goth-themed scented candles. Named “Best Luddite Shopping Experience” by Washington City Paper last year, the old-school shop has DJs who spin vinyl on weekends. Upstairs is the Silver Spring outpost of Loyalty Books, with a large selection of titles by Black, Latino and queer authors and other marginalized groups. The market and bookshop are only open Thursdays through Sundays. 923 Gist Ave.; bumpngrind.co

Eat

The reputation of Ethiopian restaurant Beteseb carries all the way home to Africa. That’s according to celebrity chef and restaurateur Marcus Samuelsson, who showcased the family-run eatery in No Passport Required, his award-winning PBS series. The 2018 episode featured chef/co-owner Darmyalesh Alemu teaching the famous chef how to make kitfo, a spiced raw beef delicacy. But the most popular dish at Beteseb these days is its veggie combo: traditional vegan stews served with injera, the spongy pancake that’s a staple of Ethiopian cuisine. 8201 Georgia Ave.; betesebrestaurant.com 

Coming Up

Events at Veterans Plaza, 1 Veterans Place, silverspringdowntown.com

Silver Spring’s 2024 Summer Concert Series kicks off June 20 and runs from 7 to 9 p.m. every Thursday evening through Aug. 1, except July 4. Bring the whole family and groove to a mix of crowd favorites and new musical offerings while the kids enjoy lawn games and more. 

Montgomery County Pride in the Plaza comes to town from noon to 8 p.m. on June 30, featuring a drag story hour, LGBTQ+ entertainers, activities and a concert during the day, and a Pride ball in the evening.

This story appears in the May/June edition of Bethesda Magazine.

The post Where to shop, sip and party in Silver Spring appeared first on MoCo360.

In February 2019, an article online caught the eye of Bethesda business executive and attorney Lisa Friedlander. It was about a new investor group called Citrine Angels, whose mission was to connect novice female investors with early-stage, women-led startups. Friedlander quickly emailed the founder, Allyson Redpath, to offer her support. 

“For decades…the percentage of capital—venture capital—going to female founders has been 2% or under,” says Friedlander, who co-founded an online marketplace for summer camps and other activities for kids called Activity Rocket in 2013 and then sold the business four years later to Thrively, a California-based education technology platform. “When I launched and grew and sold my company…[I] experienced firsthand the discrimination and difficulties of female founders raising capital.”  

Fast forward to today, and Friedlander is one of Citrine Angels’ principals. Named after the gemstone believed to promote prosperity, Citrine Angels has a dual purpose: It provides female-founded startups around the country with access to capital, and it teaches financially secure women throughout the D.C. area how to become successful angel investors.  

“The idea is to create more women angel investors,” says Friedlander, who, along with two Northern Virginia women, took the helm in late 2019, after Redpath stepped aside to accept a high-ranking position with the Maryland Department of Commerce.   

To be considered an accredited—or angel—investor by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, an individual must have a net worth (spouses included) of more than $1 million, excluding their primary residence, or individual income of more than $200,000 for the past two years. Citrine Angels members also must meet these requirements.

A $995 annual fee gives them access to monthly virtual pitch presentations, as well as monthly in-person networking gatherings and educational opportunities that focus on everything from portfolio-building strategies to evaluating a startup for its investment potential. The group has a Bethesda mailing address, but its events are held either online or at sites around the D.C. area.  

The nonprofit’s 80 members aren’t required to make regular investments, though they are encouraged to make at least a small investment every year—“as low as 5 and 10K,” Friedlander says.  

The way it works: Citrine Angels accepts applications from female-led startups. A committee then vets each company, and those that pass the initial review are given the opportunity to pitch the group. If there’s enough interest in the startup from Citrine Angels’ members, then a lengthier due diligence process begins, with a deep dive into the startup’s financials, the marketplace for its product or services, and its leadership team. Once the due diligence report is shared with members, each decides whether she is interested in investing—either directly into the startup if the dollar amount she chooses to put up meets the startup’s minimum investment threshold, or by pooling funds and investing together. Upon investment, Citrine Angels adds the company to its portfolio.  

As minority shareholders, Citrine Angels’ members typically see a return on their investment when the startup is acquired by another entity, generally within three to seven years, according to Friedlander. 

“[We’re] looking closely at who the founders are…we have to really believe that these founders have what it takes to grow a company to be successful,” says Lisa Conners, a Bethesda-based
executive-leadership coach who became a member two years ago.  

According to a 2018 Boston Consulting Group study, female-founded or co-founded businesses have an average rate of return of 78 cents for every dollar invested, compared to male-founded startups, which have an average rate of return of only 31 cents. 

Since its inception in 2019, Citrine Angels has provided more than $1.25 million in capital to approximately 20 female-founded or co-founded companies across the country, in industries from consumer products to artificial intelligence to financial and medical technologies. Bethesda-based Pocket Naloxone Corp., which became part of Citrine Angels’ portfolio in 2020, is focused on developing an easy-to-use, lower cost, over-the-counter naloxone product to help in the battle to prevent deaths from opioid overdoses. It was Friedlander’s first personal investment as a Citrine Angel. “A huge game changer and an incredible opportunity to save lives,” Friedlander says about the startup.     

Citrine Angels also provided capital to help Bethesda entrepreneur Julie Melnick expand SkySquad, the company she founded to provide airport travelers with personal assistants who can carry their bags, help ease their way through security and TSA lines, and navigate their way through the airport. The service is offered at five airports around the country, including Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport.  

When Melnick first pitched Citrine Angels for funding, the organization took a pass; Friedlander told her to “show us some traction” with customers first, Melnick says. She heeded the advice, and when she pitched the group again two years later, in 2021, her company came away with about $35,000 from Citrine Angels members, in a round of financing that netted approximately $1 million in all, she says. 

“The whole experience of running a startup, I believe, is really mindset and believing that…your service or your product is really worth something,” Melnick says. With Citrine Angels, she adds, a whole group of women are investing their hard-earned money to support a business, and “it’s really a vote of confidence.”

This story appears in the May/June edition of Bethesda Magazine.

The post Local organization connects female investors and entrepreneurs appeared first on MoCo360.

This story, which was originally published in the March/April 2024 issue of Bethesda Magazine was updated March 28 at 12:20 p.m. to correct Maryland Department of Transportation’s (MDOT) role in the Old Georgetown Road project.

Patricia Bibes still has panic attacks every time she hears an ambulance siren or sees a white “typical contractor minivan,” she says, “and they are everywhere.” 

It’s been almost two years since Bibes’ 18-year-old son, Enzo Alvarenga, was killed on Old Georgetown Road in North Bethesda—mere blocks from her home—but her emotions remain raw, as if the tragedy happened yesterday. 

In June 2022, Alvarenga, a freshman at the University of Maryland, College Park, was riding his bicycle about 4 p.m.—on what was then a narrow walking path alongside the busy roadway—when he swerved to avoid some tree branches extending across the sidewalk. He lost his balance and fell into oncoming traffic. He was struck almost immediately by a commercial minivan and was declared dead at the scene, according to news reports. 

Early the next morning, state maintenance crews trimmed back the branches that Alvarenga had tried to avoid the day before, Bibes says. And within weeks, the Maryland Department of Transportation (MDOT) picked up the pace on an extensive and controversial bike lane project that has since narrowed and removed a car lane in each direction and added almost two miles of dedicated bike lanes along the busy roadway. 

A few years earlier, the MDOT reduced the speed limit on Old Georgetown Road and began the first phase of changes after another local teenage bicyclist was killed not far from where Alvarenga was struck.

“If there had been bike lanes [then], Enzo [and the other boy] would be alive,” Bibes says. 

Still, the bike-lane project created so much outcry that Bibes says she deactivated her local Nextdoor social media account shortly after the lanes were added because reading all the online complaints was too upsetting. Even today, a petition on Change.org to remove the bike lanes has more than 9,200 signatures. 

North Bethesda resident Hope Page, who added her name to the petition last summer, says the bike lanes “are a death waiting to happen.” 

Page volunteers at a dog shelter in the northern part of the county that she reaches by driving north on Old Georgetown Road and turning right onto Interstate 270. She says she has yet to see a bicyclist use the bike lane, but if cyclists were to use them, they’d likely get hit by motorists turning onto I-270 or I-495 because there is no stop sign for either the bicyclists or the drivers. “Very bad design,” she says. 

Old Georgetown Road is one of many thoroughfares that county leaders, activists and residents have focused on in the name of traffic safety over the past several years. In many parts of the county, new bike lanes, reduced speed limits, and “road diets”—in which driving lanes are narrowed to encourage motorists to slow down—have received cheers from safety advocates, environmentalists and the biking community; and criticism from nearby residents dismayed by the addition of flex posts and blocked-off roadways where travel lanes and street parking used to be, and what they call frustratingly low speed limits, traffic backlogs, and ill-conceived design. 

Yet despite the millions of dollars being spent to help make roads safer, the number of traffic deaths in the county in 2023 was about 33% higher than in 2017, according to Zero Deaths Maryland (ZDM), a database that tracks road safety throughout the state. The county implemented its sweeping Vision Zero initiative in 2017 with the goal of eliminating all roadway-related fatalities and serious injuries by 2030.

Wade Holland, the county’s Vision Zero coordinator since 2020, admits that part of the problem in addressing road safety across the county is that “you basically see a complete inverse relationship [in which] the communities with the least amount of traffic crashes [produce] the most [requests for attention].” 

“That’s where that starts to build into inequity,” Holland says, adding that the county has begun to prioritize roads that are the most dangerous statistically and not just “where we’re hearing the most complaints.”

According to ZDM, not only were there more traffic deaths overall in 2023 than in 2017, but also more pedestrians and bicyclists who died after being struck by vehicles. In 2023, 15 pedestrians and one bicyclist were killed by motorists, compared with 14 pedestrians and no bicyclists killed in 2017.

Included in the 2023 figures: a 70-year-old Latin American woman who was struck by two vehicles while trying to cross Veirs Mill Road in Rockville on Dec. 26 with groceries she’d just bought across the street, says District 6 Councilmember Natali Fani-González. Her district borders the intersection where the fatality occurred.

“We are moving the needle, but not fast enough,” says Fani-González, whose district also includes portions of University Boulevard and Georgia Avenue that are part of the High Injury Network (HIN), where many of Montgomery County’s most serious and fatal crashes tend to occur. 

According to the Vision Zero fiscal 2023 annual report, which covers the period from July 1, 2022, to June 30, 2023, the network represents only 3% of the county’s non-interstate roadways, but 41% of its most serious and fatal crashes. Vehicle speed as well as distracted and aggressive driving are blamed for most road fatalities, safety advocates say. 

The intersection of Georgia Avenue and University Boulevard, in Wheaton, is “one of the most dangerous stretches…[in the] nation…for pedestrians,” says Jose Ortiz, Fani-González’s director of community engagement, adding that it is “producing around 3.1 deaths a year, repeatedly.” 

“It’s heavily populated by Latinos,” Ortiz says. Most of them are immigrants who don’t speak English or have the time or resources “to organize themselves and fight for [safer roads] in a more aggressive way,” he says. 

A drive north on Georgia Avenue, from 16th Street in Silver Spring, past University Boulevard, and into Aspen Hill, reveals some of the safety issues that exist. Without enough crosswalks along vast stretches of the roadway, those who rely on public transportation and live just off the main drag or in nearby garden apartments must walk as far as a quarter-mile or more out of their way to cross Georgia Avenue to get to their bus stop or nearest grocery store via demarcated crosswalks. 

