Transcription of Julie Jordan Marchese for the show Community #62
Dr. Lisa: This is Dr. Lisa Belisle and you are listening to the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast show number 62, “Community” airing for the first time on November 18, 2012 on WLOB and WPEI Radio Portland, Maine. Today’s show features Maine Magazine writer and author Jaed Coffin. Craig Lapine, founder of Cultivating Community, and Julie Jordan Marchese and Andrea Brown of sheJAMS. We specifically put the “Community” show right in front of Thanksgiving and we did this because we understand that there are many different ways in which people belong to communities.
Author Seth Godin actually refers to these as tribes and a tribe or a community can be what you’re born into. It can be where you work, where you play, or simply built of the people that you love. I have communities built around my own life based on where I’m living. I’ve been in Maine since 1977, but also based on the fact that I am the oldest of ten children. I’m a doctor. I’m a writer, and I’m a Facebook picture taker on my early morning runs. In many different ways I’ve created communities that make sense to me, that feel good to me, that nurture me.
This Thanksgiving I’ll be spending time with my extended family at Atlantic Hall and Cape Porpoise right here in Maine. This is something that my family’s been doing for many years because we simply have so many darn people involved in this community, but I love it. My nine younger brothers and sisters and I and our spouses and our families and our significant others. My cousins, my aunts, my uncles, my grandmother, we’ve all really come to enjoy this regular occasion at Atlantic Hall because we consider it community building time. I’m very fortunate to have a family like this and a family that meets regularly right here in Maine.
I hope you enjoy today’s show with Maine Magazine writer and author Jaed Coffin who is going to talk about his experience with community and growing up in Brunswick and the work he’s done for Maine Magazine including the recent article “What is a Mainer?” Also Craig Lapine who has developed a cultivating community presence working in the environment, working with people, working with education, and doing all kinds of interesting things over the last decade. Finally, Julie Jordan Marchese and Andrea Brown of sheJAMS who have created a community around exercise and fitness and social outreach and well-being on so many different levels.
We hope you enjoy today’s show.
Dr. Lisa: As we get ready to head into Thanksgiving I think a lot about families because of course those are our primary communities, but also think about other groups that make up communities and one of these groups I know is very active in the Portland area community. This is the sheJAMS organization. Now we had Julie Jordan Marchese come on and speak with us very early on in the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour last fall talking about Tri for a Cure, so thanks for coming back and being part of our conversation again today.
Julie: Thank you for having me back.
Dr. Lisa: We also have Andrea Brown representing sheJAMS, and she’s got her own really impressive set of credentials including being a coach and doing multiple triathlons and director of recruiting services at Pro Search, so thanks for coming in and also being here with us.
Andrea: I’m excited to be here. Thank you.
Dr. Lisa: First of all, sheJAMS. What is it and why did you call it that?
Andrea: Well the name actually was interesting because we spent a lot of time trying to come up with something that captured the idea of pulling women together and being active that had some excitement to it, and there’s a lot of organizations out there who have claims to names and we really came down to Julie, Andrea, and Melissa. Jams. sheJAMS. It fits what we were trying to accomplish with the jams, sheJAMS, but the names came together on that.
Dr. Lisa: Well I like it. You’re missing the third member of your jam at this point?
Julie: The fourth, yeah Coreen. Well, she came in after, so we’re going to rename her at some point.
Andrea: We were going to add a Saint before her last name, the end of her last name so we had an S.
Dr. Lisa: I see. OK, all right. Well, so tell me what is sheJAMS? What do you do and why does it represent a community of sorts?
Julie: Well sheJAMS is a group of women coming together with a common goal and usually our goal is to train together, but we’re much more than that and we do a lot of community outreach. It’s a social networking club where we share ideas and what each other does, so it’s just really a group of women that like to get together and do things together in a social and noncompetitive atmosphere and so we do a lot of cool things like volunteering and we put on races and we do all sorts of things in the community.
