Jill Mulvay Derr began working at the Church‘s history department in 1973 as an intern, compiling the poetry of Eliza R. Snow. She spent her career there and at Brigham Young University studying and writing about the history of the Relief Society and its leaders. She participated in writing and editing multiple books about Latter-day Saint women, culminating in the 2016 publication of The First Fifty Years of Relief Society: Key Documents in Latter-day Saint Women’s History. Could you tell us a little about yourself? I grew up in Salt Lake City with hard-working, loving parents, known for their generosity. They were not active Latter-day Saints. Both came from pioneer families but my mother’s ancestors became hostile toward the Latter-day Saints. My dad went inactive when he joined the Navy at age 17. Still, they decided that it would be best if their children attended Church and had Latter-day Saint associates. So my three siblings and I went to Primary and Young Women, and the four of us were baptized around age eight. Our parents supported us in Church activities even though they themselves never entered into Church activity. I attended the University of Utah, then went to the Harvard Graduate School of Education for a Master of Arts in Teaching degree. I taught for two years in the Boston public schools, then returned to Utah. I started working at the Church Historical Department in 1973. My husband Brooke and I married in 1977. He brought three children to the marriage and we had a child of our own, so we have a family of four children. Our children are now grown and we have eleven grandchildren. We had two wonderful experiences abroad. My husband taught at the University of Utah, and in 1985, he took an appointment at a business school in France, so we lived there for eight months. We lived in Europe again from 1989 to 1991, this time in Switzerland where he taught at a different business school. Brooke and I are retired now and we served a mission in Frankfurt Germany, 2012-13. How did you begin focusing on women in Church history? I was in Boston when Claudia Bushman and Laurel Ulrich and others sponsored a lecture in the early months of 1973 that featured Maureen Ursenbach [Beecher] talking about Eliza R. Snow. I attended that lecture and was fascinated. I knew nothing about Eliza R. Snow. I couldn’t believe that Maureen had that kind of information. I talked to her afterward; she told me that she was doing her research in the Church’s new History Division under the direction of Leonard Arrington, the newly appointed Church Historian. That spring, I returned to Salt Lake. I had planned to get a teaching job but couldn’t find one. A friend suggested I visit Maureen at the Church Historical Department where they were sponsoring some internships. I had been making about $8000 teaching in the Boston public schools, which was a good salary for that day, and I had determined I would not accept less than that in a teaching job. Then I connected with Maureen and got this offer for an internship for $1000, and snatched it up as fast as I could. Eliza R. Snow (1875) My first assignment was searching for the poems of Eliza R. Snow. It was like I parachuted into a totally different world, to be engaged in research. My undergraduate work was in English with a History minor. I knew absolutely nothing about Church history. I knew nothing about women’s history. I had not been stirred or awakened by the women’s movement that was happening around me. But I was soon enmeshed in all those ideas and concepts and people. After my internship ended, a full-time appointment in the department came through the James Moyle Oral History program and I began interviewing recent women’s leaders – LaVern Parmley who had just been released Primary General President, Belle Spafford who had recently been released as Relief Society General President, and a series of other Latter-day Saint women. So it plunged me in – I learned to swim by being dropped in the water. What could be better training than working under Leonard Arrington and Davis Bitton and James Allen and Maureen? They were great mentors. You noted that the women’s movement of the 1970s didn’t really catch your attention, but was it connected to the Church’s focus on women’s history? Belle Spafford is known to have opposed the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), but at the same time, the Church was apparently focusing more on women in our history. How did that balance out for you within the setting of the Church Historical Department? That’s a very interesting question. It really sets up some of the tensions of that era. One of the challenges was that the Correlation movement was in full swing. In 1970-71 especially, we see this big era of change. The Relief Society had been running Social Services, the Primary ran the Primary Children’s Hospital. Women published their own monthly magazines – the Relief Society Magazine and the Children’s Friend. Each of the three women’s organizations had its own budget and responsibilities. Through the Correlation movement, all former Church publications were terminated and replaced by the Ensign, New Era, and Friend. All of women’s major responsibilities were to be umbrella-ed under what we then called simply “the priesthood” – which at the time meant these responsibilities would be managed by men. That was a huge change for Latter-day Saint women. It required a considerable loss of autonomy but reflected the need for the simplification and central direction that enabled internationalization and the growth of a worldwide church. Relief Societies in Utah could have bazaars and fund their projects and decorate their rooms how they wanted. In the Philippines, however, Relief Society women had no resources and no money. They could do much more by being under a ward budget. Correlation was part of the difficult transition to becoming a global church and reaching members internationally. I think that transition has been a long time coming – a gradual move away from concern about the Wasatch Front and how things are done here, to what we can do worldwide. So today we see the immediate translation of conference talks or manuals going out to all the world at once, instead of dribbling out year by year to different communities. But to get back to your question – there were lots of changes in the Church at the same time there were lots of changes in the world. In the world, there was emphasis on women’s equality, the Equal Rights Amendment, equal pay for equal work, advanced positions and responsibilities for working women, expanding women’s lives into the public sphere, moving beyond the private sphere. At the same time in the Church, there was new emphasis and a real focus on the home, Family Home Evening, priesthood directed homes, priesthood directed (usually male-directed) everything, and women’s responsibilities in the Church became more narrowly focused in the home. Was this a clash? Yes, it was. It was impossible for it not to be. In doing women’s history, in looking at how Latter-day Saint women’s lives corresponded to the lives of American women, answering the questions that the feminist movement was raising as we worked on Mormon history – yes, there was considerable dissonance there. It was certainly an awakening for me. Maureen and I started going to women’s history conferences. We could see the questions that the world was opening up – our first efforts were to answer some of those questions. We looked at public figures, we looked at famous women, we looked at women in politics, we looked at women in medicine, we looked at women in the arts…because the focus on public figures was what was happening in American women’s history right at that time. It was a time of discovery for me. In addition, Maureen and I were part of a women’s group established in Salt Lake City in 1974 – some were women from Boston who had helped publish the 1971 pink Dialogue that addressed women’s issues. We decided to call our Salt Lake City group Retrenchment because in 1869, as Relief Societies were reorganized in Utah, they operated only on a ward basis. The women themselves developed a monthly meeting called General Retrenchment where they met across ward boundaries. So we chose that name for ourselves because we were outside the confines of our ward associations. The group is still meeting now, fifty years later. It is an amazing collection of women, and it’s wonderful. That group was the place I worked through a lot of women’s issues such as concerns over the ERA and concerns over changing the Relief Society organization. On one hand, I was studying history, and on the other hand, I had this great exposure to these lively and intelligent women who understood political science and social work and literature and medicine and different fields that really make for a rich conversation, which, as I said, continues. I’m seeing in my mind this group of women focused on community and learning and not necessarily being in their home all the time, which was not what the Church leaders encouraged at the time. That’s something we still have a challenge with now – many women feel that they are told that they should live a certain way, to stay home with their children. But they’re done having kids, or they don’t want kids, or they want a career and kids. So there’s tension. How did you deal with that tension in the 1970s? I graduated from the University of Utah in 1970. It was difficult for me because most of my college friends were getting married and settling down. I opted to go to graduate school, which was unusual. I think the fact that I chose a one-year program bespeaks my ambivalence about it. I didn’t want to sign up for a long-term graduate degree. I was brave and timid at the same time. I loved my time at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. I enjoyed associating with people there. I returned to Utah without being married. So I was going to try to have a productive life in the interim, whatever happened. I was 29 when I married, much later than most of my friends, and I continued to work. I loved my job. I had been working in women’s history for four