More often, pedestrians and bicyclists opt to cross the six-lane thoroughfare when the roadway looks clear. But with cars traveling much faster than the newly posted 25 and 35 mph speed limits (down from 45 mph in some stretches), some pedestrians and bikers don’t make it across safely.  

In February 2023, Ruth Nohemy Bermudez Chavez, 22, was fatally struck crossing Georgia Avenue in Aspen Hill while carrying a bag of groceries that she’d purchased at a store on the other side of the six-lane road, Ortiz says. She wasn’t in a crosswalk, he adds; the nearest one was a quarter-mile away.

Four months earlier, 19-year-old William Villavicencio was also killed along the busy thoroughfare. He was struck by a hit-and-run driver as he attempted to cross the road on his bicycle. He’d exited a bus with his girlfriend about 11 p.m. She made it safely across Georgia Avenue by foot. He tried to follow her moments later, after fetching his bike from the bus, but was hit before getting across, according to his mother, Sandra Ort, who was at the scene just after the ambulances arrived.

The vehicle that struck Villavicencio still has not been identified, nor has the driver, according to Montgomery County police. Investigators say they believe the vehicle that hit him was a 2003-2007 dark red Honda Accord that lost its right sideview mirror in the collision. 

As in Chavez’s case, Villavicencio and his girlfriend didn’t cross at a crosswalk. The nearest one was a block from the bus stop in the wrong direction from where they were heading, says Villavicencio’s half brother, Jonathan Rivas. It’s not always practical, Rivas says, “to go in a complete opposite direction just to come back down to go where…you need to go.” 

In 2021, a 63-year-old Aspen Hill woman was struck and killed on Georgia Avenue, blocks from where her husband was hit and killed five years earlier, according to news reports.

Walter Marks, who lives with his wife in a small one-story house on Georgia Avenue, in Silver Spring, says he sees cars speeding along the road all day long. There aren’t enough speed cameras to serve as a deterrent, he says, and the fines are too low to prevent drivers from speeding. 

“Somebody’s got to…put pressure on the governor,” he says, “to do what he has to do to make it safe for our children and for…people that have to walk to get a bus to go to work to feed their family.”

Democratic Gov. Wes Moore agrees. “We are serious about making this happen,” he told reporters, following a walking tour of downtown Wheaton last May. 

Fani-González, who had invited the governor on the tour, says she’s been working with him to study the feasibility of adding a grassy median strip and vegetation to a long stretch of Georgia Avenue and turning it into an urban boulevard. The state has also been working with the county to add pedestrian hybrid beacons at intersections on state-maintained roads with notoriously hazardous conditions, she says.

The federal government has contributed resources too—including a $28.5 million grant announced in early January to improve road safety across Maryland, according to a press release issued by the office of U.S. Rep. David Trone (D-Potomac). The release states that nearly $1 million of it has been allocated to projects in Montgomery County.  

Still, it’s going to take “a significant amount of culture change” before the crash data shows consistent improvement, says Eli Glazier, Montgomery Planning’s acting countywide transportation planning supervisor. 

Glazier was project manager of the county’s 2023 Pedestrian Master Plan, one of several programs, acts and guidelines approved by the Montgomery County Council over the past few years to support Vision Zero’s goals. Other programs include the 2018 Bicycle Master Plan, the 2021 Complete Streets Design Guide, and the Safe Streets Act, which became law in September 2023 after passing the council by unanimous vote. The Safe Streets legislation prohibits right turns on red at busy intersections in downtown areas.

For many years, Glazier says, the priority—not only locally but also state- and nationwide—was to keep traffic congestion down and commuting times short. So “you end up with wide lanes, a long distance between signals…[and] sidewalks and other pedestrian things being an afterthought.” 

These days, with the emphasis shifted toward slowing down and staying safe, “that’s a lot of roadway miles that are going to need to be reimagined,” he says. “We may not actually see it in the statistics in terms of severe injuries and fatalities until we’ve reached some sort of critical mass where enough of these high injury roads have been redeveloped.”

To that end, the county has made some strides, Holland says, especially along the HIN corridor, which includes state-maintained thoroughfares such as Old Georgetown Road, Rockville Pike and Connecticut Avenue, as well as county-maintained roadways including Montgomery Village Avenue, Shady Grove Road, and East Gude Drive. 

“We [are] seeing a stronger decline on the High Injury Network because of [our] focus on those roads,” Holland says.  

And indeed, Vision Zero’s 2023 report states that “in 2022, serious and fatal crashes decreased 13% compared to the 2015-2019 annual average” and that “on [High Injury Network (HIN)] corridors where safety projects, outreach, and law enforcement were prioritized, there was a significant 28% reduction compared to a 1% decrease on non-HIN roadways.”

“It takes a long time to make the overall macro numbers change, but we are seeing…the numbers go down in those areas,” Holland says.

At the same time, the report acknowledges that crashes occurring in “equity emphasis areas,” or EEAs, rose one percentage point during the same period, from an average of 37% in 2015-19 to 38% in 2020-22. EEAs are defined as locations with “high concentrations of low-income individuals and/or traditionally disadvantaged racial and ethnic minorities,” according to the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments. 

Holland says Vision Zero’s no-deaths-by-2030 goal was always considered more motivational than realistic. “The idea was to push ourselves to think what can we double down on or do differently if we could eliminate serious and fatal crashes in 10-15 years,” he says.

Olney’s John Seng, founder and chair of the nonprofit Maryland Coalition for Roadway Safety, believes a cultural shift is necessary to curb deaths. “Here in Montgomery County…the thinking [is] that if we can only fix the infrastructure, fewer lives will be lost,” he says. “For instance, [we tend to think that] fewer bikers will be killed if we only created that bike lane…few[er] pedestrians would be killed if we only [add the] Safe Streets Act.

“I think all these things are good, don’t get me wrong…but the data shows that the major risk factor is speeding and aggressive driving,” he says. “How many times have you been driving on a county road and looked up in the rearview mirror thinking, you know, I…don’t want to go any faster…[but] I’ve got somebody riding my bumper?  

“It’s this pressure, this bullying, really,” he adds. “If [we] drive the roads like it’s [our] kids on these roads, that would be a nice message for people to embrace as they get behind the wheel of their car.”

Journalist Amy Halpern has worked in print and television news and as the associate producer of an Emmy Award-winning documentary. She lives in Potomac.

This story appears in the March/April issue of Bethesda Magazine.

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It was the morning of May 4, 2020, and attorney Lisa Blatt was about to make history. From a podium that she set up in her Chevy Chase dining room, Blatt was moments away from presenting oral arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court in the first-ever SCOTUS case conducted by telephone.

“My [19-year-old] daughter was there keeping time,” she says, “and my husband was in charge of keeping the dog away from the house so he didn’t bark.”  

The case was The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office v. Booking.com, and Blatt was representing the hotel-booking website. She was arguing that the company should be allowed to trademark its name over the objections of the Patent and Trademark Office, which had denied the company’s application on the grounds that “booking” is a generic word and therefore not eligible for trademark protection. 

Blatt knew the ruling would carry major implications. It would likely affect not just her client, but also hundreds of other companies whose business model revolved around a trademarked web address that consisted of a generic word or two followed by dot com. 

But with the world on lockdown due to COVID-19, and the Supreme Court forced to shift from the model it had used for more than 200 years, Blatt was at a disadvantage: She couldn’t read the justices’ facial cues or body language to gauge whether her arguments were resonating with them or falling flat. 

Standing in her dining room in the black suit and white blouse she wore when arguing before the court, she could only hear the justices’ voices over the speakerphone, which was connected to the landline by a 30-foot extension cord. “The mechanics of this were incredibly elaborate,” she says. “We spent a lot of time with the court personnel preparing for it and kind of going through…what happens if the phone doesn’t work.”

As she stood at the podium, waiting for the familiar call of oyez, oyez, oyez to bring the court to order over her speakerphone, Blatt could only hope it would all go smoothly.  

Except in narrow circumstances, attorneys must be members of the U.S. Supreme Court bar to practice before the high court, and nearly 200,000 attorneys from all over the country are official members, according to bar records. Yet the actual pool of frequent advocates—those who have represented numerous clients at the high court over many years—is closer to 25, insiders say. Many in this elite club, such as Blatt, live in or around Montgomery County, and their recurring appearances before the court’s nine mercurial justices have given them a celebrity status of their own—and plenty of stories about what it’s like to stand before the highest court in the land. 

“It’s an amazing institution. It’s incredible,” Blatt says. “You can’t practice before them without loving them.”

Blatt heads the Supreme Court and Appellate practice at Williams & Connolly in downtown D.C. She has argued 46 cases before the high court—more than any woman in
history—and she has a win rate of nearly 90%, according to her law firm bio. 

She won the USPTO v. Booking.com case 8-1 (only Justice Stephen Breyer dissented). 

Blatt says the case also paved the way for a new protocol that the court has kept in place even after returning to in-person oral arguments in October 2021. Now, after each side finishes oral arguments, “each justice has an uninterrupted [session] to ask the advocate questions,” she says.

Previously, explains Chevy Chase attorney Peter Keisler, 95% of what the advocates were doing was responding to justices’ questions. “It was a free-for-all,” he says, with justices interjecting as they saw fit.

A longtime partner—and now senior counsel—in the D.C. office of Sidley Austin, Keisler argued his first case before the Supreme Court more than two decades ago. He says the pre-COVID protocol of pummeling advocates with questions started in the 1980s, when William Rehnquist was chief justice and Antonin Scalia joined the court. Scalia “was always a very active questioner…and it seemed that every justice who joined the court [after him] was a more active questioner than the justice that preceded him or her,” Keisler says. Back then, there was a strict 30-minute limit per side for oral arguments, he says, and Rehnquist “was a maniac as to time.” 

Indeed, “it was like facing target fire,” recalls Bethesda’s Jeff Wall, who has argued 30 cases before the high court. “On the lectern, there’s a light that comes on when you have a certain amount of time remaining. And then a red light when your time is up…[and under Rehnquist] when your red light came up [you were] expected…to stop midsentence,” he says. 

Now, advocates can get their oral arguments out uninterrupted, but with “nine active questioners,” Blatt says, arguments can sometimes run long. Between both sides’ orals and the justices’ questions, Blatt’s 2022 case of Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts v. Goldsmith went on for close to two hours, she says—nearly twice the pre-pandemic limit. 

In the end, she won the case 7-2, with all but Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Elena Kagan siding with her that the Andy Warhol Foundation had infringed on photographer Lynn Goldsmith’s copyright when it commercialized a series of Warhol silk screens based on Goldsmith’s 1981 photograph of the singer Prince.

“For the advocates,” Blatt says, having more time to speak is always “a lot more fun.”

Those who practice regularly before the high court prefer the term “advocate” over “attorney” to describe their role because “our stock-in-trade really is our advocacy, Wall says. “It’s what we take pride in and how we judge ourselves within the profession.” There’s no higher compliment, he says, than being told you are an excellent advocate.

Guessing what they’ll ask

Bethesda’s Gregory Garre, head of Latham & Watkins’ Supreme Court and Appellate practice, has argued 48 cases before the high court. “The court today is much more focused on historical arguments than it was 10 years ago,” Garre says, meaning that all the justices these days, including Ketanji Brown Jackson, the most recent confirmation to the court, tend to look not only at modern precedents, but the historical events surrounding a constitutional provision.

