In October 1977, Barbara Dixon found herself in a dire situation. The elementary school secretary had spent four months at her husband’s bedside before he died of a brain tumor, leaving her with two daughters in their pre-teens to support on a small salary.
Dixon was in her mid-30s, a single mom, looking for a way forward. She realized after helping care for her husband that she was interested in nursing, but she needed help to bring the dream to fruition.
Fate soon intervened from a team of five Athens women who had formed a foundation a year earlier in the name of suffragist Jeannette Rankin to award scholarships to women college students 35 and older with low income. Dixon was their first recipient in 1978, with a grant of $500 that helped her pay for books and supplies for a nursing degree at Athens Technical School.
Fifty years later, the $16,000 seed money from the sale of Rankin’s Watkinsville house has burgeoned into a $6 million endowment under the auspices of the Jeannette Rankin Foundation that has helped over 3,000 women change the trajectory of their lives and achieve their dreams through advanced education. And in its 50th year, the foundation is hoping to reach a $16 million fundraising goal to fund more grant programs.
How it started
To tell the story of the foundation, we need to go back 145 years to the woman who inspired a movement. Rankin was born in 1880, the eldest of seven children on a western Montana ranch. Her father was a carpenter turned wealthy mill owner, producing the timber that built homes and businesses in what became the town of Missoula.
As the eldest, Rankin helped raise her siblings when her mother became ill. Her father relied on her like a business partner. She sat with him in business meetings and accompanied him on visits to building sites and lumber camps.
With the grit and determination of her pioneer upbringing, she would be drawn to the fight for women’s suffrage, traversing the country by train, stagecoach, and car, campaigning for women’s right to vote, child labor reform, and anti-war activism.
Her tenacity earned her election to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1916 — the first woman elected to a federal position — where she introduced the bill that became the 19th Amendment, assuring women a voice in American democracy. She voted against America’s entry into World War I in her first term and against World War II during her second term in 1940.
She spent the rest of her life lobbying for women’s rights, civil rights and world peace. At 87, she led the Jeannette Rankin Brigade in the march on Washington in 1968 with 5,000 women, calling on Congress to end the Vietnam War, poverty, and racism.
From Montana to Georgia
In 1924, Rankin moved across the country after hearing about Athens from a friend. She loved the town for its academic spirit and pursuit of knowledge, reminiscent of her home in Missoula.
She bought land in Bishop and lived in a small house that she designed and named the White House. She cleared the land herself, grew her own food, and lived in “chosen impoverishment.” She brought people together to discuss ideas, learn, and change minds.
In the early 1940s, her Bishop home burned, so she bought a small house near Watkinsville where she lived until her final illness.
Enter Reita Rivers, a University of Georgia graduate student who became Jeannette Rankin’s personal assistant in 1968. For five years, Rivers helped the 88-year-old Rankin write letters and speeches, drove her to speaking events near and far, and helped adjust her wig before going onstage. Rivers became Rankin’s companion and confidante at a time in her life when she had outlived most of her family and friends.
The legacy of a small house
After Rankin died in 1973, Rivers was left with instructions in Rankin’s bequest to user her house in Oconee County to help “mature unemployed women workers.”
Over the next two years, Rivers and four other friends who were active in the local League of Women Voters, met to decide what to do with the house that could fulfill Rankin’s wishes.
“At that time, Athens was a very exciting place to be — from the standpoint of women coming into their own,” said Susan Bailey, now a retired attorney and one of the co-founders of the foundation. Bailey was one of the first women students at the University of Georgia Law School, and she would start the Athens chapter of the National Organization for Women (NOW). Rounding out the group were Gail Dendy, Margaret Holt, and Heather Kleiner.
“Between the five of us, there was no lack of ideas, all sorts of things were put forth,” Bailey said.
They realized in their roundtable discussions that they, as well as a lot of women they knew, had needed money to further their education, said Dendy, a lifelong women’s and civil rights activist best known for penning the third stanza in the UGA Alma Mater to include women.