Dr. Lisa: What are you training for?
Julie: We train for all sorts of different things, but I think it started with Tri for a Cure and we felt that Tri for a Cure is a real bonding moment for women so we felt that maybe leading up to the triathlon it might be an opportunity for women to bond more training together. Now we do a multitude of things, Tri for a Cure, it might be the Maine Marathon, it could be your first 5K, it could be swimming Peaks to Portland, it could be anything. Some people just join to be part of the social atmosphere of what we do. You could join for all sorts of reasons.
Dr. Lisa: I should back up and just ask. I know for anybody who’s been and I know of course everybody’s listened to every single episode of this show, so they know what Tri for a Cure is but let’s just pretend that they don’t know what Tri for a Cure is. We mentioned this on our recent breast health show when Meredith Strang Burgess came in and the Maine Cancer Foundation, but just a little bit of background on that.
Julie: Sure. Tri for a Cure is all women’s triathlon that is put on by Maine Cancer Foundation and triathlon is swimming one third of a mile, biking 15 miles, and then running a 5K at the end which is 3.1 miles. Each woman is required to raise $350. The race last year raised $1.2 million. I think it’s definitely one of the largest fund raisers in the state. Maine Cancer Foundation is a really cool organization. It’s from Maine. It puts all its money back into Maine for cancer research and patient support right here, so it does really good things for the people of Maine. Cancer is one of the leading diseases that we have here so it benefits us all by getting together and doing a race of this sort.
The race over the year has become very popular. It’s very difficult to get in because we can only allow so many, so people talk about it a lot. They want to do it. I think we’ve probably attracted over the years over 5,000 different women have done it and each year there’s always somebody new that’s doing it for the first time. It’s quite a race to be in if you’re a woman, and you can participate. I mean even men can volunteer and donate so we get a lot of people involved in such a great cause.
Dr. Lisa: Maine Magazine who happens to be a sponsor of the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour is also a sponsor of Tri for a Cure.
Julie: They certainly are. Not just Tri for a Cure but Maine Cancer Foundation in general, they support the organization all year round which is really a nice partnership.
Andrea: I was going to add, part of sheJAMS coming together is too. In the Tri for the Cure, I think this year we were talking earlier, 80% of the women who had signed up had never done it. For a woman to say hey, I’m going to do this triathlon. They get all excited. Their friends get all excited, and then they realize oh my gosh. I’ve got to learn how to swim, bike, and run and put all three together. How do I do that? That was part of putting sheJAMS together was taking those beginning athletes, those women who maybe had done one segment of a triathlon or maybe none, and giving them the confidence and the skills and the training to be able to complete and complete it safely and have people that they can train with because it’s intimidating to walk into a bike store and you’ve got these $8,000 bikes hanging off the ceiling and you’re thinking OK, so I want to spend about $600 and I just want to ride this. What does that mean?
We’ve partnered up with the bike shops. We do workshops or socials on them where we teach them how to maintain their bikes and it’s pulling these women together and not just us training them but connecting them so that they find other people to bike with, to run with, to do swimming, group swims with, people at their level that they can train with to get to that next level.
Dr. Lisa: How long have you been in existence?
Andrea: We just completed our third triathlon training season, so we started in March of 2000 …
Julie: 10.
Andrea: 10?
Dr. Lisa: How many women have you actually worked with? Is it all women?
Julie: It’s all women and I think we have had over 200 members. 225 members over the last three years. We have some women that come to be a member because we have great discounts on wetsuits because we partnered with national companies that will give us discounts because our group is so large. We do have great group, I mean a large group of women and it’s overwhelming at times to go to places like Tri for a Cure and see us in our uniforms, but not only are we racing, we’re volunteering, we’re doing lots of things and it’s not just race focused.
We actually put on a flash mob this year at the beginning of Tri for a Cure which was a real hit. It really started the race off in a really upbeat …
Andrea: Good energy.