Garre says he typically holds two moot courts to practice his cases in front of colleagues who are tasked with poking holes in his arguments and asking questions he’s likely to hear from the justices. Yet he has still experienced some “colorful” exchanges with justices that he didn’t anticipate, including one about whether dogs were used to track down 19th-century serial killer Jack the Ripper, and another back-and-forth about what would happen if Big Bird accidently uttered the “F-bomb” on Sesame Street. 

“The only really zany [questioner] was Justice Breyer…because he would ask super crazy, wild hypotheticals,” Blatt says. “Justice Scalia probably had the most combative jousting style…and Justice [Sandra Day] O’Connor….would always ask for a yes or no answer. 

“In terms of individual styles…Justice Jackson’s very animated and fun,” Blatt says.

Before the pandemic, Justice Clarence Thomas was often criticized in the media for not asking enough questions, but that was because he didn’t want to become part of the frenzy, Blatt says. Now “he is known as one of the best questioners,” she says. “There’s usually a pause after the advocate gives his or her opening remarks to see if Justice Thomas has a question, and he usually does.”

Up close and personal

Few people realize how close the attorneys are to the justices when making oral arguments, says Wall, who heads the Supreme Court and Appellate practice for Sullivan & Cromwell. The lectern is only about 6 feet from the chief justice’s face, he says, with the most senior justices flanking the chief justice and the most junior on the wings. You are so close to the chief justice, Wall says, “that you can’t see all nine [justices] in your field of vision…it’s a difficult balancing act to be able to argue to all nine.”  

Wall says he’ll never forget his first case before the Supreme Court 14 years ago. He had recently joined the U.S. solicitor general’s office and was asked to argue on behalf of the federal government in support of New York City. “I was terrified. I couldn’t sleep the night before, so I got up and went to the office in the wee hours of the morning to practice,” he says. 

Wall had been instructed that his first words before the court were supposed to be: Mr. Chief Justice and may it please the court, yet he recalls that Scalia bellowed out a pointed question before he had a chance to get settled at the lectern. But once he got in his introductory line, he says, “the nerves fell away.” 

Wall won the case, but what was even more meaningful was that “it turned out…in the courtroom was a clerk in the chief justice’s chambers, and she’s now my wife and we have two beautiful kids,” he says.

Bethesda’s Neal Katyal, who is a New York Times bestselling author, a partner in the D.C. office of Hogan Lovells, and a frequent guest on MSNBC, has argued 43 cases before the Supreme Court—more than any other minority attorney, according to his personal website. Yet he still gets nervous every time he appears, he says.

“I wear the exact same thing to the court every time: my dad’s Sikh kara bracelet, socks my mom gave me, a tie my aunt gave me and a suit I bought a while ago,” the 1991 Dartmouth College graduate told his alumni magazine in 2018.  

Garre says that no matter how many times he argues before the court, “one of the most thrilling things…is exiting…through the great bronze doors and walking down the court steps…having just survived an argument.” 

But that long, magisterial flight of stairs happens to be “one of the brightest spots in D.C. on a sunny day,” he adds, “so you have to proceed with caution to make sure you don’t finish your day by tripping on the steps and tumbling to the bottom.” 

Staying under the radar

Keisler says that the cases that don’t get much media attention are the most exciting to argue because the justices aren’t coming in with preconceived notions. 

“If you’re arguing one of the big headline cases…you are coming in pretty late to the game,” he says. “But if you’re arguing about, you know, what’s the maximum compensation rate for a disabled longshoreman, it may be that when [the justices] open your brief, that’s the very first time they’ve thought about that.”

Keisler’s long resume includes stints at the U.S. Justice Department and the White House counsel’s office, and two nominations that required appearances before Congress. Yet, he says, “there’s nothing like the direct interaction and focus an advocate has in the court.”

Think about it, he says: Lobbyists go to Congress and appear before committees where members are shuffling papers or walking in and out of the room, or they go to the executive branch and likely meet with staffers. 

But at the Supreme Court, “for an hour plus, you’re there with the nine decision-makers…and they really are the decision-makers,” he says. “And they’re not focused on anything else. They’re not talking to anyone else. They’re not coming in and out. They’re not shuffling papers on some other matter. They are completely engaged in the case at hand.” 

As for the longshoreman-compensation case he argued before the court in 2012, Keisler says he was told shortly afterward by a friend that Justice Samuel Alito was making public remarks along the lines of everyone thinks we spend all our time deciding about affirmative action and abortion, and Alito referenced the longshoremen case as an example of how dry and technical most of the cases are that come before the court.

“And I will tell you,” Keisler says, “I was pleased that my case had been singled out.”

Down on SCOTUS

Only 44% of Americans view the Supreme Court favorably, according to the latest Pew Research Center poll. That’s the lowest favorability rating since Pew began polling the public about the court in the late 1980s.

Pundits blame the court’s declining approval numbers on recent controversial decisions involving abortion, LGBTQ+ rights, student loans and affirmative action—as well as a series of news reports involving justices accepting potentially inappropriate gifts and mingling with high-profile partisan donors. 

Critics have called for reforms, including expanding the court. Last spring, U.S. Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Takoma Park) was among 14 co-sponsors of a bill to boost the number of justices from nine to 13. 

Tom Goldstein, a Bethesda attorney who has made frequent appearances before the nation’s top court, has even spoken out against its ability to render fair and impartial decisions since the addition of three Trump-era appointees: Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett. 

Goldstein and his wife, Amy Howe, co-founded SCOTUSblog, an independent news source for all things Supreme Court-related. When Goldstein announced his retirement earlier this year from the Bethesda law firm that he founded more than a decade ago, he said it was partly in response to the Supreme Court’s evolving character, according to Reuters. “In the important civil rights and social cases, the court’s conservative super-majority makes it very difficult for the little guy to win,” Goldstein told Reuters at the time. (Goldstein did not respond to Bethesda Magazine’s requests for an interview.)

Other local attorneys Bethesda Magazine interviewed who argue regularly before the court say that while the current makeup of the court is more conservative than in recent years, every case is decided on its merits.

For example, says Bethesda’s Jeff Wall, the court’s 2020 ruling in Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia, found that the 1964 Civil Rights Act protects gay, lesbian and transgender employees from discrimination based on sex. The decision was 6-3, with Gorsuch, President Donald Trump’s first appointee to the court, writing the majority opinion—joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and the court’s four liberal justices. “The court sometimes does reach outcomes that people are predicting, but oftentimes it doesn’t,” Wall says. “It is a court that will reach conservative legal results more often. But that does not mean that…folks presenting different arguments can’t get a fair shake.” 

A self-proclaimed liberal Democrat, attorney Lisa Blatt wrote an article in 2018 for news website Politico that supported Kavanaugh’s  nomination. “I still think he’s an incredible justice,” she says now, even though she is “extremely pro-choice” and Kavanaugh voted with the majority last year in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization to overturn Roe v. Wade. “I was disappointed, but not surprised [in the ruling],” she says. “[As an advocate] you don’t have to like every decision.”

Journalist Amy Halpern has worked in print and television news and as the associate producer of an Emmy Award-winning documentary. She lives in Potomac.

The post Local lawyers on what it’s really like to argue a case before the U.S. Supreme Court appeared first on MoCo360.

On a warm June morning, Noah Simmons, 14, is dangling from a rope 40 feet in the air. One of his hands is wrapped around the rope; the other is flapping back and forth the way it often does when Noah feels exhilarated. 

After a few moments, Noah looks to the wall behind him and angles his body so that his right foot finds purchase on a small blue rocklike protrusion. Once his other foot lands on another colorful piece, Noah continues his ascent to the top of the climbing wall, about 10 feet above him. 

“Great job, buddy!” Noah’s mother, Tracy Simmons, cheers from the floor—five stories below her son—as he reaches the top. 

It’s been a year and a half since Tracy and her husband, Mike, decided to homeschool their nonspeaking autistic son and nearly a year since Tracy discovered Movement Rockville, a rock climbing gym. Ever since, she and Noah have become regulars. It’s become his primary classroom, so to speak. 

Tracy, a yoga instructor, drives him here from their Bethesda house two or three times a week. Noah climbs for hours. He has learned to tie the complicated knots that keep him attached to the harness. He chooses the walls he wants to climb, and for how long he wants to climb them. It’s a form of homeschooling called “unschooling” that involves learning organically through exploration and discovery rather than through a traditional curriculum-based educational model.

“He makes his own choices,” Tracy says. “Something he couldn’t do in school.” 

Tracy says she never would have considered homeschooling her child before the pandemic. The Simmonses’ older son, a senior at Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School, has been in Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) since kindergarten, and Noah had been given learning accommodations through the school system since he was 6. 

In March 2019, when Noah was in third grade, he began attending the Kennedy Krieger Institute’s school for children with developmental disabilities at what was then its Silver Spring campus. MCPS agreed to pick 

up the tab, acknowledging that Noah’s needs would be better served there. “We were over the moon,” Tracy says.

For nearly a year, reports from the school showed  that Noah was thriving. But when the pandemic arrived, Tracy took a careful look at the worksheets sent home—and then at what was being taught online—and she went from elation to disappointment. 

“He wasn’t required to learn. He wasn’t required to listen. …All he had to do was follow the prompts,” Tracy says. “Suddenly those outstanding report cards felt like little white lies.”

She tried supplementing his classwork with therapies that focused on building communication skills that she felt his school program wasn’t addressing. But eventually she concluded that she had two choices: stick with the program she’d tried so hard to get him into, “or follow my gut, which is telling me this isn’t working.” 

The morning Noah was due to return to in-person school in March 2021, she made her decision.

Homeschooling across Montgomery County skyrocketed nearly 80% during remote learning, rising from 2,510 students during the 2018-19 school year to 4,505 during the term that ended in June 2021, according to data from the state Department of Education. 

Many parents expected their children to return to the classroom when in-person classes resumed. Yet more than 3,400 students, representing almost 45% of those who left MCPS during the height of the pandemic, didn’t return for the 2022-23 school year, according to MCPS. 

And as of this July, nearly 2% of MCPS’s 164,000 eligible students had already identified as homeschoolers for the 2023-24 school year. It’s a trend that’s being felt not only across Maryland but nationwide.

There’s no one-size-fits-all reason why, says University of Maryland education professor Kellie Rolstad, founder and director of Goodloe Learning Community, one of more than 300 umbrella organizations registered with the state Department of Education to supervise home instruction for families across the state. She says families have cited reasons ranging from disappointment with the school curricula to bullying.

Others say racism and religious intolerance have played a role in families’ decisions to homeschool. 

“Many families [feel] that the school system is no longer a safe and inclusive place for faith-based communities,” says Zainab Chaudry, Maryland director for the Council on American-Islamic Relations. She says dozens of Muslim and other religious families in Montgomery County have begun pulling their children out of MCPS over the school system’s decision to prevent families from opting out of its new rollout of LGBTQ+ books.

More Black families are also homeschooling since the pandemic began—many citing implicit racial bias in the educational system as their primary reason, according to several surveys. Nationwide, the percentage of Black families who switched to homeschooling during the early months of the pandemic rose fivefold, from just over 3% in the spring of 2020 to more than 16% that fall, according to the U.S. Census. 