“We talked and talked and talked about all the ideas and issues that came before us, and we never, ever had a vote,” Bailey said. “We talked about things until we came to a consensus. Everybody felt they’d been heard.”
The discussion was reminiscent of the Montana Equal Suffrage Association that Rankin chaired in 1913, where she advocated consensus rather than vote.
“I think that helped us arrive at the best solution to whatever the issue was.” said Holt, who spent her career teaching adult education at UGA. “I think that has been a tremendous strength from the start of the foundation.”
After two years of these discussions, the women sold Rankin’s property in 1976 for $16,000, which they had decided to use as seed money to establish the Jeannette Rankin Foundation whose mission would be to help fund scholarships for women 35 and older in financial need.
“It was really thrilling just to get the foundation up and running because we had been working for years,” Holt recalled.
A big leap to paid staff
For the first 27 years, the foundation had no paid staff, and 90 percent of its funding was from Athens even though it’s always been a national organization that funds students from all over the country.
The foundation encouraged volunteers from the community to read applications and help pick the scholars. This pen-and-paper process was done in Athens until 2014 when the process became digital and volunteers from anywhere could read applications online. The foundation now boasts about 250-300 application readers nationwide.
Volunteers contributed in myriad ways but by the 2010s, it became clear the organization needed to hire full-time staff if it was going to continue to grow.
Sue Lawrence was hired and served from 2004 through 2015. During these years, the number of scholar awards grew from 25 annually to 78. Operations were streamlined, support increased, the website was retooled, and an office was purchased as headquarters to house the many functions of the growing organization.
In 2015, the board hired Karen Sterk, a former YWCA executive in Minneapolis and Atlanta, and gave her marching orders to “nationalize the funding.”
One of Sterk’s first moves was to connect with a college friend in Montana, the most obvious place to fundraise. Starting with a house party there and Facebook friend-finding in Montana, Sterk connected with Jeannette’s grandniece who stepped up to organize house parties out there.
The annual STAR Party, begun in 2014, is a signature fundraiser that honors scholars and alumni. During the pandemic, Georgia Public Broadcasting hosted the Atlanta STAR party and has continued to host the Atlanta/Athens party as a hybrid event, which attracted more than 500 people this year alone.
In 2023, the foundation launched the Great Force campaign, named after the speech Rankin gave to Congress in her plea for the 19th Amendment. The campaign has already passed its fundraising goal of $13 million in commitments; now it’s been extended another year with a goal of raising or surpassing $16 million.
The increased funding has allowed Sterk to hire a full-time staff of 12. Because of her efforts and staff dedicated to fundraising, the endowment has ballooned from $600,000 to $3 million in 10 years.
The need is great
The statistical picture of the Rankin demographic indicates a tremendous need for support. Of the 400 scholars currently funded, nearly 45 percent are single, 61 percent are survivors of domestic violence, and 56 percent are first in their family to go to college. They all fall under the $28,000 annual income threshold and receive up to $2,500 a year for full-time enrollment — 95 percent of the women are enrolled in a full-time degree program.
The demand for funding has increased with each application cycle. The foundation currently averages 700-750 applications a year but can only fund 30 percent of those.
More than three-fourths of the current scholars are working on a bachelor’s degree; others are working toward an associate degree or certificate program. The average GPA is 3.71, and the persistence rate is a whopping 97 percent, compared to 30 percent for the older student demographic.
“Office Hours” is one of the soft benefits of the wrap-around support the foundation supplies. Current and past students meet each week via Zoom to talk with each other and staff.
The foundation also provides emergency funding for medical bills or car repair, coaching and case management, as well as community building for scholars who are typically isolated as non-traditional students.
“It’s the wraparound support stuff that makes all the difference,” said Sterk. “That’s the secret sauce that makes the Jeannette Rankin Foundation different.”