Julie: Yeah. Really good energy and I think people enjoyed that. We do some really fun stuff.
Dr. Lisa: What about when someone gets injured and isn’t able to be a part of this group, at least from a training standpoint? Are you able to support that person and include them in other ways?
Julie: Sure. All the races that we do we’re a part in more than just racing, so they can volunteer on the course. They can come and help us with administrative work. They can be a volunteer coordinator for our volunteer jogs that we do out in the community, so we have lots of ways. We don’t have many women that get hurt. Thank gosh.
Andrea: No. I’m knocking on wood here.
Julie: But there are times when people have to stop for a while and then they come back. Thank gosh they’re not hurt.
Dr. Lisa: Well I was thinking also not maybe just injured, but maybe people who aren’t able to jump in and do a triathlon right away for whatever reason or maybe they have some other physical something that’s kind of holding them back from completely doing the training piece of it.
Andrea: I think part of it is being part of the community whether you’re racing something or you’re there being a part of it. I know we had our own sheJAMS tri as part of their Rev Three Race this August and we had a lot of women do a relay, but we have a lot of women just down there cheering. I think we were the biggest consolidated group cheering, and we weren’t just cheering for our women. We were cheering for every single athlete who came through whether they were the pros coming through or the person who’s biking ten miles an hour and they’re just doing this. It was really inspiring to see all these people pull together, be there really early, really early on a Sunday morning and cheering for this whole group and community and people who had come from all over the place. I think, it just comes down to you’re encouraging all those other people in the community whether you’re racing or not racing you’re connected.
Julie: Yeah, with each one of our races like when we did a partnership with Rev Three. Rev Three happens to be a national triathlon company that I would say we compete with what most people hear about Iron Man, and they gave us 300 community spots in which we had to raise funds and so we did a really good job of recruiting women that had to raise money, so at that particular race we were the community funded part of the race and we raised $12,000 for Maine Cancer Foundation which was really great.
Now we’re taking it back to our members and we’re going to allow them to come up with non-profits that they want to support and vote on and so it’ll be interesting this year what they’re passions are for non-profits and we’ll choose from the top and decide who we’ll support with different races, so each one of our races does have a fundraising component so what we do always is giving back into our communities, and we try to keep everything local which is really nice.
Dr. Lisa: How do people find out about sheJAMS?
Andrea: Word of mouth I think for the most part or just seeing us out there. Again, if we’re at any kind of event there’s a lot of pink, a lot of pink going on.
Julie: A lot of noise.
Andrea: There’s a lot of noise. Yeah, there’s a lot of cheering. There’s a lot of -nobody’s out there alone if they’re part of our group.
Dr. Lisa: Do you have a Facebook page or a website?
Julie: We have a Facebook page sheJAMS and then we have a website www.sheJAMS.com and on there it talks about opportunities to join us, why you would join us, the races that we do, and …
Andrea: The programs that we run.
Dr. Lisa: It sounds like if somebody has questions they can either see one of your members in the crowd or they can go to your website or your Facebook page and connect that way and maybe figure out what might be the best option in terms of being part of your community.
Andrea: Absolutely.
Julie: That’s the wonderful thing about being all women. Women talk and if they have a good experience they talk about their good experience and so I think we’ve been really successful at most of our members bringing friends and say that you have to be part of this club. It’s great. Word of mouth has worked well for us along with our Facebook pages and things like that.
Andrea: We have a really central core group of women who have been with us from the beginning and it’s really cool to see how they’ve developed and changed physically, socially, with the support, just the feeling of connectivity. It’s very tangible.
Dr. Lisa: Well, we’ve been speaking with Andrea Brown and Julie Jordan Marchese from sheJAMS. I really appreciate your coming in and telling me about your group and spending some time with me today.
Julie: Thank you for having us.
Andrea: Yes, absolutely. Thank you.