A lot of Black moms, in particular, told Rolstad that they didn’t realize how much better it would be to have their kids at home, learning their values full time rather than what was being taught in school, she says.

Overall, about 3.1 million students were homeschooled across the U.S. in the 2021-22 school year, representing about 6% of school-age children, versus 2.5 million homeschooled students, or 3% to 4%, three years earlier, according to the National Home Education Research Institute (NHERI). 

The one universal among homeschooling families, Rolstad says, is that “once you realize that there’s this whole community out here…and kids are doing fun things, you start thinking: What is the benefit that school can offer that makes me want to send my kid back?” 

Clara Timme became a homeschooling mother shortly after the pandemic arrived. Her first grader had thrived at Rockville’s Lucy V. Barnsley Elementary School, she says, but when programming went online, she realized that the pace was too slow for her child—and for her. 

“To be fair, [the teachers] want none of the students to be left behind,” Timme says. But her daughter continually finished the online tests early and would sit and read a book or play video games on her Chromebook while the other students completed their work, she says. “It was tedious to watch the amount of time wasted when we could be, like, going hiking or going camping.” 

One month into the 2020-21 school year, the family switched to homeschooling. Now the stay-at-home mom plans field trips and activities with her daughter most days, and every Tuesday during the school year her daughter participates in the Homeschool Naturalist Program run by a nonprofit called Ancestral Knowledge, which offers outdoor educational programs that cater to homeschool families. 

Bill Kaczor, the executive director of Ancestral Knowledge, says homeschooling families can meet most of the state’s homeschool curriculum requirements while still having fun. “[We cover] everything from art to English composition, biology, physics, everything…you’d find in a public school but [in] more of a hands-on, experiential, self-motivated journey,” he says.  

Homeschooling requirements, as well as services made available to homeschooling families, vary by state, and some are more accommodating to homeschooling families than others, says Goodloe’s Rolstad. 

In Maryland, homeschooling families have the option of joining a state-registered umbrella organization or submitting to periodic portfolio reviews with their local school district to ensure that their child “is receiving regular, thorough instruction…in the studies usually taught in the public schools to children of the same age,” according to the state. 

“We want to make sure that students are being instructed,” Brian Beaubien, MCPS’s supervisor of online learning, interim instructional services and home instruction, says in an email. “But…parents have a lot of leeway in how they deliver and the specific curriculum that they use.”  

Umbrella organizations cost between $60 and $3,000 annually, according to the Maryland Homeschool Association. Though some have religious ties—particularly those that started in the 1980s and ’90s, when homeschooling was most popular with conservative Christians—many umbrella groups today are secular, even progressive in their focus. 

The nonpartisan International Center for Home Education Research notes the dearth of high-quality scientific studies on homeschooling outcomes and says, “It is thus impossible to say whether or not homeschooling as such has any impact on the sort of academic achievement measured by standardized tests.”

Homeschooling often involves one parent giving up their job, or cutting back on work hours, which can make it challenging for families of lower means. And in Maryland, families that pull their children out of the public school system lose not only their child’s spot in the classroom, but also the benefits that come with it, from access to sports and music extracurriculars to support services, including speech, occupational and physical therapy.

Anna Mwangachuchu learned that the hard way after she decided to homeschool her son, Aden, who has Down syndrome. Aden started special education kindergarten at Galway Elementary School, in Silver Spring, in September 2019. But a month in, Mwangachuchu began seeing red flags. 

“He didn’t bring anything home,” she says. “I wrote back to the teacher and said, ‘So, what does my child do from morning to evening in school?’ ” 

After getting no response for weeks, she learned that her son’s class was being taught by a series of substitute and temporary teachers. The school eventually started sending her weekly one-page memos outlining what Aden’s class was covering, but it wasn’t enough to make her feel that anyone other than herself was fully invested in his learning.

Once the pandemic hit and she was working with Aden one-on-one, the Silver Spring mother realized how far behind her son was lagging in reading and math.   

When it was time to return to in-person school, she decided to keep him home, though it meant she couldn’t go back to work as a registered nurse. “I [could] see that I [was able to] do more with him at home than when he was at school,” she says. She didn’t realize at the time that homeschooling him would also mean he’d lose access to the speech, occupational and physical therapy that his school provided. 

Now, Aden is making progress in reading and math, using programs and resources Mwangachuchu has found online and at the library, but he hasn’t had the support services he got in school because she can’t afford them, she says. 

“Unfortunately, if parents choose to home instruct their children…essentially the only county service to which they are entitled is standardized testing,” says MCPS’s Beaubien. “It is something that parents do have to weigh when they make the decision to homeschool.” 

“As a taxpayer, I feel like it’s unjust for my son to be penalized that way,” Mwangachuchu counters. “I don’t know what kind of a community we [live in] if our community cannot support [children with disabilities]…unless [they are] a number  in the school system.”

MCPS says student privacy rules bar it from commenting on any specific family.

Caraline Hickman decided long ago that her children wouldn’t go to public school, but she loved the small, private Seneca Academy in Darnestown that her kids attended since they were little, near their North Potomac home. 

“We were very heavily invested in Seneca. It was a big part of who we were as a family,” says her husband, John.

But when the pandemic arrived, the family discovered that they all enjoyed being at home together even more—and they decided to stick with it even after their school reopened. 

On a warm July afternoon, 11-year-old Ben Hickman is holding up a dark gray triangle-shaped item about the size of a silver dollar. “It’s a megalodon tooth,” he exclaims, referring to the prehistoric shark species. He found it on one of his family’s fossil-hunting excursions and came home to research the tooth’s origin. 

Since becoming homeschoolers, he and his 13-year-old sister, Sterling, learn at their own pace—which means high school-level algebra for Ben and high school-level geometry for Sterling, John says. 

Some days they head to the Horizons Homeschool Co-op in Gaithersburg, where dozens of children of all ages learn and play together. On other days, they participate in programs and seminars for homeschoolers offered across the region, including visits to the National Archives and The Phillips Collection in downtown Washington, D.C.

“Part of the fun for me is I’m learning as much as they are,” says Caraline, who, after years in the corporate world, is now a stay-at-home mom. 

The children have even started to enjoy writing, something their mother says they used to fight. Now Ben writes poetry nearly every day, and Sterling is working on a novel—her second. 

For John, a tech executive who works from home, the best part of homeschooling is that they aren’t “just exposing [their kids] to rote memorization of ideas or history or facts,” but rather delving into “something that happened in history and [reflect] on how…that applies in today’s social context.” 

Tracy Simmons says critical thinking is also at the heart of what made her pull Noah out of school. At Kennedy Krieger, Noah was asked questions about things that were read to him, and all he had to do was point to the right answer, something he could usually figure out because the prompts were so easy, not because he understood the material, she says. 

Now, she says, she can focus on things he’s interested in and help him to think through information at a deeper level. Recently they were reading together about coral reefs, and she turned to him and asked, “Noah, can you tell me something else that lives in the ocean?”

“I could have given him the choice: Is it fish that live in the ocean, or dogs?” she says—something equivalent to what his lessons were like in school. Instead, she says, “I waited a moment…and then he looked at me and said ‘whales.’ ” 

And when she followed it up by asking him to look at his letter cards and spell the word whales, he did. “That is huge,” she says proudly. “I am very hopeful that one day we will get to a place where Noah is in more of a school setting, but…where he can be engaged. ” 

For now, she says, they are taking it day by day. 

This story appears in the September/October issue of Bethesda Magazine.

The post Homeschooling in Montgomery County got a pandemic boost—that has stuck appeared first on MoCo360.

Brooke Eby

“Hi. I’m Brooke, and I was given the terminal diagnosis of ALS.” 

That’s how Brooke Eby, 34, of North Bethesda starts most of her Instagram stories and TikToks. But the words are hard to reconcile with the vibrant young woman on the screen. 

Since being diagnosed in March 2022 with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou
Gehrig’s disease, Eby has become one of the most upbeat faces to represent a progressive neuromuscular disorder with few treatments, no cure and certain death. And she has used her positive attitude, charisma and social media acumen to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars—and counting—for ALS research. 

“Other diseases have survivors that can go rally the troops. …With ALS, there are no survivors,” she says.

For the first few months following her diagnosis, Eby, a partnership manager at the California-based software company Salesforce, admits she spent her time “crying and shoveling M&M’s into my face.” 

But then she started typing into her phone a list of ideas to bring awareness of the disease to a younger generation. She shared the list with her mother, her sister and one of her friends. They were all supportive, she says, “so I just started making videos.”  

Eby—who graduated from Winston Churchill High School in Potomac and Lehigh University in Pennsylvania—has since posted about everything from the perils of dating while disabled to videos of her grimacing as she gulps down Relyvrio, her bitter ALS medication. The drug, approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration last year, is one of only a handful of ALS medications on the market.  

Eby posted videos from her condo every evening in May, during ALS Awareness Month. In many of the clips, she leans in close and answers her followers’ questions, which range from silly to deeply personal. 

“She had prepopulated the donation field on Instagram at five dollars,” recalls Carol Hamilton, vice president of development for the ALS Therapy Development Institute, the world’s largest nonprofit focused on ALS research. “Within days, she surpassed $50,000 [in donations],” Hamilton says.

That same month, Eby appeared on NBC’s Today show. An anonymous couple saw the interview and messaged her on Instagram to offer a $100,000 match. In about six weeks, Eby managed to raise more than $225,000 toward research for an ALS cure. 

Join MoCo360 and several of these Women Who Inspire for lunch Sept. 14

In June, the Baltimore Orioles approached Eby and asked if she’d throw out the ceremonial first pitch before a game against the Toronto Blue Jays. “If I can’t throw it really well, then I hope it goes so wrong that it goes viral,” she told Bethesda Magazine the day before the game. 

Afterward, she posted a video of herself—in a Lou Gehrig jersey—riding toward the pitcher’s mound in her motorized wheelchair and smiling as she lobbed a very impressive pitch right into the catcher’s mitt. 

“Brooke [is] able to reach outside of the ALS community using her humor and her social platform to introduce a whole new group of people to ALS in a nonintimidating way,” says Hamilton, who realized how special Eby is after her own 25-year-old daughter, Jae, saw Eby being interviewed on The Toast, a podcast popular with 20-somethings and 30-somethings, and was overcome with emotion. 

To Hamilton, it was impactful because, “It wasn’t me telling my daughter about an incredible young woman with ALS. It was my daughter…being touched and inspired by [Eby] on her own.” 

Today, Eby has over 86,000 TikTok followers and over 73,000 Instagram followers—and the numbers are rising steadily. 

On a sunny June afternoon, sitting in her wheelchair outside a coffee shop at North Bethesda’s Pike & Rose, Eby is still coming up with ideas to raise awareness—and research dollars. Though the disease has left her legs paralyzed, her upper body and her voice are still strong. 

As she sips her tea, she says that maybe she could conduct man-on-the-street-style interviews, like YouTube’s Billy Eichner. 

“I’d ask a bunch of different people, ‘Who do you picture when you picture ALS?’ and I guarantee 75% of them will say, ‘What’s ALS?’ ” she says, sitting back in her chair to ponder how she’d bring the video to fruition.

“I support anyone who is raising money for ALS,” she says, whether their focus is on covering the exorbitant cost of their own equipment and caregivers, or whether they are in the position to fundraise for research.

“I’m still working, I’m financially comfortable, so I feel like I sort of checked that care bucket off for myself and I want to focus…[on] research,” she says. “The cure is ultimately my goal.”