years. In fact, before we married, I had a wonderful bishop, Craig Sudbury, who thought I should serve a mission because I was older and single. I told him I didn’t feel good about that. This wonderful man said, “I’m willing to fast and pray with you on a given day and then let’s talk again.” We talked again and I said, “I really feel that the work I’m doing is my mission.” He said, “I feel that way too.” He gave me his full support. I felt strongly that I should marry Brooke – I was wildly in love, and he was supportive of my work. We had full custody of one of his three children, an 8-year-old son, so I went to half-time employment so I could balance my work and give part of the care to this son. Brooke was teaching at the University of Utah and as a professor, he had some flexibility. So we were able to manage that. Jill Mulvay Derr It was harder after a son was born to Brooke and me because in addition to having an infant we were in a custody battle over his other two children. So our family situation seemed very different from the traditional family. Those were difficult years and without the wonderful support of family, friends, and neighbors, we couldn’t have made it through. My neighbors were full-time homemakers. I never felt criticism from them – I always felt their love and support. Maybe that was easier for me because I was working for the Church, so there seemed a kind of legitimacy that other people may not have felt. I acknowledge that I was in a position of privilege. Did I feel tension about my decisions? Of course. I think all women who work evaluate and reevaluate what they’re doing, how to balance their time, what their own health is, what kind of support is available from a husband depending on his work, or from sisters or parents or ward members. It’s a balancing act. I recall running into a friend and she asked me how I was doing. I said, “You know, life never seems to be quite in balance.” She just looked at me and said, “And it never will.” I thought that spoke to the sense of juggling, the way we’re always asking if we’ve got it just right, trying to meet the commitments to family, to work, or community service. I think for all women, it’s a balancing act. And you’re right. The rhetoric from the Church sometimes makes us feel that we have to be the perfect mom. I think my history work helped me because of the diversity of models. It’s one thing to talk about ideals and principles. It’s another to see the diverse ways that people live them out. That was very liberating for me. You worked for the Church your entire career. How many books did you work on? Were they years-long projects? Women’s Voices: An Untold History of the Latter-day Saints The projects all fit into the family-work-life conundrum. The first book that I worked on was in collaboration with Kenneth and Audrey Godfrey, Women’s Voices: An Untold History of the Latter-day Saints. That project started when I worked in the Church’s History Division, directed by Leonard Arrington. I stayed with the division until about 1980. After our son was born, I couldn’t balance children, writing, and commuting the forty minutes from our home in Alpine to work in Salt Lake, so I terminated my employment. But I completed the work on Women’s Voices and it was published by Deseret Book in 1982. Around 1980, I began working on Women of Covenant, the Story of Relief Society with co-author Janath Russell Cannon. That project had to go with me first to France and then to Switzerland. By the time we came back from France, the Church History Division staff in Salt Lake had been transferred to BYU to become the Joseph Fielding Smith Institute for Church History. Since those were my colleagues, I reconnected with them in 1986 and they offered me part-time work. I remained with Smith Institute and BYU until 2005. That year, I moved back to the newly reorganized Church History Department in Salt Lake. So yes, over a span of years I was employed by the Church, but in two different places, and at three distinct periods. The Smith Institute director, Ronald K. Esplin, not only helped me get a part-time appointment at the institute but also fully supported the Women of Covenant project which with the addition of a third author, Maureen Ursenbach Beecher, was published by Deseret Book in 1992. As part of that work, Maureen and I wanted to publish the original Nauvoo Relief Society Minutes but that took a lot of negotiating over the years. I finally came up with the idea of publishing the minutes in connection with other documents from the first fifty years of Relief Society history, so readers could see how Relief Society gradually changed, and see how the minutes were interpreted over that first half-century and better understand where Relief Society is today. Context is vitally important. Women of Covenant: The Story of Relief Society That project was indeed long-term and went from Smith Institute back to the Church History Department when I moved there in 2005. I had already invited Carol Madsen to help with the project and the department assigned Matt Grow and Kate Holbrook to collaborate with Carol and me. The four of us were able to finally pull the massive work together. A huge team at the Church History Department helped refine it and make the introductions and footnotes historically accurate and comprehensive. That was an important team project, and The First Fifty Years of Relief Society was published by the Church Historian’s Press in 2016 (and is included on the Gospel Library app in the Church History section).In between, I worked with Karen Lynn Davidson on Eliza R. Snow: The Complete Poetry, published in 2009 by BYU Studies in connection with University of Utah Press. That collection of some 500 poems completed the work I’d started in 1973. Some things take a long time. I’ve had wonderful co-authors or co-editors in everything I’ve done. I don’t claim to be an independent historian. Many fine historians work on their own, independently and without a co-author. I have generally had institutional support and worked collaboratively, and that’s been one of the great blessings of my life. Why was there pushback to publish the Relief Society Minutes? Really, I believe parts of those minutes should be canonized and known by every man and woman in the Church because they include some of Joseph’s most beautiful and significant teachings. Maureen Beecher and I hoped to publish them because they had not been published ever, in their entirety. The reason, to state it succinctly, is because the Nauvoo Minutes raise questions about plural marriage and about the nature and extent of women’s religious authority. Both of these subjects have been and to some degree remain controversial. Nauvoo Relief Society Minutes Book Some of Joseph’s sermons to the Relief Society were edited for publication in the 1850s. Why were they edited? When Joseph first organized and addressed the women, who themselves chose the name Female Relief Society of Nauvoo, he spoke about the authority of the new presidency—the president Emma Smith and her two counselors—to preside, but he did not explicitly clarify the limits of that authority. Emma was a strong leader whom women admired and followed. As plural marriage, introduced privately by Joseph, became a subject of public gossip and stirred controversy, Emma apparently encouraged Relief Society women to take a stand against the practice. Her claim that she had authority to oppose it is only hinted at in the minutes of the last four meetings – two held on March 9 and two on March 16 in 1844. Following Joseph’s death, she did not support the leadership of the Twelve in pursuing temple ordinances, expanding the practice of plural marriage, or moving West. As Church historians in Utah began compiling an official history of the Church in the 1850s, they included some of Joseph’s addresses to the Relief Society, but they, with Brigham Young and the Twelve, decided to redact or edit some of Joseph’s wording to clarify the limits of women’s authority. For example, Joseph’s statement in the original minutes, “I now turn the key to you” was redacted to read, “I now turn the key in your behalf,” to make it clear that Joseph was the holder of the key, turning it to open new possibilities for women. The redacted minutes appeared in the Deseret News in the 1850s, then became part of the well-known six-volume History of the Church published by B.H. Roberts. Though the original minutes had not been published, scholars went to the Church Archives and made their own transcripts from the microfilm. Unofficial transcripts were circulating by the 1970s and 80s. Feminist scholars began to look at the original turning of the key statement and said, “No, Joseph was giving women keys.” The wording stirred questions about women’s authority for a new generation concerned with women’s equality, responsibility, and authority. How do you deal with that? During that era, Church leaders declined to publish the original minutes. In part, they, like the earlier leaders who had redacted the minutes, seemed to be thinking, “Keys? No, no, you’re not giving keys to women. Only the presiding priesthood leaders have keys, so let’s not talk about turning keys over to women.”Another of Joseph’s addresses in the minutes talks about moving according to the ancient priesthood and making the Relief Society a kingdom of priests. These were references to the forthcoming temple endowment and Joseph made it clear that he was using the Relief Society as a means of preparing women for the temple endowment. So that’s another consideration. We have temple-related language that general Church leaders had not seen previously and didn’t know what to do with. On top of that, we have Joseph talking about spiritual gifts, and women healing the sick by laying on of hands. That too in the 1970s and 80s was problematic. Some scholars had already begun to address these issues, but at the time Church leaders were reluctant to speak to these questions without having more information or a better sense of the context. That was the debate, discussion, conflict swirling around. Maureen and I tried to take on part of that in