October 26, 2006

Marianne MacQueen was inducted into the Greene County Women’s Hall of Fame last month.

By Lauren Heaton

Whether it was starting a daycare, running a restaurant, organizing a nonprofit or supporting green development, Marianne MacQueen has been involved in creating better community since she came to Yellow Springs 34 years ago. She knew early on that in Yellow Springs she would find support for whatever she wanted to do and whomever she wanted to be, she said in a recent interview. After pursuing her passions and many progressive projects in the village and surrounding areas, MacQueen earned a place last month in the Greene County Women’s Hall of Fame.

Creating community is MacQueen’s buzz word, and the ultimate objective in her most recent positions as the director of Home, Inc. and president of the board of trustees for B-W Greenway Community Land Trust in Beavercreek, which aims to connect the Beaver Creek and Wenrick Wetlands in Medway with a green corridor. Bob Jurick, the founder of B-W Greenway, nominated MacQueen for the award because of her committed and creative work to develop the board as well as her current and former leadership with the Yellow Springs Smart Growth Education Task Force and Community Service, Inc., and her involvement with saving Whitehall Farm and with many other community projects over the years, he said.

According to longtime friend Moya Shea, MacQueen is “always having ideas about getting more community involvement and about how to make things more harmonious,” she said, citing MacQueen’s efforts in the 1970s to establish a cooperative infant care center, which she and MacQueen both used for their young sons, and her involvement in the Village Mediation Program in the 1990s. Integral to her efforts to create community, Shea said, is MacQueen’s role as “a champion of the underdog.”

MacQueen’s sensibilities toward the disenfranchised became more acute several years after she moved to Yellow Springs in 1972 to work for Community Service. She and her husband, Roy Talbert, came to the village so Roy could finish his dissertation on Arthur Morgan, whose community-centered philosophy shaped the active citizenry of Antioch College and Yellow Springs. MacQueen was raised in a steel mill town in northeast Ohio that had very little sense of community, she said. By contrast, she said, “when I moved here it felt like I had come home.”

She and Talbert soon divorced, and as a single mother with her infant son, Matthew, MacQueen started a cooperative infant care center and began cooking at The Restaurant, a diner on Glen Street started by Ken Simon that aimed to serve nutritious, homecooked meals affordable to everyone. According to Simon, MacQueen made a Hungarian cheese-filled coffeecake to die for, and also brought to the cafe an energy that was wild and fun, and also very honest.

“She was interested in not having this be a place just to work but a place where people could get to know each other and be friends,” he said.

MacQueen reveled in being part of a community where she could learn how to build an engine from Pat Ertel and Joe Ayres, help bring well-known female vocalists to town with Martha Oelman’s local Women in Music radio show and spearhead a series of women’s and lesbian conferences and activities, she said.

But her life changed in 1976 when she lost custody of her 5-year-old son and lost the right to see him more than once a year, partly because she was living with another woman. She and several of her friends enlisted the help of the American Civil Liberties Union to fight the courts and ultimately to win back her rights to her son. And the five years of separation she endured sharpened her awareness of the racial, sexual, economic and other forms of discrimination people face, MacQueen said.

MacQueen had found her bitter fight to be a waste of negative energy, she said, and she wanted to do something that would facilitate reconciliation without such angry conflict, a cornerstone of Morgan’s credo. While working as a carpenter in town, MacQueen entered one of the first mediation certification programs in the state at Antioch College and in 1989 became coordinator of Ohio’s community conflict resolution organization, eventually known as “O-Come On.” She helped what is now the Ohio Commission on Dispute Resolution and Conflict Management grow programs throughout Ohio that provide mediation services to neighbors, local businesses and consumers, and local governments and citizens.

She also helped start a program in Yellow Springs and in 1990 became the director of the Village Mediation Program. According to MacQueen, the program has had much success helping villagers come together, for instance, to talk through a conflict between police and residents after a street fair or to discuss the decision to purchase land for the Center for Business and Education. But the program was not as effective at resolving conflicts that had already reached the boiling point, she said.

In 1996 MacQueen returned to Community Service to see if she could be more effective at building community. There she began reading about sustainability, environmental justice, and the idea of a land trust for affordable housing, which led toward her efforts to make affordable housing available in Yellow Springs. Already president of the Greene County Fair Housing Board, MacQueen became one of the first board members of Home, Inc., and in 2003 she was hired as the director of the organization.

Though Yellow Springs can be insular, MacQueen feels that for the village to be economically vibrant it must relate to the surrounding region. B-W Greenway has a holistic mission to develop a greenbelt around Dayton with spokes of developed land going into the city. B-W is also working to develop an eco-industrial park in Dayton. And while Yellow Springs Village Council and Planning Commission were hesitant to commit to sustainable businesses when planning for the Center for Business and Education, MacQueen has found other areas are more open to the idea, she said.

Through all her endeavors, MacQueen has learned to stick with the things she is committed to, even when they aren’t easy, she said. Her leadership role is as the “doer,” the one who pulls people together and makes the ideas happen, she said. She also would like to see herself as a communication builder, acknowledging that while community consensus isn’t always possible, it is possible to have respectful conversation where everyone is heard and disparate ideas are held together without judgement.

MacQueen lives with partner Patti Dallas and Dallas’ parents, Meredith and Willa Dallas. Her son Matthew recently attained a Ph.D. in philosophy and ethics and will start a fellowship at the University of San Diego before getting married next summer.

Contact: lheaton@ysnews.com