Angela Graham

Angela Graham has come a long way from the Benjamin Banneker middle schooler and Paint Branch High School student who spent her weekends and summers washing glass bottles at her father’s small biotech company.  

Today, Graham, 53, is president and CEO of Gaithersburg-based Quality Biological Inc. (QBI), a niche manufacturer of custom “reagents” used in biomedical research (think the substances that help scientists grow cells in a lab). 

Since buying the business from her parents 11 years ago, she’s pivoted away from the company’s previous focus on government work, and toward serving the research and development needs of biotech companies in early-stage treatment exploration for diseases from cancer to multiple sclerosis (MS)—a nervous system disorder that Graham has been battling since 1997. 

“I am not a scientist, so I cannot go into the lab and develop a cure for MS or any other disease,” she says. “But [now] my company can manufacture the…tools required for the research and development of new medicines.”  

She’s also become a leading voice in promoting Montgomery County as the ideal place for life science businesses to set up shop—not only to encourage innovative companies to locate here, but also to bring high-paying jobs to folks with and without a college degree.   

Early in the pandemic, Graham even helped create a Biotech Bootcamp, through a partnership with Montgomery College and WorkSource Montgomery, to provide lab training to displaced
hospitality workers, according to Judy Costello, special projects manager of business, innovation and economic development for the county executive’s office. 

“Angela’s support of local entrepreneurs always includes a special interest in helping our historically underserved communities,” Costello says. 

Pavel Khrimian, co-founder and chief business officer of Germantown-based Deka Biosciences, which devises therapeutics to treat cancer patients, says Graham let him and his business partner “incubate” their fledgling company at QBI for several years before they had the funds to branch out on their own. “We need more leaders like Angela who have the ability to give startups the opportunity to get started,” he says.

Graham has provided mentoring for other early-stage biotech companies too, particularly women- and minority-owned ones, though she says there’s still a shortage of them. “I am always the youngest, the only woman and the only Black [person] in the room,” she says. “The further up you go being a Black female, you definitely get accustomed to not having anyone in the room look like you.” 

It was a recruiter from Dow Chemical, while Graham was a fourth-year student at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, who made her appreciate the unique role she could play in the industry. She was showing him around campus when he told her he couldn’t think of another Black family with a business in biotech. “That made me look differently then at what my dad had done,” she says. “It made me really step back to understand the risks that he took.” 

The recruiter ended up offering her a job, but his words inspired her to return instead to QBI—which her father, a U.S. Navy vet who had used the GI Bill to study tissue culturing at the National Institutes of Health, founded when she was 13. 

After she spent three years at the family business, Bristol Myers Squibb lured her away, and then Pfizer offered her a high-level management spot. In 1997, shortly after taking that job, she was diagnosed with MS. “That was the first time I remember really feeling alone and afraid,” says Graham, who was 27 at the time. “I don’t think that feeling ever goes away for MS patients, but you learn to live with it.” 

Eventually she left the pharmaceutical industry and used her and her husband’s life savings—and a hefty home equity line of credit—to buy QBI. “I learned a lot from my parents, and one of the lessons was that…if something’s given to you, you don’t necessarily have the same dedication or passion for it,” she says. 

One thing she hasn’t changed at the company is its longstanding tradition of giving back to the community. Graham, who now lives near Olney, says her focus is on the eastern part of the county where she grew up. “I know that it’s kind of like the forgotten area where economic development has stalled,” she says.

“I’ve been very fortunate to have [had] some opportunities but…I grew up with people who didn’t,” she adds. “I believe that business can do good and…this is how we can make a difference.”

Anne Khademian

It was nearly 20 years ago when Anne Khademian first led a class of “nontraditional” students, she says. By then, the recognized scholar and author had already taught at some of the country’s most prestigious universities, but most of her students lived on campus while earning four-year degrees.

Shortly after she joined the full-time faculty of Virginia Tech at its Northern Virginia campus, though, she found herself teaching a graduate-level evening seminar on U.S. homeland security policy to seasoned individuals, many in lofty government roles. They were people who went home to their spouses and children, not their dorm rooms, and came to class with a wealth of experience.  

“I thought, Oh my gosh, what am I going to teach these people?” 

Once the class started, she found that she had much to offer, and so did her students. “It was this wonderful collaborative learning opportunity,” she says. “They were so committed, and they were so smart. …I loved everything about it.”

Fast forward to today, and Khademian, 61, who lives in Chevy Chase, is still focused on educating students who don’t fit the traditional fresh-out-of-high-school, four-year-degree model. But now it’s in her role as the executive director of the Universities at Shady Grove (USG) in Rockville—a campus that partners with nine institutions in the University System of Maryland (USM) to deliver undergraduate and graduate education programs to transfer students, many with limited time or resources. 

“This is the job I’ve waited for my whole life,” she says. 

Hired in 2020 after a nationwide search, Khademian came to USG with the goal of making higher education more accessible, affordable and better geared toward serving the needs of “fluid” students, as she calls them, who now comprise nearly three-quarters of all students in higher education, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. 

“They predominantly work, they predominantly have family responsibilities, they often are financing their own education, and oftentimes they are first in their family to go to college,” Khademian says. Many times their life situations dictate that they spread out their classes over many years, maybe even decades, she says. 

In her three years on campus, Khademian has partnered with industry leaders and employers across the region to ensure that the skills taught to these students are the skills employers need. 

She’s also led the charge in developing the 23-year-old institution’s first-ever strategic plan—USG 2.0—which lays out USG’s promise to help students attain meaningful employment and sustainable-wage careers. And she’s secured nearly $12 million in grants, gifts and federal funding to help make her vision a reality, according to the USM.

Since she’s taken the helm, the graduation rate among students who transfer into USG—which was already the highest of any campus in USM—has climbed even higher. At 81%, it’s now more than 10 percentage points higher than the statewide average, according to USM data.

“You’ve got a workforce that is in desperate need of educated, degree-holding employees” and an education system that’s geared toward serving students who live on campus, Khademian says. For those who are juggling work and family demands, “the traditional model is not going to cut it.”

Her biggest priorities now, she says, are that every student has an experiential learning opportunity, has access to a coach or a mentor, can use their degree or certificate to build a more meaningful career, and—with the help of scholarships and financial aid—can earn their credentials without taking on additional debt. 

“[Anne] not only understands the big picture of where the institution should go and what its main mission should be…she’s also the person who helps bring the people together,” says former County Executive Isiah “Ike” Leggett, her USG 2.0 co-chair, who also serves as a USM regent. 

Khademian’s backstory is just as impressive. A star runner on the boys cross-country team at her Michigan high school, Khademian attended Michigan State University on a full athletic scholarship and later entered its Athletics Hall of Fame. She went on to earn a master’s degree in public policy there, then a Ph.D. in political science from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. She’s since taught at the University of Wisconsin, Madison; the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; and the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. She was a tenured faculty member in the School of Public and International Affairs at Virginia Tech’s Northern Virginia campus for 17 years until USG lured her away. 

“All of these places…they are beautiful institutions; they transform lives,” she says of the universities where she’s served. “But we need additional models. Maybe we can do it here.” 

Susan Lee

Susan Lee will never forget the day in June 1968 when her father drove her and her two sisters from their Bethesda home to Washington, D.C.’s National Mall. He wanted his daughters to see the 3,000-person “protest camp” set up as part of the Poor People’s March on Washington—a six-week-long event that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. orchestrated but didn’t live to see. 

“It was a sea of an endless number of tents everywhere,” Lee, 69, recalls. “These people came from all over the country…to essentially fight discrimination and poverty and to bring their cause to national attention.”

The scene had a profound impact on Lee, and so did her father—a second-generation Chinese American who enlisted in the U.S. Navy at age 17 to fight in World War II. He instilled in his daughter a lifelong commitment to defend the rights of the most vulnerable: women and children, people of color, and those struggling to make ends meet. 

“He gave me a moral compass,” Lee says of her father, who died in 2014. “He wanted to change the world.”

Today, Lee is Maryland’s secretary of state under Democratic Gov. Wes Moore. Among many responsibilities, she serves as his top foreign affairs adviser and leads the charge to promote Maryland as an international hub for science and technology. 

On a sunny midday in June, Lee is sitting in her Annapolis office, taking a short break between meetings. She spent the morning hosting the Argentine ambassador, and now a half dozen staffers are scurrying around her, asking questions and handing her documents to review before a full slate of afternoon appointments. 

In her first six months in office, Lee met with representatives from more than 50 countries—encouraging them to expand their operations in the state. “I always feel like there isn’t enough time,” says the longtime Bethesda resident. “I’m always trying to get to the finish line.”

Bringing high-tech jobs to Maryland is just one of many causes Lee has championed over her decades-long career. As a Maryland delegate and state senator, she sponsored or co-sponsored more than 100 bills in support of victims of domestic violence and human trafficking, pay equity, transgender rights, consumer and identity-theft protections, gun safety, expanding Maryland’s hate crime laws and more. 

“When I see an injustice, I feel like I’ve got to do something about it. …I refuse to be a passive spectator,” she says. “A lot of times the constituents come to you because there’s a problem. …I want to get all the stakeholders to the table so we can…have everybody air their position [and] pass a bill that’s fair to everybody.”  

U.S. Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Takoma Park), a longtime friend and colleague of Lee’s, credits her with seeing more bills to passage during her eight years in the state Senate than any other state senator from Montgomery County. “She can always be counted on as an ally of the underdog,” he says. 

Born in San Antonio, Texas, Lee was 13 when her father took a job with the federal government and moved the family to Bethesda. Back then, many neighborhoods that fed into what was then Leland Junior High School had racially restrictive covenants that allowed for discrimination against Black people, Jews and other people of color, and she suffered tremendous bullying, she says. 

When her family moved to Potomac a year later, “my attitude improved, my grades improved, my self-esteem, everything,” she says.

After graduating from Winston Churchill High School and the University of Maryland, College Park, Lee headed to the University of San Francisco for law school and then returned to Montgomery County to take a job with the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. She eventually left the federal government for private practice but stayed active in local politics. 

She never intended to run for office herself, she says. Then she overheard a local elected official say that “the Asian American community doesn’t matter because we don’t vote,” she says. “That made me so mad I couldn’t see straight.” 

In 2002, when then-Gov. Parris Glendening asked if she’d fill the state House seat vacated by Nancy Kopp, she said yes—and proceeded to win the next three House elections, before running for the state Senate, where she served until Moore came calling.

Lee has never lost a race, and she’s been a “first” at every political office she’s held: first Asian American woman—and first Chinese American—elected to the Maryland House of Delegates; first Asian American elected to the Maryland Senate; and now Maryland’s first Asian American secretary of state. 

“I didn’t mean to be the first of anything,” she says. “What I hope I’ve done is lay the foundations for others who haven’t been represented in government to be able to be elected…and to…change the world for the better.” 

Donna Westmoreland

It was the summer of 2017, and construction on The Anthem, the highly anticipated music venue that anchors Southwest D.C.’s District Wharf, was almost complete. 

The project had been Donna Westmoreland’s baby. She’d spent nearly seven years working with engineers, architects and designers to make sure the space was state-of-the-art. The interior plans centered on an elaborate and expensive stage on wheels that took more than a year to design. Westmoreland had proudly called it an “engineering masterpiece.”  