our chapters of Women of Covenant. We used examples of women healing the sick. We used Joseph’s original statement, “I now turn the key to you.” Because it was published by Deseret Book, we tried very hard to provide context and explanations that would be acceptable to Church leaders and members. Two members of the Quorum of the Twelve and Elaine Jack, Relief Society General President at the time, reviewed the manuscript before it was published. To be honest, our book did not accomplish all we’d hoped for and did not please everyone. It didn’t push things far enough for the feminists. It pushed things too far for traditional members. Now we’re living in a period when the rhetoric has changed and there’s a new understanding about women’s authority on the part of General Authorities and General Officers. We have President Nelson talking about women and priesthood in very different terms than the 1970s. He’s talking about Relief Society responsibilities to minister. Members of women’s presidencies serve on executive councils at every level. I just celebrate all of that. I know there are people who feel that the progress isn’t sufficient, and questions of women’s authority are still sensitive. But for me who has waited fifty years to see such advances, I think it’s great. I’m grateful for the Saints volumes that forefront women in so many ways that previous Church histories have not. A friend of mine, who is very traditional and has served as a bishop and stake president, read the first Saints volume and said in all seriousness, “I had no idea there were so many women in Church history.” We’ve always been at least half of the population! How has studying women’s history and the Relief Society impacted your personal faith? My studies have been a significant part of my faith. Seeing the varieties of lived religion has been of immense importance to me. It’s one thing to study principles, it’s another to see how people have lived those principles. Women’s Voices: An Untold History of the Latter-day Saints is a collection of selected excerpts from women’s diaries and letters and reminiscences. Working on that book was important to me because I was able to look at individual women and hear their voices and see their lives. At first, I was like a kid in a candy store – give me some of Bathsheba Smith’s sense of humor! Give me some of the faith of Mary Ann Weston Maughan when her husband died from persecution in England. I wanted a bit of this or that – the courage, the bravery, the humor, the faith, the humility – I wanted a piece of each of these women. There became so many women I admired that I finally came to the conclusion, oh, I guess I will have to be myself. That was just so liberating. I couldn’t be just like this one or just like that one, or a piece of this and a piece of that. I could only be me and work it out with the Lord. That was tremendously liberating on a personal level.I have also learned the power of the collective. I started looking at not just the Nauvoo Relief Society Minutes, but also the local minutes. One of the first people I studied was Sarah M. Kimball, president of the 15th Ward Relief Society in Salt Lake City – what a discovery for me! These beautiful 15th Ward minutes are a story in and of themselves– of women who lived with the suspension of Relief Society in 1844, picked it up in the 1850s, saw it drop and picked it up again in 1867. I loved the spirit of initiative and enthusiasm and cooperation – these minutes tell the story of the Relief Society in the 1870s and 80s. Salt Lake City 15th Ward Relief Society Hall The creativity of somebody like Sarah Kimball – “Let’s build a Relief Society hall! We can do this! We can have our own meeting place. Let’s sell our homemade goods in a small cooperative store and pool our money. President Young has asked us to store grain – we can do that, we can build a granary. We have money to send to those who suffered in the Chicago Fire and we can pay for the training of a kindergarten teacher.” And her sisters in other wards demonstrated the same spirit: “We can build a hospital. We can run a newspaper – the Woman’s Exponent. We can support the suffrage movement. We can be self-sufficient. We can set up a straw weaving establishment to make hats and get the equipment for weaving stockings. We can do tailoring. We can send women to medical school.” There’s so much energy in this period –so many things women felt they could do. It was the cooperative era in Mormon history, and it opened my eyes to the variety of things that Relief Society has done and could do. Some of those activities faded as times changed, of course, but some carried on in new ways into the 20th century, such as health care for women and children and the establishment of Social Services and the Primary Children’s Hospital. There is just so much that women have done. Part of the conflict that I and others felt in the 1970s was that those women-led enterprises were placed under the direction of men. That was difficult. But my sense of wonder and respect for those women and their energy has remained with me. We don’t take minutes like that anymore that I know of. Was that a product of the culture at the time? Why did we stop? How can we not lose that kind of record with the current women of the Church? Eliza R. Snow was called by Brigham Young to reorganize the Relief Societies that had been dormant, and in 1868, she started in earnest working with individual wards. As secretary of the Female Relief Society of Nauvoo she had recorded the minutes of most of its meetings in a bound volume, and that volume remained in her possession. She did submit it briefly to the Church Historian’s Office so that excerpts could be copied from it (and redacted, as we have noted), but during her lifetime the volume remained with her. She felt a keen sense of stewardship for that minute book. In 1868, as she began the work of reorganization, she took the volume with her from ward to ward and said, “This is the pattern for organizing a ward Relief Society, and this is the pattern for keeping minutes.” In fact, as we study some of those minutes from wards in 1868, it is evident that she is the one who set up the minute book and recorded the minutes for that ward’s first meeting. She was clear about the importance of secretaries and keeping minutes. We have in the Church Archives scores and scores of wonderful minute books. Certainly this attention to record-keeping stems from the mandate in Doctrine and Covenants 21: “There shall be a record kept among you.” When the Young Women and Primary were set up, they too kept minutes of their meetings. Elders quorums and Seventies quorums were keeping minutes. This is part of the treasure in the archives and many of those minute books are now being digitized. So today, if you go on the Church Historian’s Press website, you can see the discourses of Eliza R. Snow pulled from women’s minutes. Of course, ward and stake minutes preserve the words of many other women who were speaking – Zina Young, Mary Isabella Horne, Emmeline B. Wells, among others, and hundreds of local women. We have a rich treasure trove of women’s words in these remarkable records. Handwritten minutes ended in about 1913-14 when Relief Society general secretary Amy Brown Lyman and others from a new generation pushed for modernization. We then had more typewriters and standardized forms. The forms were much cleaner, briefer, and the information was much reduced. If I go to Sarah Kimball’s 15th Ward minutes from the 1870s, for example, I can see, “Sister so and so said this, Sister so and so said that this is the testimony borne by Sister so and so.” Sometimes the minutes are lengthy and detailed, sometimes not. From the 1880s, I found minutes from a ward in Huntington, Utah that tells the whole story of building the Relief Society hall including a conflict with the bishop over the hall. It’s a rich story that we have now because the secretary kept elaborate minutes of who said what, sentence by sentence. It’s just a treasure. But you don’t find that after 1914. The forms introduced in 1914 were used until about 1970, when they began to eliminate the forms. Unfortunately, many of those records have been lost. Many have been microfilmed or digitized, but many are lost. So it does become harder in the 20th century to get that kind of intimate picture from the minutes. More recently, the Church History Department has asked individual wards, stakes, and missions to assemble annual histories. Some of those are very rich and meaningful, some are just photographs of youth activities. My husband and I served a Church history mission in Europe for 18 months, and part of the emphasis was encouraging units to put together these annual histories. Some are just stunning – they include testimonies of people baptized or reactivated that year, the testimony of a young man who received the priesthood, and his experience administering the sacrament. People come up with creative things. As with previous minutes, the efforts are spotty – they’re not all comprehensive, and they’re certainly not all submitted. But that is one way of keeping this history worldwide. Records like that and individual diaries are what the historians have drawn upon to write the Saints volumes of the 20th century. What impact has writing about Eliza R. Snow specifically had on you? I have now lived with this woman for fifty years and I’m still learning new things about her. This is a person of extraordinary intelligence who consecrated her gifts to build the Kingdom. The compilation of her poetry – those five hundred poems – was an important part of my coming to know her better. We have only three diaries – one from Nauvoo and two from the trail – that show us something of her private thoughts. We have a handful of letters and a rich trove of discourses from the last twenty years of her life. Eliza R. Snow, The Complete Poetry Consistent across her life were her poems. One of the important concepts that has come to me from looking at her poems is her capacity to work within patterns and structures to express herself. In some ways, this is the story of her leadership: this capacity to be creative and express herself within a form or structure. Within the ecclesiastical structure of the Church, we see her moving forward creatively to make things happen and still maintain allegiance to the structure, just as she could conform her thoughts to some pattern and form of meter and rhyme in her poetry. She’s able to do that organizationally without losing personal integrity or a sense of what she wants to express or advance. That is one of Eliza’s great strengths. I have learned much from seeing her navigate some pretty tight forms and pretty tight places. Not that she never stepped beyond limits – she was reprimanded a few times. But she had an exceptional gift for maximizing possibilities within the organization. This, coupled with her willingness to consecrate and sacrifice, enabled her to make a singular contribution. She believed heart and soul in the restoration of the priesthood. For her, priesthood order and ordinances provided women and men access to the power of God, and she believed that working within the revealed order was the way she could gain access to godly power, increase in holiness, and assist in the work of salvation, to which she was deeply committed. That is the core of her strength – her faith in and connection to Jesus Christ, her devotion to His Kingdom on earth and to the possibilities of holiness He offers each individual. Her vision of and commitment to the power of priesthood order and ordinances has had a tremendous impact on me. I’m sure it has. How can we now – both men and women – benefit from studying Church history and the women in particular? I think we can benefit by the same sense of discovery and fascination that I’ve tried to convey. The more stories we have, the more satisfying it is – whether it’s someone from the 19th century or the 20th century. These lives don’t necessarily solve our problems, but they show us such a range of possibility. I hunger for that. The diversity in our history is truly enriching. As the Church has moved internationally, and we see even a greater variety of lives, we understand that there are many ways to be a faithful Latter-day Saint. There is power in sacrifice, and we can’t study these lives without seeing the power of the sacrifices people have made.When we study the whole history, we also see that people have opted out all along the way, essentially saying, “This sacrifice was too great for me. The dissonance was too much for me and I left.” Those are also part of our story. We can see those who dissented weren’t necessarily destroyed – many went on to live productive lives. Those examples are also out there. Still, there is a plentitude of diverse examples of people who made the sacrifice to stay, to remain, to live with conflict and dissonance, to work through disagreements among women and men. Disappointment is as much a part of our history as triumph and unity. In seeing the full landscape more clearly, we get a better sense of what it means to be a Latter-day Saint and how we can commit ourselves to an institution that is both human and divine. We’re going to be disappointed and offended, we’re going to have to sacrifice. But if we believe in that divine power to which the ordinances of the gospel give us access, we can live with those sacrifices and that dissonance, and we can make a contribution to something we believe is divine and far greater than ourselves. At A Glance Name: Jill Mulvay Derr Age: 73 Location: Holladay, Utah Marital History: Married Children: 4 children and 11 grandchildren Occupation: Historian, retired Convert to the Church: Baptized at 8 years old Schools Attended: B. A., University of Utah; M.A.T., Harvard Graduate School of Education Languages Spoken At Home: English, occasionally French Favorite Hymn: #113, “Our Savior’s Love” Interview Produced by Trina Caudle

Robyn Burkinshaw is the secretary of her stake Relief Society, and a gay woman. She was raised in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and has always had a love of the Gospel. When she left the Church as a young adult and struggled deeply with depression, she felt a devastating distance between herself and God, believing herself to be unworthy of His blessings. Time, family, and tiny miracles led her back to the gospel and after a twenty-year hiatus, she returned to church. Robyn’s journey is her own. While her story may help LGBTQ people realize the love that God has for them, it is not a guide for their own lives or their relationship with the Church. Robyn is the CEO of BlytzPay, a financial technology startup. As a woman executive in the financial technology industry, Robyn is used to standing out and raising her voice for positive change. Robyn Burinshaw Will you tell me a little bit about what you do? Professionally I am the Founder and CEO BlytzPay, a financial technology startup in Utah County. Soon we’re moving from Lehi to Draper, to the other side of the mountain. It started late 2016 to early 2017 and we’re starting to catch some steam. It has been a lot of fun to be a female fintech founder—to be involved in technology as a woman and specifically in Utah—and to make a little bit of a splash. It has been an incredible opportunity and I’m really blessed and very grateful for all of the things that have come my way. Can you briefly describe in layman’s terms what BlytzPay is? BlytzPay is a mobile payment technology that allows businesses to invoice and collect via text message. So rather than getting your water bill or your mortgage payment or your insurance bill in the mail, you get it via text message and you can pay right from your phone. Why did you create BlytzPay? What is your underlying vision there? It has evolved pretty dramatically. Initially I created it because paying bills is a pain, so I wanted an easier way to interact with merchants. BlytzPay was born of the need to communicate and collect—interaction that leads to transactions between consumers and businesses. But there is an inclusion piece that has materialized as the product has grown and developed. The twenty-first century digital economy excludes people who are underbanked or unbanked—people who are immigrants, the poor and people who are trying to make ends meet—they don’t have the opportunities to participate in the digital economy like people who fit in the bank box. It’s expensive to be poor and needlessly so. Blytz has designed some platforms to allow everybody to participate and everyone to have those conveniences and efficiencies and security. Blytz really came about during the crash in 2008. I was in mortgage lending when the market crashed, and I was recruited by a law firm that was dealing with distressed consumers. At that point in time, middle America was full of distressed consumers. Many were underemployed or unemployed, and underwater in their homes. That opportunity really gave me a clear vision of the silos that exist in the way businesses deal with consumers. It gets worse when people are scared, and what happens to communication in that kind of a setting needed to be improved. What’s it like being a women in Utah in fintech? Fintech leadership in Utah specifically is predominantly male and it has been a challenge—in fundraising, and in being taken seriously. I’ve sat in meetings where I’m answering questions that are posed to my male counterpart sitting next to me—engaging with him but not looking at me. It’s interesting. In my entire career I’ve never seen anything quite like it. Dealing with fundraising and dealing with the financial technology world specifically has been a challenge as a female founder, but it’s one that I absolutely thrive on. The fastest way to get me to do something is to tell me that I can’t. Do you feel like it’s changing for women in the fintech field? I do feel like it’s changing, but I don’t feel like it’s changing at the pace it needs to. I think that in order for it to change, people who care about change are going to have to stand up for what we believe in and make ourselves heard, because it’s not going to be handed to us. I’d like to hear a little bit about your upbringing. Were you raised in Utah, in the Church? I was born and raised in Midvale, the youngest of five siblings—the closest sibling to me was 16 when I was born, the oldest was 25. I was the family surprise over and over again, as they tell me. My mother wrote my second-to-oldest brother who was serving a mission in Brazil and said, “Oh, by the way, when you get home from your mission you’re going to have a new baby sister!” So it was pretty surprising to him and then just as he got home, my other brother left to serve a mission in Japan. So I was surrounded by adults from a very young age. I was the one to be supervised. I had five sets of parents telling me what to do and how I should do it. All of my siblings were active, more or less. My mom was always fairly active before I was born but my dad never really was, but more or less I was raised in the Church. The Burkinshaw Family What was your journey in the Church like, from when you were young? It was a little bit of a dichotomy. There was always a feeling of spirituality, but I never really related it to the Church or to Church activity. I have family roots that I think anchored me in the gospel even before I was born. I always loved the gospel and always had a love of my Savior, but there came a point where I felt like I had to choose and the gospel and the Church were so intertwined that if I was choosing out of one, I was choosing out of all of it. In my early life, that was a real challenge for me. I struggled. I left the Church in my early twenties. I’d always known that there was something different about me. Recognizing I was gay came a little later because I didn’t really have a context. I hadn’t grown up around anybody that was gay and so I didn’t understand. I think everybody knew I was gay but me! So that wasn’t a piece of your leaving the Church? It wasn’t at the time but it became a piece later. I think at that time being gay was so different that I didn’t believe I could have the Savior and the gospel in my life if I was gay. So I went really, really far the other