A Defining Moment

Frances Hesselbein, CEO of the Girl Scouts of the USA, in 1982.

Author, friend, and now film producer Sarah McArthur told a story last week at a screening of the film she pulled together about our shared hero, Frances Hesselbein. Frances was a great non-profit leader whose pioneering practices influenced corporate and military leaders as well as those at other non-profits. Her impact remains undiminished since her death in 2022 at the age of 107.

Sarah visited Frances at her home in Easton, Pennsylvania, back in March of 2020, as the world was locking down. Aware that Frances had lived through the 1919 influenza pandemic as well as both World Wars, Sarah was seeking guidance and perspective.

“How are we going to get through this?” she asked.

Frances responded with calm deliberation. “We’re going to get through this together.”  

And so we did. 

We lost precious lives and endured fear, uncertainty, and a startling amount of chaos. Things we took for granted were suddenly out of reach. Yet disruption also brought many of us closer– to family, friends, neighbors, colleagues, to strangers we met online or walking the dog. Stuck at home, we became paradoxically more social, recognizing our need to connect and making time to do so. And so we got through it together, as Frances knew we would.

Now once again, many of us are feeling a great uncertainty, along with confusion and shock. And once again, there’s only one way to get through this: together. With people we love, of course, but also with those whose thinking we struggle to understand or make sense of. People whose values or way of looking at the world, whose experiences and beliefs, are different from our own.

Frances was perhaps best known for her unwavering commitment to diversity and inclusion, dating back to her early days as a Girl Scout troupe leader in the 1950s, when segregation in scouting was routine. She saw diversity not as a way to divide people into identity silos, but as a way to draw power from our shared humanity. 

In the film, she talks about the genesis of that commitment. She was eight years old, and furious with her grandmother for not permitting her to play with the two beautiful Chinese vases displayed on the fireplace mantle in her family’s living room. Her grandmother, instead of scolding Frances for losing her temper, took her on her lap and told her why the vases were important. 

They had been entrusted to Frances’s grandmother by the man who ran the local Chinese laundry and who needed to return to his own country to see his family. The man had asked her to keep them because, he said, she was the only person who spoke to him with respect during his decades at the laundry, the only person who ever called him Mr Li. But the man never returned to the little Pennsylvania town where he had been working, and nobody knew what happened to him. 

At this, Frances began crying. Why hadn’t people been nice to Mr Li? 

The pain she felt that afternoon stayed with Frances, shaping her resolve to treat all people as her grandmother had: with respect. For Frances, this was a commitment. It was not provisional, not dependent on her judgment about whether another person “deserved” her respect. It was simply how she treated others. And this made Frances, a savvy and tough-minded woman, a lifelong unifier.

“Treat all people with respect” was one of the maxims that made her a force throughout her very long life, along with “To live is to serve” and “Work is love made visible.”

In the film, Frances describes listening to her grandmother’s story as one of the defining moments that shaped her life. And that’s the title Sarah and documentary filmmakers Beverly Jacobson Schler and David Schler chose for the film: Defining Moments. Speaking on camera, Frances urges us all to identify the defining moments in our own lives: incidents, often small, that end up influencing who we become and what remains important to us year after year.

Though the current moment is anything but small, it’s potentially defining for many of us, and for our nation as a whole. It’s a moment when many of us wonder what really binds us together, and what might unify us going forward. Seeing the film helped me, and others at the screening, understand that treating all people with respect is how we start. It’s our only path toward unity and healing.

Like what you’re reading? Click here to order my most recent book Rising Together, or How Women Rise, both are available from Amazon or from your favorite bookseller.