A few months before opening, though, she and her team were about to sign pop phenom Lorde when the singer’s production manager casually mentioned on the phone to Westmoreland that the interior space of The Anthem was the perfect size and dimension for Lorde’s stage. 

In other words, Lorde would be bringing her own. 

That meant that the high-tech stage already under construction would need to be hauled away for Lorde’s show or perhaps scrapped altogether. 

“Is that a problem?” Westmoreland recalls Lorde’s rep asking after dropping the news. 

“Let me call you right back,” she calmly told him, even though she winced at the thought of the time and money already spent, she says. 

Hours later, after consulting with her team, she made the executive decision to swap the planned stage for one that could accommodate not only Lorde’s requirements but those of pretty much every act that could draw a sellout crowd of 6,000.

It wasn’t an easy choice to make, she says, but as chief operating officer of I.M.P., Westmoreland, 61, makes critical decisions like these every day. The native Bethesdan is second in command of a regional music empire that includes not only the 9:30 Club and The Anthem, but also The Atlantis and the Lincoln Theatre in D.C., and Merriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia, Maryland.

“What people don’t realize…is that she’s the one doing all the work,” says I.M.P founder and chairman Seth Hurwitz. “She’s really the one who’s run all the companies all these years, not me.”

It was 30 years ago when the University of Maryland grad was hired to be bar manager at the original 9:30 Club—the only venue I.M.P. owned or managed at the time. Within three months, she was named I.M.P.’s production manager, tasked with booking larger venues around D.C. and Baltimore for acts that could draw more fans than the club could accommodate at its former F Street Northwest location. 

As a woman in what is still a male-dominated industry, she remembers security guards demanding to see her backstage pass when she was the one giving out the passes. And being told “no, honey” by those who didn’t realize that she was the person in charge.

Hurwitz recalls artists’ reps calling him up and saying things like, “Your girl told me this or that,” flummoxed that a woman could have the authority to make major decisions. “I used to really get a big kick out of it when people would underestimate her and didn’t realize the buzzsaw they were walking into,” he says. “She has no trouble being a bad cop. Believe me—she’s not afraid of anyone.” 

Under her leadership today, women serve as general managers in four of I.M.P.’s five venues. And Westmoreland has used her platform to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars for causes from breast cancer awareness to women’s reproductive rights to gun safety advocacy. 

A triathlete in her spare time, she competes in about five races a year and has competed three times in San Francisco’s notorious Escape from Alcatraz Triathlon. These events are her “outlet,” she says, but she has also organized hikes up Sugarloaf Mountain that have cumulatively raised $250,000 for Breast Cancer Prevention Partners. 

Her philanthropic bent goes back to the late ’90s when she left I.M.P. for a few years to join musician Sarah McLachlan on the West Coast to launch the original Lilith Fair, a traveling music festival that consisted solely of female artists. 

Over its three-year run, the Lilith Fair grossed more than $52 million—more than $10 million of it going to charity by directing $1 of each ticket sale to a women’s shelter in each of the cities where the festival was held, Westmoreland says, and one of her jobs was to select the recipients. 

“The impact…of these [charities] receiving a check for something like $17,500 that was going to make a real difference…was so gratifying and so powerful that it’s now just a part of me,” she says. 

“We’re not curing cancer or solving world hunger, but…there’s something spiritual about music and bringing people together,” Westmoreland says. “And when you are doing [something for the greater] good as well, it’s awesome.” 

Margarita Womack

Wearing a lab coat, hairnet, shoe coverings and disposable gloves, Margarita Womack is walking a visitor through her nearly four-year-old empanada plant in Rockville. She stops to make small talk in Spanish with practically every worker she passes, and to share with her guest the backstory behind almost every piece of equipment. 

“We put this together ourselves,” she gushes over a conveyer belt designed to cool the empanadas after they are fried. 

It’s clear that the Bethesda mother of three is also the proud mom of a burgeoning empanada dynasty. “It’s like my fourth baby,” she says. 

In 2020, Womack’s empanada business, Maspanadas, had seven employees; now it has 55. It’s on track to earn revenue of $8 million this year and triple its square footage before the end of 2023.

But business success is only part of Womack’s mission. Just as important, she says, is partnering with churches and nonprofits to provide jobs, training and other support to people who need it most. Currently, 90% of her employees are immigrants, more than 80% are women, and about half are refugees, mostly from Central and South America, she says. She offers her employees wellness classes and instruction in digital and financial literacy. 

When you are new to this country, “you need much more than a paycheck,” says Womack, 43, who grew up speaking French in school and Spanish at home and learned English after moving to the United States to finish college.

She requires only that her hires have valid work permits and are “responsible, reliable and willing to learn,” she says. “We do have very often people at the front door looking for a job.” 

Born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia, Womack came to the U.S. at age 20. At the time, guerrillas in her home country were targeting people at random for kidnappings. Her family, like many others, had started to receive threatening phone calls. She says she’ll never forget the ominous message warning that her family would be declared “a military objective” if they didn’t cooperate. That means, Womack explains, “they are going to kill you.”  

Under her mother’s instructions, Womack, then a sophomore in college in Colombia, quickly sent out as many college transfer applications as she could and ended up completing her bachelor’s degree at Tulane University in New Orleans. Then she headed north to Princeton University in New Jersey, where she earned a doctorate in ecology and evolutionary biology, began a career in academia, got married and started a family.

After her husband was accepted into a fellowship program that brought them to Washington, D.C., she took a job teaching middle school science at the National Cathedral School. She loved teaching, she says, but after four years, “I [had] two boys, a baby and a full-time job, and [I was] ready to jump out a window.”  

She switched gears and started a catering company in 2017 that soon morphed into a manufacturer of frozen empanadas that she sold to restaurants and delis around the D.C. region. She squeezed in an M.B.A. from Georgetown University. When the pandemic struck and restaurant sales ground to a halt, she pivoted to retail sales—mostly packaging her empanadas under large chains’ private labels—and business took off. 

The skills required for scientific research aren’t all that different from those required to launch a consumer products line, Womack says. “It’s all [about] problem solving…you generate a question and then have a working hypothesis.”

In 2019, Maspanadas was so successful that it outgrew its space at D.C.’s Union Kitchen—the accelerator where it got its start—and she opened her Rockville plant.

Today, Womack’s empanadas are still sold under large chains’ private labels. But they are also in the frozen-food aisles of more than 2,000 stores around the country, including Whole Foods, Costco, Target, Stop & Shop and Sprouts, and online via HelloFresh—all in brightly colored packaging that bears the Maspanadas brand. 

“I would call her the prototype entrepreneur because she had a big vision, very driven to succeed and…fearless,” says Richard McArdle, a retired food industry executive who met Womack as she was transitioning from restaurant sales to retail. He’s now a Maspanadas adviser and investor. 

“She grew the business several hundred percent in a year, and it’s just kept going,” he says. “She [also] goes out and hires and trains and nurtures and raises up people that are out there just looking for a chance. …A lot of people say [they do] stuff like that, but she really lives it.” 

This story appears in the September/October issue of Bethesda Magazine.

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One hundred years ago, when Bethesda’s Burning Tree golf club first opened, Prohibition was in full swing, Warren G. Harding was president, and women weren’t allowed on club grounds, let alone the 18-hole course. Seventeen presidents later, Burning Tree’s no-women-allowed policy hasn’t budged. That is, other than a change made in the 1990s that allows members’ wives to book appointments at the pro shop just before Christmas to buy gifts for their husbands. 

Today, the club is one of about eight male-only golf clubs left in the nation, according to GolfLink, a California-based website that connects golfers with courses near them. No other golf club in the D.C. region, or in Maryland, shares Burning Tree’s exclusionary policy. Even the iconic Cosmos Club—Washington, D.C.’s 145-year-old social club for the region’s political and business elite—has admitted women since 1988.

Legend has it that Burning Tree was the brainchild of a group of guys who were frustrated after playing 18 holes behind a slow-moving foursome of ladies at nearby Chevy Chase Golf Club. The men decided right then to create a golf course and clubhouse where women were excluded—much like the “no girls allowed” policies of countless boys and their tree houses.

For much of the 20th century, Burning Tree was the gathering place of the nation’s most influential men, including presidents Franklin Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon and George H.W. Bush, and a long list of Supreme Court justices, U.S. congressmen, foreign dignitaries and business leaders. Renowned broadcast journalist Edward R. Murrow reportedly learned of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor while on the 10th tee at Burning Tree but finished his round anyway, figuring it was probably fake news. 

Throughout much of the club’s history, all sitting U.S. presidents have been offered honorary membership. So had all U.S. Supreme Court justices, at least until 1981, when Justice Sandra Day O’Connor took the bench, says Susan Ness, a longtime women’s rights advocate and former president of the Montgomery County Commission for Women. O’Connor, the first female U.S. Supreme Court justice, was not offered membership at Burning Tree, “and she was an avid golfer,” Ness says, “but she didn’t press the case.” 

Still, Ness adds, “A lot of business went on at the club…and women trying to make it in the business world were at a distinct disadvantage.”

Starting in 1989, Burning Tree’s discriminatory policy cost the club Maryland’s “open-space” tax break that other private golf clubs in the state are granted. But a higher tax bill—valued then at $186,000 and now at about $1 million annually, according to insiders—hasn’t persuaded club members to open their course to women. Rather, members have chosen to pony up more in dues to cover the added cost. 

Stewart Bainum Jr., chairman of the board of Choice Hotels International, who served from 1978 to 1986 in the Maryland legislature, first in the House of Delegates and then in the Maryland Senate, had hoped the loss of the tax benefit would encourage the club to change its ways. He isn’t surprised that it didn’t, Bainum says, but he is irked, nonetheless. “That irritated me. Still does,” he says. While in political office, Bainum led the charge to get Burning Tree’s open-space tax exemption revoked due to the club’s discriminatory policies. In 1983, he and his sister Barbara Bainum Renschler filed a lawsuit against the club in Montgomery County Circuit Court; Judge Irma Raker ruled in their favor. But on appeal, the club prevailed. “You [had] taxpayers…subsidizing the clubs that [wouldn’t] consider them for membership,” Bainum says.  

The club and its supporters were so powerful that it took Bainum six years of court challenges, legislative proposals and cajoling to get Maryland’s laws amended to strip Burning Tree of its preferential tax treatment. “It was a who’s who of wealthy and politically well-connected people,” Bainum says. “Members from all over the country…flocked to Burning Tree.”

The club has long welcomed Black members, but it has kept a low profile in recent years as the nation’s moral compass has shifted toward inclusion of all people—not just women and those of different races and religions, but also of the LGBTQ+ community. Over the past few decades, most mentions of Burning Tree in the news have involved high-level politicos who turned down invitations to join. The list includes presidents George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. 

It’s unlikely that presidents Donald Trump or Joe Biden are Burning Tree members either, says golf journalist Todd Kelly, who has written extensively about U.S. presidents’ golf preferences. “I would be shocked if Biden…has ever even stepped foot on the property there,” says Kelly, the assistant managing editor at GolfWeek. “Just playing one round there would raise thousands of questions about equality and equity. … And Trump was always flying Air Force One to one of his properties to play.” (Neither presidents Trump nor Biden’s camps returned Bethesda Magazine’s emailed requests for comment.)

Burning Tree “has a longstanding policy of refraining from public comment,” wrote Charles Briggs, the club’s longtime general manager, in an email to Bethesda Magazine, responding to a request for an interview. That’s a far different stance than during the club’s heyday, when stories about President Dwight Eisenhower’s golf rituals on Burning Tree’s fairways and visits to the club from heads of state regularly made headlines.  