direction, trying to figure out who I was. It was tough. My family struggled with it quite a bit, they didn’t understand me and I don’t feel I understood them. We spent a lot of time talking past each other—when we were talking, which was rare in those days. My mother passed away a couple of years ago but to her dying day I think she would tell you that I wasn’t gay, that it was a phase. How did they respond to your inactivity in the Church? That was tough for them. I think they were worried about my well-being and my safety and my choices, and it was really tough. My mom specifically had a really difficult time. I think they feared for my eternal well-being. I don’t want to speak too far out of turn, but my perception was that they viewed it as a choice I had made, rather than part of who I was. I think over the last 20-25 years we have gained a lot of insight and information about what it’s like to be gay. I think my family at the time felt like I was just going through some wild phase and that it was a decision that I made. And that was really hard to try and explain. These were people that I loved and respected and I wanted them to understand, but I didn’t have the words to articulate it and neither did they. Were you able to maintain those relationships through that time of misunderstanding? No. They tried in their own way on a number of different occasions. One of my siblings still hasn’t quite wrapped her head around my journey and where it has gone. She has distanced herself from me but my brothers really did their best and my parents did their best to understand and be supportive where they could. It was a hard time for all of us. What about your relationship with God around the time you realized you were gay? Devastatingly distant. I othered myself—I believed that I was different enough that I didn’t have the right to have a relationship with God. And interestingly, He kept reaching, and reaching, and reaching. He wouldn’t let me go and I just didn’t see it. I think I was so convinced that I was less-than, or that I was not deserving of His love and His blessings that I distanced myself there as well. What are the ways that you now see He was reaching to you? When I was 23 or 24, I had broken up with my first partner. I was convinced that I was going to lose my family, I was going to lose my faith, I was going to lose everything, and she had had enough of me being a closet case. It was really a tough time. I told my family I was gay, and they didn’t take it very well. I was battling a depression that I couldn’t lift myself out from. Even just to think back to that time, it feels like a fog. I had had enough, and I made a pretty serious suicide attempt. I was found by a friend that had absolutely no reason to be looking for me, but he felt impressed to leave work and come and check on me. The doors were locked in my house so he climbed in the back window and found me unconscious. To make a long story short he got my parents and called 911. I had stopped breathing. As they were getting ready to load me into the ambulance, my parents’ home teacher and our bishop were driving by. They saw the commotion and stopped and followed the ambulance to the hospital. A couple of weeks ago I found a letter written by my former bishop, who I’m actually still close to now. It was basically him jotting down notes of the blessing he gave me while I was unconscious in the emergency room and they were waiting to see whether or not I was going to live. At that point they didn’t have great hope that if I did survive I was going to be at full capacity. That’s one of the ways that Heavenly Father blessed me. He was able to see the future. He was able to see past the darkness of a young struggling girl that didn’t know which direction was up. In the blessing, my spirit was commanded to return to my body and I was told that Heavenly Father had a great work for me to do in my life and that I would be a tool in His hands to lift and build and strengthen people who had less faith and who needed—I think the words were—“needed to see a light at the end of a dark path.” It’s hard for me to share that story publicly but I think it’s important for people struggling for any number of reasons to know there is a light at the end of the tunnel. Suicide is something we need to talk more about in the Church and as a community especially with LBGTQ members. There’s no shame in having challenges and struggles, even serious ones. There is hope even when you don’t fit the mold. There were always people around that were there to support and sustain me as I walked my path. I recovered and Heavenly Father continued to reach for me. It was always very difficult for me internally because I felt a pull back to the gospel. I felt a pull to my Heavenly Father, and I think some of that probably was from the other side. I think some of that was grandparents, and I had a sibling that passed away, and aunts and people who were always there to make sure that I didn’t go so far over the side that I couldn’t be brought back. Thank you for sharing that. What was your “light at the end of a dark path?” What was it that finally led you back? There were a number of things. In 2008-2009 when the market crashed, I was in a position where I was looking for work and work was pretty scarce. An opportunity materialized that couldn’t have been anything but the hand of God in my life. From that point I made a commitment to start paying my tithing. It was a little strange to be in the position that I was in—I was in a relationship at the time and completely out of the Church. I just felt that Heavenly Father had blessed me so abundantly that I needed to reach out. The day after Christmas in 2013, my dad hadn’t been feeling well and had really kind of declined. He was in his eighties. On Christmas Day he wouldn’t let me take him to the doctor. We took him the day after Christmas, and the next day we found out that he had acute myeloid leukemia with just a very, very short period of time to live. It was devastating to me. I didn’t always have a great relationship with my parents and I didn’t have a relationship with him that was very good. It was like the door had closed. He passed away the night of New Year’s Eve, just shortly after 11:00 p.m. My brother had driven from Oklahoma where he was living at the time and there was a peace to him that I didn’t have. He had an understanding—I understood it but I don’t think I had a testimony of it. I think the fear overwhelmed me. To watch the difference between my brother’s response to my dad’s passing and the rough tide that was just raging in me, was pretty significant. My mom had been diagnosed with dementia and was pretty out of it. She didn’t have a lot of comprehension as to what was going on, so my dad was kind of the last anchor I had to my parents. I’m the baby. It was a challenge. I think that started the serious journey. Over the course of the next year we had to put my mom in an assisted living facility because she wasn’t able to care for herself. We had to sell the family home and all of these things. I’m pretty sentimental by nature and so to watch some of those things unfold was pretty tough; to watch my mom take her last steps out of her home that she had lived in the majority of her married life was devastating. It was a pretty rocky year for me. We began to prepare the home for sale and I was going through some documents that my mother had saved. I found a letter that she had written in 1962 or 1963. It was very clearly for me. A little bit of background: my mom and dad were not married in the temple and had had some struggles in their marriage and some struggles each personally and so weren’t ever super active. So about 18 months before my dad passed away, they were endowed and sealed in the temple and all of my siblings were able to participate but me. I very literally stood outside the doors of the temple and waited. I was pretty upset. So when I found this letter, it was pretty interesting. My mother wasn’t married in the temple and I think she carried that regret with her but her mother, my Grandma Bateman, was very, very active and my mother loved and revered her mother just like all my siblings. I never met my Grandma Bateman as she passed away before I was born, but this letter is about her. My mother wrote: One night I stood outside the temple gates and waited for mother who was inside. I waited quite a time, and in those moments, I saw and pondered many things. I looked upon the solid stately walls which separate Temple Square and set it from the world apart, then upward to the lighted spires and upward until my eyes rested upon that grandest pinnacle, atop which stands that glorious likeness of the Angel Moroni. Above, the sky was black in contrast, filled with glimmering stars. Upon the street were many a hurried footsteps, couples, arms entwined, or holding hands, walked forth in eagerness, faces alive with purpose, to enter, and be welcomed through the gate. Groups of every age, hurrying, intent on the joyous task at hand poured through the gate. A bride, carrying a bouffant wedding dress, careful lest it be crushed, made her exit from those doors, the realization of her dreams written upon her face. Her husband beside her, their parents close at hand. Young and old, I thought, here are the faithful. Then I saw my own dear Mother approach, her face alight with the inspiration she had felt within those walls, of the worthwhile accomplished, buoyed up and generated by covenants renewed, eyes shining from the burning of the spirit within. Out the heavy doors she came, down the path to the outside world, carrying an essence of heaven with her. I was alone. I alone had waited outside that night. With the waiting, the seeing, the feeling, came a clear realization of how my own choice had placed me there, of how those years ago, I thought that love could win the desires of my heart and soul without a doubt. Now only God could know the yearning of my heart. My love of husband even stronger now, and with four children, Kim, Jeffrey, Mark, and Laurie, ours to love and guide, I knew the truth: True love cannot be fulfilled that does not