Photo above: As a tireless professional advocate of recycling, it’s only natural that Lindsey Walker wears a cape that reads “Real heroes recycle.” Photo by Cori Fitzpatrick.

Today, as part of our equity portrait series, we honor Women’s History Month by sharing thoughts from Lindsey Walker. Lindsey is a Petoskey city council member and, as the photo above attests, a force for good as a leader in Emmet County’s recycling program. As told to Jeff Smith.

Lindsey Walker: I grew up in Petoskey and attended Petoskey schools from kindergarten through graduation and then went off to college at Antioch College, in Yellow Springs, Ohio. After college I returned to Leon, Nicaragua, where I’d previously worked, for two years, working for the same nonprofit in rural development, focused on construction projects. When my contract finished, I moved back home and after giving birth to my daughter, I attended graduate school because I had no understanding of economic development or macro economic theories, and I was feeling the need to understand what was happening with farmers in Nicaragua. After my academic portion of campus finished, I moved to Massachusetts for five years to write my dissertation and train as a community organizer training under the guidance of one of the best people in the community organizing space, Caroline Murray.

All along these routes, I met amazing influential women leaders. My mom, obviously, has been a very big influence in my life, and my grandmother too. And then in high school I did an internship at Petoskey’s Women’s Resource Center. Jan Mancinelli was the founder and director. I became really enamored with Jan because she was working on a local level, but doing a lot with policy and legislation on a state level in Lansing. So that was impactful for me. As a high schooler, I didn’t fully understand how the policy pieces and the advocacy pieces worked, but just seeing her run this organization and be a part of the community in a leadership position … I remember thinking, Wow, that is something I’m very interested in and I want to lean in and learn more about that.

One thing about the way she worked that stayed with me was how she turned to notable men in our community to help lead the campaign against violence toward women. I saw that as something very admirable, that it wasn’t only women she was going to lean on. Because the real work happens when the men are also having these discussions, and also leading discussions, and demonstrating equitable and healthy relationships with women.

Also, she worked hard to make sure that there was a system and policies in place to handle domestic violence because she knew that, given the constantly changing face of leadership, it’s really the policies that are the legacy of a lot of this leadership.

As I said, my work in Nicaragua was mostly focused around small, rural community development, working on construction projects in rural communities We were building preschools and health centers. These are all community-driven construction projects using rammed earth, which is an Adobe type of construction. A lot of the women in these rural communities and in the urban communities were single mothers. And much of the construction work was volunteer. So we’d be mixing cement together. We’d be learning how to plane wood and do all these skills together.

Sometimes when I think of what women bring to leadership, I think of my days working the Nicaraguan construction sites. We’d mix wet cement, but we didn’t have cement mixers. The women would kick off their flip flops—no steel toed boots for them—and they’d mix the cement barefoot. And it was hard work, but they took care of themselves. They paced their work so they could keep going. They wore button down shirts over their dresses and a hat to protect against the sun. It was all slow and steady and efficient. And there was a synergy, and the women were setting a pace and best practices for longevity. And it was community based. A “We will do this together” spirit. We will be ready. I learned so much about women leaders observing what those women did with thoughtfulness and synergy.

As part of my undergraduate senior thesis on women in revolution, I interviewed women in Nicaragua. There were some very specific older generations of women that had participated in the people’s revolution in different capacities. And so that was my opportunity to kind of build that relational network of, the positive will and the will of people to organize themselves from the grassroots based on, in their case, missing and murdered youth. The mothers would just start to show up at the police stations and demand to know, “Where are our kids?” And that’s really how the people’s revolution in Nicaragua started from the rural campesino people, and the women played a major role.

I saw the same thing when I moved to Massachusetts and was doing organizing there. I was organizing around housing in western Massachusetts, and again I had a really strong woman mentor. And the community leaders in the housing developments where I was working were mostly all women who were rising to the top of leadership in their neighborhoods to protect housing affordability and protect from gentrification in their neighborhoods. A lot of the women were single moms, and their livelihoods and their ability to care for their children depended on the affordability of housing. So when I looked around I saw, OK, woman leader here, woman leader here, woman leader here.

In 2005 I moved back to Petoskey to raise my family here working under one of my greatest mentors, Elisa Seltzer, who founded Emmet County Recycling, and continues to be the legacy of which I am grateful to be a part of today, 35 years later. IN 2018 Kate Marshall, who was a city council person and previous mayor of Petoskey, approached me to run for city council. Kate recognized that the time was maybe not right in my life to run for office, since I had young children and I wasn’t planning to run for public office until my child Hiram Walker-Gross graduated from high school, but duty called. The time was now. I took a risk, a leap of faith, ran for city council and won.

Yes, the tide is beginning to change. Now we’re seeing how women are leading in the political realms in our state, and here locally, and with our Tribe as well. There’s a lot of women leadership in Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians. I’ve been very honored and privileged to be an adjacent community member to the tribe. My son’s a tribal member, and I see a lot of great women leading in tribal government, as well as on our school board, women really leading the way in our communities. It’s admirable, and young girls and young men are paying attention.

I still feel, however, that we have a long way to go, even within the women’s movement itself. The feminist movement came from women not having the right to vote. And it was a monopolistic movement, a certain kind of white woman. Well, what about Black women? What about Latino women? And Indigenous women and women of color? I’d like to see the women’s movement better address the fact that women of color were left out for a long time and their struggles were different than getting the vote. African American women, for example, were more concerned with the Black man being suppressed in our society. So let’s really listen and understand and figure how we can be more inclusive within the women’s movement.

I’ve been very influenced by women leadership throughout my life. Women in leadership positions, whether it was publicly acknowledged or quiet and behind the scenes, was always apparent to me. Looking ahead, I continue to have hope of a more egalitarian society that understands our history and refuses to repeat the mistakes of the past.