The Legacy
The Jeannette Rankin Foundation’s first scholar Barbara Dixon worked as an RN until she was 70. She also gave back to the foundation for many years by volunteering, speaking at events, and promoting the scholarship at Athens Tech.
“I had such a rewarding career,” Dixon said. Even though the financial support was crucial, it was the emotional and psychological support of the five founders that made the difference.
“The money was great – five hundred dollars in 1977 was a lot more than it is today,” she said. “The ladies were so encouraging, so interested. That, to me, has always meant much more than the money.”
Dixon’s story is exactly why the Jeannette Rankin Foundation was formed, said Sterk.
“She returned to school to earn her nursing degree and was able to raise two children on a decent salary. Both children grew up and entered the health care field as their chosen work, confirming what we find consistently: that what the mother does very much influences what the children do and whether they succeed.”
Fifty years later, the mission of the Jeannette Rankin Foundation remains strong. It was an idea conceived by five women whose passion was inspired by Rankin’s original wish to help women in difficult circumstances pursue an education. It was an idea, like Jeannette Rankin, that was before its time.
“If you told me 50 years ago that this foundation would give $6 million to 3,000 women, I would never have imagined it,” said Holt. “It gives me goosebumps, because it took so many people working together.”
Note: Rankin’s biographical details in this article were drawn from “Winning the Earthquake,” by Lorissa Rinehart.
New book about Jeannette Rankin owes much to a UGA researcher
Many people in Athens are familiar with the name Jeannette Rankin because of the foundation created in her name but few know details about her remarkable life and how she came to live in the Athens area.
Now, thanks to “Winning the Earthquake,” a book penned by Lorissa Rinehart and released in November on the eve of the foundation’s 50th anniversary, readers can get the fullest perspective ever written about the former congresswoman and equal rights activist. Rinehart spoke in November at the UGA Special Collections Libraries in Athens as part of her national book tour.
What has added to the depth of Rinehart’s book is a newly available collection of interviews and notes by Ted Harris, a longtime University of Georgia faculty member who spent more than 100 hours talking to Rankin in the late 1960s as a basis for his 1972 doctoral thesis on her.
Rinehart spent 10 days poring over the extensive files and listening to recordings that were donated to the library in 2019 but were made available in 2024. Harris died in 2004.
“It was really a moving experience to feel like you were sitting beside her,” Rinehart said about the recordings that took place in Rankin’s Watkinsville home. “You can hear the fire crackling or the rain outside or her yelling at her cat, or commenting, ‘Oh, the wallpaper’s peeling off.’”
Twelve authors have written books about Rankin since 1980, resulting in four biographies and eight children’s books, which Rinehart said she built upon. However, Rinehart is the first author to tap into all of Rankin’s archives at five different locations, including Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, Radcliffe College in Massachusetts, Montana State University, and Montana Historical Society. But it was the Harris recordings at UGA, she says, that were the most revealing.
Since the last book published about Rankin in 2016, the website newspapers.com has digitized nearly 150 years of American newspapers. With a simple keyword search, she was able to access every newspaper article about Rankin from the turn of the 20th century to her last march in Washington at age 87.
“What a lot of people don’t know is that at the time that Jeannette was elected to Congress, she was very much the most famous person in the United States,” she said. “And even before that, she was the most famous woman in the country [because of her suffrage work].”
After a year of research and writing, Rinehart was so moved by writing Rankin’s story that she joined the Rankin Foundation’s board of directors.
“I want to elevate and amplify her legacy and voice,” Rinehart said. “She’s such an important figure in our country’s history. And I want to shine a light on her and in doing so, bring the mission and purpose of the foundation to that many more people.” For more information about Rinehart and her book, go to https://www.lorissarinehart.com.
Tracy N. Coley worked for nearly 30 years in communications at the University of Georgia where she earned an MFA in narrative nonfiction writing. She is owner of Lucky Dog Press, a local boutique book publishing firm offering writers individualized guidance. She also teaches classes on writing craft and writing through grief and trauma.