encompass the gospel of Jesus Christ. On then, to dinner with Mother for whom I’d waited, to sit about the table and hear her conversation, feel the strength she had derived from her loving service for the dead. See the emotion and almost into the souls of the family who had been sealed that very night. Twelve years had passed since my wedding day, years of hope, faith, love, learning, and a vast multitude of experiences. And yet how long the journey and how steep the pathway I did not know. Onward, then, with tools of love and understanding to strive, and earn with faith, to qualify, with the one I love for eternal life. If I could leave one message for my children, it would be this: Never make a choice in life that leaves you waiting outside the House of God. For if you do, it may be you will find yourself and those you love outside for eternity. Nothing in the world could compensate for the loss of this, the greatest of all blessings. —Joyce B. Burkinshaw At a time when my mother didn’t have the capacity to deliver that message to me, Heavenly Father made a way. That was my call to come home. Robyn’s parents’ sealing, 2011 What an amazing story. What was your journey back like? How did you take those steps? My first step was I think talking myself into it. I hadn’t stepped into a church for over 20 years and that was a pretty daunting experience. It took me until January of 2015, and one Sunday I gathered my strength and found the one skirt that I owned in the back of the closet that I hadn’t even thought about for years, and traipsed myself to sacrament meeting. I was terrified. I walked in the doors and sat in the back. It was fast and testimony meeting, the first Sunday in January, and I sat hiding in the corner, hoping that nobody would see or notice me. During fast and testimony meeting I felt compelled to bear my testimony about the Plan of Salvation and the fact that I didn’t know anything about anything, but that I was grateful that Heavenly Father had instituted a way for us to be together. From there I all but ran to the door. I was mobbed by members of that ward who wanted to know who I was and what I was and where was I going and why was I going so quickly. It took me a couple of months of going to really commit. In years past I had investigated other religions and had tried to find that peace, and it didn’t exist, at least for me. That’s one of the things I want to make really clear in this interview, that my story is very different than everybody else’s, my path is very different. One thing I don’t want to happen is for my story to be used as a weapon against others who are struggling with some of the same challenges. My path is my path alone and it doesn’t represent the same choices and same challenges or opportunities that others face. People are people, everybody has their own path and their own opportunity to learn and to grow in a way that is designed specifically for them. The Atonement was focused by our Savior and our Heavenly Father on the individual. He atoned for each one of us personally and individually and He knows our path and He doesn’t compare our path to anybody else, even if the challenges are similar. I want to make sure that I communicate this clearly: my path is not for everyone. Thank you for stating that with such clarity. What teachings of the Church resonate most deeply with you? What really drew you back? There are a couple of things that really spoke to me. Elder Holland has a special place in my heart. It feels like every time he talks, he is talking specifically to me. My brother sent me a link to Elder Holland’s talk, “Remember Lot’s Wife: Faith is for the Future.” This was after my dad died but before my path started back towards church. That resonated with me, that faith looks forward, that we take the embers and not the ashes from our past and we are able to grow from those. He talks about the future that is yet to come and the forgiveness that can be wrought from that. That gave me a hope and a sense of belonging that I really needed and hadn’t had. I think it started to clarify for me that I was worthy and had the opportunity to find God even though I was different, even though I wasn’t what you would consider the storybook member of the Church. That was significant to me. There was another talk that I found by Brad Wilcox called “His Grace is Sufficient.” In that he talks about the art of playing the piano—essentially we are beginning piano players and as we go through life’s experiences, we’re going to hit wrong keys, but it doesn’t mean that we are not to be piano players, it means that we are learning. That resonated with me as well. Robyn with her brother Mark What teachings of the Church are challenging for you? The night before I was endowed, my family had flown into town and my mother had recently passed away. I was preparing to be endowed on November 6. The day before, November 5, 2015, the Church announced the changes to Handbook 1 that limited children of same-sex couples from being blessed and then baptized. I crawled into bed to read the news, as is kind of my custom, and to see that news was a kick in the gut to me. Literally not 12 hours before I was to be endowed. I thought, I can’t do this, I can’t do this. I can’t join something that is this exclusionary to people who don’t have a choice and who don’t fit the traditional mold. That was very, very difficult and very painful for me. That was a struggle. I ended up being endowed, but being endowed with the goal to raise my voice—for whatever that was worth—to be a voice for change and a voice for temperance and a voice for kindness and inclusion. Change within the Church, so that everybody is welcome and that everyone deserves the love of God and the blessings of the Atonement and the recognition of His hand in each one of our lives. The sociology of the Church I think is changing, but there are still some tough challenges that weigh on me. There are conference talks that are given across the pulpit that are sometimes painful. I’ve gotten to where I don’t listen to conference live, I listen to it after the fact and I’ve got amazing, supportive people that give me the guidance of what to listen to and what to stay away from. It’s not the doctrine, it’s the way the doctrine is delivered. We are a church of lay leaders—imperfect lay leaders with opinions and experiences and differences, and that can be challenging. There was a time just after I was endowed that I was sitting in Relief Society. Nobody really knew my background. There were a very select few who even knew that I was gay, my bishop and his counselors and maybe one other person. Because of the conversation and the derision that the changes to Handbook 1 had caused, everybody had something to say but there wasn’t a really good forum in which to say it, so it came out in these really weird ways, like in Relief Society. So we’re in Relief Society, and we’re having a lesson called “Feed My Sheep,” and “Feed My Sheep” turns into “Should I feed the gay sheep?” There were a couple of sisters that started going back and forth about whether they should support family members and attend weddings of gay family members or gay friends. I sat kind of white-knuckled in my seat, not sure what to share and what not to share, and I just sat there silent. I walked out, pretty upset with myself that I had stayed quiet, because I’m not much for being quiet, but I wasn’t sure what to say! I had been called that year as a Relief Society teacher and happened to be teaching that next week. The lesson was called “Faith is not by Chance but by Choice,” and I shared my story. And you could have heard a pin drop. I read the letter from my mother and I asked, “If you had known I was gay, would the conversation have been different? Would you have thought that I would have returned? Does it change your opinion of me? Does Heavenly Father want us to feed just the sheep that look like us and talk like us?” I talked a little bit about the Savior’s life and who He was. That was a wake up call to me. There are always people that say things that I don’t think mean harm—they don’t think through completely what they’re saying or who may be in the room that might be affected. But the truth, at least for me, has been that my faith is not by chance but by choice. That I choose to believe in the gospel and believe that Heavenly Father will sort it all out, eventually. I don’t have to carry the weight on my shoulders, and not that that absolves me of a responsibility to be a voice for change, and to speak up when I see something that’s wrong, but that I don’t have to feel responsible to change everything in a finite period of time. He is aware of us and aware of the things that are happening, and blesses us accordingly. That is beautiful and I think a really compassionate view of the people who surround you in the Church. It must be some kind of a burden to be a gay member of the Church and feel like there is a responsibility to be the one that speaks up and that represents and that explains. Does that become tiring? I wouldn’t say tiring, I would say I want to make sure that I deliver it in a way that’s loving and that’s appropriate and that’s kind. Because we don’t need any more division, we need unity. I think it’s overwhelming at times, and it’s easy to feel insecure about being able to deliver that message. I think of Moses—I’m not comparing myself to Moses—but I think of people who have been called to duties and responsibilities that they don’t know how on earth they are going to fulfill. It’s scary; it can be challenging and overwhelming that Heavenly Father would allow me to share my voice and my experiences and to believe am I the right person for that. Do you serve in a calling right now in your ward? I do. I am the Secretary in the stake Relief Society. It has been an incredible opportunity. When they called me in to offer me the calling, I thought I was in trouble. Much to my surprise they called me to the stake and I think that speaks volumes to the change that’s happening. My ward and my stake are incredible. Our stake Relief Society President is one of the most gifted, kind, loving people