One notable exception to the club’s current fly-under-the-radar posture: In 2019, Fox News’ chief political anchor Bret Baier told Global Golf Post that he is not only a Burning Tree member, but also that he’d won the club championship the year before. (Baier could not be reached for comment.)

While pressure on Georgia’s iconic Augusta National Golf Club—home of the famed Masters Tournament—was so intense that the club succumbed more than a decade ago and now boasts a handful of female members, pressure on Burning Tree to do the same has mostly fizzled out. 

Ness says Augusta was crucial in the fight for women’s rights because it has “the preeminent golf competition…that attracts so much attention,” while Burning Tree has become more of a local golf course with a storied past. “I don’t think anybody talks about Burning Tree”
anymore, she says. “It just doesn’t have that panache.”

This story appears in the July/August issue of Bethesda Magazine.

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Walt Whitman High School choral director Michelle Kim was just getting off the bus following the music department’s spring trip to Florida when Principal Robby Dodd called her over. He’d been awaiting the group’s arrival with a time-sensitive request: Would Kim and the school’s chamber choir perform at an upcoming event to support the Jewish community in honor of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, or Yom HaShoah?

Exhausted and bleary-eyed after 13 hours on the road, Kim jumped at the opportunity. She and her students would have little time to prepare and would likely have to learn at least one Hebrew song, but she knew the chamber choir—the school’s most advanced group of singers—would be as enthusiastic as she was. And she was right. 

“We had the option to decline, but I don’t think anyone said no,” says rising Whitman senior and chamber choir member Markian Frykman, who, like Dodd, Kim and the majority of the chamber choir students, is not Jewish. “I think the solemnity of the ask gave it, like, a serious tone and…everybody was like, yeah, it would be…honorable to do that.”

Three weeks later, on April 17, the Whitman chamber choir sang before a packed house at Silver Spring’s Flora M. Singer Elementary School—believed to be the first public school in the nation to be named after a Holocaust survivor. One of the songs the choir performed, Oseh Shalom, is a popular Hebrew song whose title translates as “He Who Makes Peace.”  

“The audience was really pleased,” Frykman says of the nearly 200 people who turned out for the event, including dozens of church and civic leaders, as well as members of the Jewish community. “For the people who understood the words, it added to their emotions.” 

Across the nation, antisemitism has risen to historic levels, and Montgomery County is no exception. More than half of the 109 antisemitic acts reported in Maryland in 2022 occurred in Montgomery County—a 261% increase over the year before, according to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), and early 2023 reports suggest no sign of waning. 

Yet, observers say, the increase in targeted attacks on the county’s Jews has also given rise to something almost as unprecedented: a heightened level of solidarity from non-Jewish groups toward the Jewish community—and promises from many church, civic and school leaders to do even more to help quell the rising antisemitic tide.

Even the Montgomery County Jewish Educators Alliance (MCJEA)—founded in January in response to the rising number of antisemitic incidents taking place in the county’s public schools—counts about one-third of its active participants as non-Jewish, says MCJEA founder Andrew Winter, principal of Rockville’s Ritchie Park Elementary School. 

Guila Franklin Siegel, associate director of the North Bethesda-based Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington (JCRC), says she has a long list of non-Jewish school, community and religious leaders she considers allies in the fight against Jewish hate. “While I know that there is a tremendous amount of work to do, I’m very, very cognizant of the people who sit in natural positions of power who have the ability to do something and are taking that seriously,” she says.

Over the past year, anti-Jewish acts in the county have included swastikas painted on classroom walls and school desks, threatening emails sent to those of the Jewish faith, flyers left on neighborhood doorsteps warning of Jewish evils, and even physical assault: In January, an elderly Jewish man was attacked in a Gaithersburg grocery store by a young man yelling antisemitic tropes. Court documents show that the assailant’s friends stood by during the attack, yelling, “Do it for Kanye,” in homage to the rapper Ye, formerly Kanye West, whose Twitter account has been suspended since December 2022, following a series of tweets filled with antisemitic rhetoric. 

Before his suspension, “Kanye West [had] more Twitter followers than there are Jews in the world,” says Montgomery County Councilmember Andrew Friedson, a Democrat whose district includes Bethesda, Potomac and Chevy Chase. Yet data shows that his comparison is an understatement; the controversial rapper had twice as many followers as there are Jews. 

According to Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics’ most recent estimates, there are 15.2 million Jews in the world;  Ye had more than 32 million Twitter followers, according to Social Blade, a website that tracks social media statistics. Social Blade also reports that the number of Ye’s followers increased after he began posting antisemitic remarks last year.

“Antisemitism is a conspiracy-based hatred, and conspiracy-based hatreds are very difficult to fight because…the response to it can reinforce it at the same time,” Friedson says. “If you don’t call it out, then you are normalizing and allowing antisemitism to fester…but when you call it out, it’s used to prove the conspiracy.”

In November, Friedson successfully lobbied for the county council to pass a resolution to address and combat antisemitism. The resolution passed unanimously but had been delayed several months because of pushback from community groups, including the Maryland office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), over the resolution’s definition of antisemitism. Opponents of the resolution argued that the language used in defining antisemitism would have a chilling effect on criticism of Israel and its policies. 

Zainab Chaudry, director of CAIR’s Maryland office, told The Washington Post at the time that the resolution’s definition of antisemitism was “deeply divisive.” Yet following the January assault on the Jewish man in Gaithersburg, CAIR’s Maryland office put out a press release saying it “welcomed a hate crime charge” brought against the suspect. 

In the release, Chaudry noted that CAIR had also condemned an antisemitic “Day of Hate” that had been planned earlier this year by neo-Nazi groups, and she encouraged American Muslims to offer support to their Jewish neighbors. “CAIR and the American Muslim community stand in solidarity with all those challenging antisemitism, systemic anti-Black racism, xenophobia, Islamophobia, white supremacy, and all other forms of bigotry,” the release stated. 

“Ten years ago, those statements of solidarity may not have been forthcoming,” Siegel says, adding that much of the support Jewish groups are now seeing from outside the Jewish community comes from decades of synagogues and other Jewish groups partnering with church, mosque and civic leaders in helping underserved communities both locally and around the world. 

The Rev. Timothy Warner, of Emory Grove United Methodist Church in Gaithersburg, still reflects on the time nearly 20 years ago when a vandal struck several Black churches in upper Montgomery County, painting swastikas and other hate symbols on the sides of the buildings. One of the county officials working on the investigation  at the time was a Jewish man, Warner says, who phoned him in tears. “He said, ‘Rev. Warner, I am so, so sorry for this. If you need me to come and sit on your church steps with you, I will do that because I understand what this is like,’ ” Warner recalls. 

These days, Warner is an outspoken supporter of the Jewish community. “The history of African Americans and the Jews is very much the same in terms of both the hatred and the enslavement and liberation part of it,” he says.

Historically, Jewish activists have been reticent to focus on themselves, and instead have focused on helping those less fortunate, Siegel says, but “one of our main priorities right now is to…give [those outside the Jewish faith] opportunities to learn more about Judaism. …It’s a difficult shift for many Jewish people to speak out about their own identities,” but without that, we “will not even make a dent in the problem.”

Friedson notes that, “To a certain extent, what has changed [across the world] is the ability for like-minded people to find each other on social media, for people to be radicalized without leaving their house, without going to a meeting. …There used to be secret meetings where radical people used to get together in the middle of the night…now those radical meetings happen every single second of every single day, and nobody has to move in order to let them happen.”

“Jews Not Welcome.” Those words were scrawled across the entrance sign in front of Bethesda’s Walt Whitman High School in December 2022. The vandalism occurred just days after a schoolwide lesson on antisemitism, and one day after a swastika was painted at Westfield Montgomery mall, a few miles away. 

Less than a week later, Rabbi Michael Safra of Rockville’s B’Nai Israel Congregation received a two-page letter from the Black Ministers Conference of Montgomery County, Maryland. Its subject line: Letter of Support to the Jewish Community.

“The on-going acts desecrating property in the public space and seeking to provoke fear in the Jewish community are acts of wickedness and cowardness,” the letter stated. It ended with the hope that such acts of hatred and violence will unite “the Jewish people and Black people into a resolve to continue fighting until all people can live in love, honor, and respect for each other.” 

The letter was particularly meaningful to the Jewish community, Safra says, because “there are so many times when things happen and nobody reaches out—going both ways.” 

Safra is part of a group of about 15 rabbis and Black church leaders who gather periodically to discuss the issues that affect both communities. The group, which calls itself  Bridge Builders, started meeting over Zoom shortly after the murder of George Floyd in May 2020 at the hands of Minneapolis police officers. Now they meet in person at churches and synagogues around the county. 

“It is an unfortunate reality,” Safra says, “that without these kinds of terrible acts of hatred, we might not bring ourselves together as much as we should.” 

Within months of receiving that letter—as antisemitic graffiti was discovered in and around more schools and public buildings in the county—additional emails and letters of support arrived at JCRC’s  headquarters, including from Gaithersburg-based Identity, an organization focused on supporting Latino youths. 

“Please trust that the Jewish community is not feeling and fighting Jewish hate alone,” wrote Diego Uriburu, Identity’s executive director. “For the Identity community, this struggle is personal, as you, our friends at JCRC and in the Jewish community who are being harassed and assaulted, have stood with us when few others did.”

Uriburu sent the letter in early April, just before the start of Passover, a Jewish holiday that celebrates the freeing of Jewish slaves in Egypt. Outreach followed from other Identity staff inquiring about Holocaust training programs, as well as interest in accelerating a program that pairs Jewish and Latino middle schoolers to build “cross-cultural understanding and the skills necessary to be a good ally,” says Nora Morales, Identity’s program director, by way of email.

Non-Jewish community and religious leaders also have been gathering alongside their Jewish counterparts at events that have popped up following the county’s more publicized antisemitic acts. The Rev. Anne Derse, deacon and minister of community engagement at St. John’s Norwood Episcopal Church in Chevy Chase, has attended two rallies and a town hall focused on combating Jewish hate, including one in November, after antisemitic graffiti was found scribbled along the Bethesda Trolley Trail. 

“We in the faith community that share values of inclusiveness…have to stand up and support the Jewish community,” she says. “We’re still kind of pulling ourselves together around what specific steps we…can take, but I want to be a part of that, certainly, and I know that there are people in my faith community…that will also want to be a part of that effort.” 

At Montgomery County Public Schools’ Carver Educational Services Center in Rockville, “it’s been all hands on deck,” says Tracy Oliver-Gary, the supervisor of the school system’s social studies curriculum for grades pre-K through 12. She and her team of educators spent much of the past school year rewriting the elementary and middle school curricula. Until now, she says, there has been no instruction at the elementary level on anything related to the Jewish experience, and only a brief look at the Holocaust in middle school.

Starting with the 2023-24 school year, the new elementary and middle school syllabi will include more lessons in Jewish history and the origins of antisemitism—which started 1,000 years before the Holocaust, Oliver-Gary points out—as well as more instruction in critical thinking skills. The hope, she says, is that when  students come across a video game or social-media post with a hate-filled message, they will learn to ask themselves: ”What do they know about the author? Where’s the author’s bias? Why do they think the author said this? Is it credible or not?” 