that you could ever ask for, so to be called to serve with her has been phenomenal. But there aren’t many lesbian members of the stake Relief Society presidency so it’s been pretty cool. I’m going to ask just because that’s my same calling—what do you feel like your purpose is in that calling? I think especially now, and I don’t know if it’s just more visible than it has been in the past, but I think now there are a lot of feelings in the Church about “is this the place that I should be? Am I doing the right thing?” There were a lot of people that left over the changes to Handbook 1 and, and I think if anything, I want to show that change is possible, and that people are trying and that the only way change will happen is if people are willing to stay and do the hard work and raise their voice but there are days where it’s hard. What message do you have for other LGBTQ people who wish to be active members of the Church? You have your path to walk, and only you know what direction that path will take. Very clearly I want to articulate that Heavenly Father, whether you’re an active member of the Church or not, Heavenly Father loves each one of us individually, He knows us individually, He knows us intimately, and it doesn’t change based on your sexual preference or your ethnicity or your religious beliefs or your standing in a community or your job or any of those things that we sometimes look at ourselves and judge ourselves in accordance with. If you want to be a disciple of the Savior, there are two great commandments. Number one is love God, and number two is love your neighbor. I think we stack a lot of other stuff on top of the gospel and it’s time to get back to basics. It’s time to get really clear about who we are and what’s important to us and what we’re doing and how that impacts the world and the people around us. Anything else is just a lot of noise. You talked about how there was a time in your life where you felt really distant from God and maybe unworthy of God’s blessings. What is your relationship now with God? Gratitude. I try really hard to pay attention to His hand in my life daily. There are so many opportunities that He puts before me and for all of us, things that are just tiny, or things that are large and miraculous, but He’s there. He’s there in the details. I would say I am learning to trust Him, I’m learning to trust. I think it’s a matter of remembrance—remembering the times that He picked me up on my road to Damascus and sent me on my way. There are two stories about the Savior that come to my mind often. The first is the story of Peter just after the Savior was crucified. Peter went back to fishing and I’m sure was unsure of what to do going forward, and scared, and all of the emotions that those early disciples felt. The Savior asks Peter three times “Peter, do you love me?” Peter answers, “Yea Lord thou knowest that I love thee.” Three times in repetition—I think in very deliberate proximity to what Peter’s denial of the Savior was—He asked three times and wanted to make sure that Peter knew what he was saying. I think it was almost as much a testament to Peter as it was to the Savior. The second one is Jesus asking His disciples “Will ye also leave?” And their response is “To whom shall we go?” And that’s the truth, for me. The only option, the only place that I have to go is to the Savior and to our Father in Heaven, because He knows. He knows me, and He knows what I need to be the person that I want to be, and that He knows that I can be. At A Glance Name: Robyn Burkinshaw Age: 43 Location: Salt Lake City, Utah Marital History: Single Children: 3 kids. Keima, 9 (Chihuahua), Knox age 9 (Chihuahua), Tucker 5 (Boston Terrier) Schools Attended: Hillcrest High School Interview Produced by Meredith Marshall

Celeste Mergens is the CEO and Founder of Days for Girls International, an award-winning champion for Women’s Health and Menstrual Health Equity. Days for Girls was named by the Huffington Post as a ‘Next Ten’ Organization poised to change the world in the next decade. Now they start global conversations and provide care products for women all over the world so they can go to work and school, and have the confidence to shatter stigma and shame. Trigger warning: Mention of sexual exploitation. Tell me about Days for Girls. How did you find and adopt this as a project? I didn’t find it. It found me. I had been doing sustainable development projects in Kenya and was invited by a dignitary to see a health program in the slums of Kibera in 2008. He also introduced us to a nearby orphanage project that swelled to approximately 1400 kids in the wake of post-election violence that happened in 2007/2008. Shortly before a return trip to Kenya, I got a phone call explaining that the orphanage was completely out of food and water, and had been for two days. As a woman who experienced hunger as a child, I knew what that felt like and I wanted to help with all my heart. I hit my knees immediately and asked, “What can I do to help the children?” We’d already done everything we could. We had no more resources to share. “Please just tell me what to do. I have nothing left to share, and I’m going to need help.” Nothing came to me. I fell asleep still pleading, and still no answer. I woke up at 2:30 in the morning with the thought, “Have you asked what the girls are doing for feminine hygiene?” I’d never thought to ask that question! I ran to the computer and emailed to ask, and got an immediate answer. The response was: “Nothing. They wait in their rooms.” The girls sat on a piece of cardboard for days during their periods. No access to leaving their rooms. No access to school. We were able to raise $200 for disposable feminine hygiene products – pads for the 500 girls who had that need at that time. Celeste in Nepal I knew that even if we could raise and send the money each month for pads, if they needed food, they would use the pad money for food. And they should. So how could they have something they could count on month after month? That was when I designed the first Days for Girls pad, on a napkin on the trunk of a car, ironically. The design went to Relief Societies in our stake, it went to Relief Societies in Utah, there was even a dorm at Utah State University that took it on. There were other churches all over the valley where we live in Washington that participated. Miraculously, we were able to make the first 500 Days for Girls kits – eight huge duffels of supplies. We used every resource we had, and we were fifty pairs of underwear short. You cannot arrive at an orphanage fifty pairs of underwear short. As we were packing to leave, my friend said, “What are we going to do?” I said, “If I know anything about this project, it’s not our project. God will find a way.” She gave me a skeptical look. We were packing at my husband’s office, and an employee came in: “I was told to bring this box for Celeste.” Inside were fifty pairs of underwear and four little boys shorts – one of his family members had bought them while on vacation and mailed them. From the beginning, it has been that way. Also, from the beginning, we have provided education. I asked someone, “Who talks to the girls about periods?” No one. I wasn’t a global expert in menstrual wellness and sexual reproductive health – that wasn’t a thing on my list of what to be when I grew up. But it looked like I was going to become one. I was concerned but knew they needed that, so we prepared a whole presentation. As we did the presentation, they were just so happy to receive the kits. The girls circled around after – I have a photo of them – and they said, “Thank you so much, because before you came, we had to let them use us if we wanted to leave the room and go to class.” I was hoping that didn’t mean what I feared it meant. They explained that they were sexually exploited in exchange for a single disposable pad. In that moment, Days for Girls was born. I don’t know how you could do anything else. Exactly! When people ask if I’m the founder of Days for Girls, I say, “Technically?” I’m a really good listener who pays attention, shows up, and keeps working. God is the founder. The things that I survived in childhood led to the compassion, understanding, and empathy that I need to do this work as present and never condescending. It takes listening and learning, so we can become better at what we’re doing. We’ve been through thirty-one iterations of our pads. That’s taken humility to ask, what else could work better? Today we hold two patents, because of asking what could work better – that whole ethos that people can create great solutions if you give them a chance. Honoring the wisdom of those we serve is at the core of Days for Girls. I came home and told people, “This is what happened, this is what they told us.” They said, “Nooo, it’s only that one orphanage, people don’t really need pads, people aren’t out of pads, come on!” It sounds like they weren’t out of pads, they just never had anything to begin with. Now we know, of course – what does a homeless woman do? What does a foster girl do? What does anyone do, who has to choose between food and hygiene? But we didn’t know that then. No one was talking about it then – not the World Health Organization, not any nonprofits. It was hidden in the stigma. So I would just say, “Go ask.” People would come back: “My friend in India says they asked and this is something they need!” The list went on. So we made the resources available, we invited people to join, we made it as easy as possible to do, and we all just started working together. Today, there have been over 70,000 volunteers in Days for Girls. We’ve reached 144 countries on six continents, more than 2.3 million women and girls, because the Lord loves His daughters. Going back a little, are you comfortable sharing what you experienced as a child that led you to have this level of compassion? Celeste with Her Grandchildren My family moved a lot – 32 times. As a result of that instability, we’d sometimes go without food and were homeless. It was a very unpredictable place with a lot of shouting and abuse. A stormy season. I had to survive a lot of