The new elementary curriculum will also introduce the concept of being an “upstander” (as opposed to a bystander) when one encounters situations involving hate and intolerance. Oliver-Gary says that the goal is to teach students what “hate acts” look like, the harm they do, and how people throughout history have stood together to fight them,  “to build empathy so they can have the courage to fight it [going forward].” 

As antisemitism started to rise over the past year, the school system was caught off guard—and so was the Jewish community, Siegel says. “Antisemitism waxes and wanes, and we were in a period of waning for several decades.” 

Once it started rising, community leaders, and especially school leaders, were stuck playing a game of whack-a-mole, she explains. “Every time there was a swastika, there’d be a response—and, you know, there were more and more swastikas,” she says. Now the school system is working with the Jewish community on a “systemic response, a thoughtful response, a proactive response.”

Oliver-Gary says she recently spoke with an educator on the West Coast who had witnessed a taglike game created by a group of elementary school kids on a school playground. In the game, children were assigned roles of either Nazi soldiers or Jews fleeing them. If the Nazis caught them, they died. Hearing about that game, she says, proved to her that antisemitism needed to be addressed in the curriculum before middle school.

“You start seeing things that are small, a little speech here, a little act here, and people don’t pay attention to it and then it becomes normalized, and more and more people do it and people get targeted even more,” she says. Kids need to understand that “when they start seeing the seed [of hate], before it grows, before it blossoms fully…to dig up.”

“We still live in an inclusive and welcoming community where people are not only tolerant but are appreciative of a diversity of faiths and backgrounds and race and language,” Friedson adds, “but it doesn’t take a majority of people to make places feel unsafe.”

Journalist Amy Halpern has worked in print and television news and as the associate producer of an Emmy Award-winning documentary. She lives in Potomac.

This story appears in the July/August issue of Bethesda Magazine.

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Kate Mercer and Sara Gordon grew up a block apart in their eclectic Cabin John neighborhood. They celebrated birthdays together, had sleepovers at each other’s homes, and ice-skated together on the C&O Canal when it froze over. Their moms were in the same book club and sewing circle.

Now, Mercer, 34, and Gordon, 35, are moving back to the houses that their moms still live in and own. But this time, the longtime friends are bringing their husbands and kids with them. “We’re not [good at sewing],” Mercer says of herself and Gordon. “But maybe we could turn [the neighborhood sewing circle] into wine night.”

Over the past year, each young woman’s childhood home has been extensively remodeled to include private “suites” for their mothers—giving them, their husbands and their kids the run of the rest of the house. Their homecomings—along with the renovations that allow for more comfortable multigenerational living—were their moms’ ideas.

“I could have sold my home after my husband died and moved into a little condo that probably would have cost what I’d have sold my house for, but I didn’t want that,” says Chris Davison, Mercer’s mom, 63. She raised all four of her now-grown children in the house; it has been part of her late husband’s family since the early 1900s. 

Davison hosted Mercer, her husband, Ryan, and their two young daughters for more than a year during the pandemic, after the couple sold their house in Gaithersburg and couldn’t find another house in their price range nearby. “Everything went skyrocketing,” Davison says.  

After 15 months, the Mercers relocated to an apartment in North Bethesda, but Davison knew that that the growing family would eventually need more space. Living under the same roof worked out so well during the pandemic that rather than risk that her daughter, son-in-law and grandchildren move out of the area to find a house they could afford, she asked them if they wanted to move back in with her, this time permanently. The couple, whose third child is due in May, said yes right away, she recalls. 

“Both me and Kate love to cook,” says Davison’s son-in-law Ryan Mercer, 33. “It’s not a big deal to put out another plate for ‘Neenie,’ ” the name his kids call Davison. And his mother-in-law, he says, is easy to get along with.

Meanwhile, Nicki Wright—Gordon’s mom—was proposing something similar to her daughter and son-in-law. Widowed since 2016, Wright was living alone in the home that had been in her husband’s family for generations—the house where she and her husband had hosted their annual Easter egg hunt and where her daughter, an only child, was married. 

Wright, 73, had been watching her grandson, Franklin, full time since he was born in 2021. It was a great arrangement for all of them to have her watching the baby while they were at work, but the apartment that Gordon and her husband Andrew were renting was getting tight. She worried that they, too, might end up farther away where housing was more affordable. 

If they all pooled their resources, Wright figured, they could make updates to the Cabin John house—including a bumped-out suite for her—to make it comfortable for everyone to live there together. “I said, ‘What do you guys think about moving in with me and we’ll make an addition?’ ” she recalls asking Sara and Andrew, 38. “And they said, ‘Oh, yeah!’ ” Now Wright and her family are waiting for renovations to the Cabin John house to be completed. In the meantime, she has been renting an apartment near her daughter and son-in-law’s apartment in Northwest D.C.

Multigenerational living is a growing trend—and not just with adult children taking in elderly parents. Rather, as property values rise and neighborhoods in desirable public school districts become unattainable for some young families, many older folks still in their longtime homes are taking in their grown children and grandchildren to live with them. 

The multigenerational trend is due in part to changing demographics. Recent immigrants, as well as Black, Asian and Hispanic Americans, now account for most of the overall population growth in both the county and the U.S., and these are the groups more likely to live with several generations under one roof, according to the Pew Research Center. But the increase in multigenerational living is also the byproduct of a housing crunch that hit the West Coast over two decades ago and more recently has moved eastward, according to the National Association of Home Builders.

In 2019, to help alleviate the local housing shortage, Montgomery County amended longstanding zoning laws to make it easier for homeowners to build accessory dwelling units (ADUs) on their properties. Also known as “in-law suites,” ADUs are basically secondary residences on existing homesites—with kitchens, bedrooms, full bathrooms and their own entrances. They can be stand-alone buildings or self-contained units built over a garage, carved out of a walk-out basement, or attached to the back of the main house.

ADUs give homeowners more options when it comes to supporting their grown children, grandchildren or elderly parents, say housing advocates. These units also make great rental properties, according to local builders who say ADU rentals are particularly attractive to schoolteachers and first responders who work in the county but can’t afford the rent of most large apartment complexes near their jobs.   

The county’s zoning changes not only make the ADU permitting process easier than before, but also allow homeowners with lots as small as 6,000 square feet to build them. Previously, ADUs were generally allowed only on lots of more than an acre. 

“It’s opened the opportunity for more people to come and take advantage of the new law,” says Ehsan Motazedi, deputy director for the Montgomery County Department of Permitting Services. Before the zoning changes were implemented, the county issued between 20 and 30 ADU permits most years, Motazedi estimates. Now those numbers have more than tripled. According to the Department of Housing and Community Affairs (DHCA), 126 ADU permits were granted in 2022, 122 in 2021, and 110 in 2020, the first full year of the zoning change.

“People want [ADUs],” says Sean Ruppert, president of Cabin John-based OPaL, the design-build firm that renovated the Davison and Wright homes. But he says the cost of an ADU—which can easily top $150,000—along with the size restrictions that are still in place have so far kept many people in the county from going forward with one. 

ADU permitting was not required for the Wright and Davison projects because neither involved a second kitchen or a separate entrance, though Wright says she briefly considered having her own stand-alone unit. “I could have had a little house in the backyard, but I wanted…to be together,” she says.

“I had a couple who was very close [to building an ADU],” adds Marty Mitchell, president of Hometown Collection, an affiliate of Rockville-based home builder Mitchell & Best. “The grandmother was basically the day care,” and the family wanted to all live under one roof, he says. “They couldn’t get over the [county’s] 1,200-square-foot limitation [on ADUs],” so they put the plan on hold. 

Mitchell says that even if the size limit and cost of building an ADU is discouraging to some homeowners, he’s still seeing an uptick in buyers for home plans that include two owner’s suites—one upstairs and one on the main level—a design popular with multigenerational households.

Mitchell is so confident that the ADU trend is growing that his company is about to market two different plans for stand-alone ADUs. “Going back to 50, 60, 70 years ago, [the county] chewed up the buildable land [with single-family-zoned lots] and now we still have people who [want to come], but we just can’t produce enough housing for them,” Mitchell says. “ADUs are just one more tool in the tool chest.”  

Other area builders are seeing not only a surge in multigenerational housing in general, but also in ADUs. This spring, Maryam Tabrizchi, principal architect with Chevy Chase-based Elie Ben Architecture, completed two high-end ADUs for clients—including one for a Bethesda family with four young kids. “In the short term, we are going to rent the ADU to younger people…for a more affordable housing option for them and some income for us to offset some of the cost,” says the owner of the Bethesda property, who didn’t want to be identified because he didn’t want to invite scrutiny of the family’s use of the ADU. In the long term, the homeowner says by email, “our parents might need assistance…[or] we may move into the ADU and share the main house…with the family of one of our children. …It’s all about having options.”

Teresa Frene, 66, remembers the battles she had with the county over permitting for her stand-alone ADU. In 2008, the divorced mother of three applied for a permit to build one behind the Silver Spring split-level that had been in her family for years. She wanted to live in the ADU and offer the main house to her grown son, his girlfriend at the time and the couple’s newborn baby, all of whom were living in Northeast D.C. “I was a pioneer,” she says. 

The county kept rejecting her plans and sending her back to the drawing board. It took about eight months to get the project approved. “Ultimately, after being a completely persistent pain in the neck to the people at the county, they gave it to me,” she says. Frene has now lived in her two-story ADU for about 13 years. It has a full kitchen, a main bedroom and a living room on the main level, and two bedrooms and a bathroom downstairs. These days, two of her eight grandchildren live with her. Her son remained in the main house after his previous relationship ended and now lives there with his wife of eight years and the couple’s twin toddler sons. 

When Frene’s young grandsons want to visit her, they stand on the deck—which provides entrances to her place and the main house—and yell, “Yaya! I wanna see Yaya!” she says, and she’ll 

stop whatever she’s doing to open the door and let them in. “It’s a win-win,” she says. 

In October, Frene fell on the stairs while taking out the trash. Her daughter-in-law, who’s a doctor, was there to confirm that she’d broken her arm, so her son immediately drove her to the emergency room. “It’s nice to have a doctor in the house,” Frene says.

For Cheryl Winn, 43, multigenerational living has always been the norm. When her mother’s parents immigrated to the U.S. from Hong Kong in the 1970s, her parents—who were already living here—chipped in with her grandparents to buy a small split-level in Bethesda with the intention of everyone living together. 

When Winn’s mom found out she was pregnant with her, the two generations bought a slightly larger house together—a ranch-style house about a mile away—and all moved there. The plan was always that her grandparents would live with them. They helped raise Winn and her two siblings, and eventually, the younger generation helped care for their elders, Winn says. 

At one point, four generations lived under one roof—including Winn’s grandmother, her parents, her husband, and their two oldest kids. She and her husband officially bought the house from her parents eight years ago, “but that didn’t change anything except on paper,” she says. Now a mother of five, Winn and her family built a
second-story addition on the house about six years ago so she and her husband could have a suite upstairs and each of their children could have their own bedroom down the hall. Her parents have a “wing” of their own off the living room, complete with sitting room, bedroom and full bathroom.

It was a personal choice, not a financial decision, for everyone to live together, Winn says. “I had a relationship with my grandparents that I wouldn’t trade for anything, because we lived together and we grew up with them,” she says. “And we [want] that for our kids as well.”

This story appears in the May/June issue of Bethesda Magazine. 

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