things, including being abused in almost every way you can be abused. But I got an incredible gift along the way. This doesn’t sound like a gift, but I was about five years old and we were living at a state park. I was walking on a path, and a woman came into view with her little white dog with a sparkly collar and sparkly leash. Following the sparkle in her hand with my eyes, she threw a half-eaten apple into a dumpster. I was trying to decide if I could get that apple and not get trapped in the dumpster when I realized she was staring at me. She said, “Where are your shoes, girl?” I said, “I’m toughening my feet.” Then it was like a mirror turned around and I could see what she saw – a dirty little girl in this place, barefoot with dirty feet. I could see that, but I had this wave come up inside me – “I am not from here. I am not this place. I am not what you see.” In that moment, I really did get the chance to decide whether to let the impressions of others define me, this place define me, this situation I was in define me, or if I was something else. I used to think of her as Cruella DeVil, but I’ve realized that for all I know she could have been an angel. She asked with her rude comments for me to decide if I was going to be what she saw. Going forward, I didn’t believe the things that happened to me defined me. That changed everything. People are not their circumstances – they’re so much more than that! It comes from having survived circumstances that didn’t look very survivable and recognizing that the situation doesn’t define me. How I respond defines me. I imagine that helped you commit to education and being a member of the Church: “I’m not going to be like this as an adult.” I read the scriptures when I was eight for the strength that came from them. I needed anchors to hold onto. I wouldn’t be alive if it weren’t for the gospel of Jesus Christ. I am so grateful. Every day I count on the inspiration that comes from praying and studying and knowing about the gift of the Holy Ghost. That’s why I can walk into a meeting with the Minister of Education and the Minister of Health and the First Lady of a country, and know that it’s going to be okay. I don’t have to be perfect. I can be more interested in them than worried about if I will nail it, because I will be guided. This is another reason I know who holds Days for Girls, which was founded in 2008. I was asked to give a TEDx Talk in 2010, but I had a health challenge – I had a severe seizure that lasted so long they were going to put me on a life flight. For three months, if I blinked, I would fall to the left, so I had to hold onto the wall to walk. I couldn’t read because my eyes wouldn’t work together for about four months. It took me a whole year to be able to carry a tune again because of the damage to my brain. Days for Girls was happening through this. We had amazing volunteers, but we didn’t have administrative tasks covered yet. Some days, I couldn’t get on the phone because I knew my speech was slurred, and I really couldn’t do anything. One day, I was feeling sorry for myself but I turned on the TV and watched three episodes of “Touched by an Angel” in a row. Two of them had characters in extreme end-of-life medical conditions, trying to prepare for their family’s financial support after they passed away. I thought, “Okay, I get it, I don’t have to support my family. I’m just laying here. I’m surrounded by love. I’m in the lap of luxury. People bring me lunch sometimes. I’m fine!” I realized that if all I ever did with the rest of my life is sit in the garden and hug my grandkids and pray for people…I’ve read thousands of books, I’ve had many adventures…It was enough. In the moment of letting it go, I started doing better. I had a dream that night about something I should do. My symptoms were substantially better within a week and it was remarkable. I’d just had the seizure when I auditioned for the TEDx Talk. I had to get a ride because I couldn’t drive and I was praying with all my heart I wouldn’t pass out. Not “Help me do well,” just not pass out. The audition was better than the actual presentation. [Celeste’s TEDx talk was in Bellingham, Washington on Nov. 23, 2013.] Because of that season of weakness, I know with certainty whose legs I’m walking on, whose breath I draw, and whose eyes I’m seeing with. No matter how many awards Days for Girls wins, no matter how many awards I win, it’s just about the girls. So when I spend time with the First Lady and other dignitaries, I see it as a tremendous gift and a true responsibility to represent the girls and represent what’s possible when we all come together. You said on the first trip, you took $200 of disposable pads. That’s great for one month, but what about the next month? If it’s disposable, you need to get $200 of supplies every single month because they’re being used and thrown away. Exactly. And guess what happened when we got there. The pit latrines were all stopped up with used pads. They had to hand-shovel them out because there was no place to throw them away. The chain link next to the pit latrines were filled with rolled-up disposed pads. They were piled against fence posts, and there was a big pile at the end of the row of latrines. Some girls had even reached in and grabbed one to rinse and reuse someone else’s pad. The stigma because of the mess, the shame and health issues, and sanitation issues – single-use is just really not a solution unless they have incinerators. And what about the plastic pieces? Not only that, but how do you get it next month? Sometimes they don’t have any kind of disposable, single-use items in their community. So Days for Girls makes reusable hygiene products from fabric. The girls who get your kits are not stuck in their rooms, and they are contributing members of their community every day. Absolutely. And think about confidence. Think of your daughter if she had to go without – if she’s at school and trying to manage toilet tissue or something like socks, just trying to make it work, how confident is she sitting in the classroom taking exams? How confident is she when she’s ready to leave the house for the day? How confident is she that she’s not going to have an accident or a stain? It’s about dignity and confidence, and how their community relates to them. Not having a product that you need means that you’re isolated. Not having a product that you need means that you’re shamed and mocked. One of the ambassadors for women’s health said from the time she was teenager and had a leak, she’s been called “the girl with the red drops” in her language. She’s an adult with her own children now, and she’s still the girl with the red drops. You’re giving confidence, opportunity, and shifting a stigma, especially with education, and especially if everyone understands women’s reproductive health. We’ve added a program called Men Who Know, so men get to be part of the conversation. It’s really powerful for everyone to know that without periods, there would be no people. Every one of us is related to menstruation, not just the women. Everyone. We’re making sure everyone knows it’s a big deal, and it relates to all of us. What does global sustainable development mean? How does helping girls in an orphanage have menstruation supplies factor in? Celeste with Her Family Sustainable development is finding solutions that help communities facing poverty to help themselves. It considers poverty in a way that is inclusive of the communities and is practical for them to engage with. Thinking of what works for them. You can do a whole lot of harm if you don’t know what you’re doing. With Days for Girls, that translates to listening about the product design and making the education that goes with it to be relevant. Teams have gone on listening tours – what else do you need, did we skip something, making sure even the illustrations are culturally relevant. The background of sustainable development helped me be keenly aware that our decisions as an organization needed to be thoughtful for the long term. The volunteers making and taking the kits need to be educated, and the communities receiving them need to be educated, be translators, and eventually taught to lead Days for Girls Enterprises. We make sure those two things go together. Sustainable development is not about a one-time solution but something that can be managed long-term. An example of NOT sustainable development is I once met an organization providing hearing aids. I asked how they maintain the batteries going forward and how they do follow-up visits, checking to adjust the aids. “Oh, we don’t worry about any of that, our donors just want to know that we handed out the hearing aids.” The person who got to hear, and then that’s taken away when the battery runs out – but they don’t know it just needs a battery, and they don’t have access to get a new one. I don’t know about you, but I believe that’s almost worse. So it’s really important that when initiatives are started, you consider the long-term outcomes, the engagement and buy-in of the community. Not just saying, “Here,” and dropping things off. That’s why the Days for Girls kits, from the beginning, came with education, care, and usage. Initiatives need to be thoughtful of the actual reality of those being served. How does your work with Days for Girls relate to your faith and relationship with God? From the beginning, I felt very strongly that Days for Girls is for everyone. We are not about any one religion, country, nation – anything that would divide us. Days for Girls is not religious, which is why people don’t guess that I’m a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Nor are we anti-religious. We invite everyone to come together to help end the loss, stigma, and shame around menstruation. But my faith is part of my every day. It’s crucial that I know I’m going to be okay out there, to know that I’ll be guided in what to say and do. Every day. I count on that comfort. I just got back from Malawi where I saw a remarkable connection between Days for Girls leaders who live there and follow up on the advocacy done with the First Lady, the Minister of Health, the Minister of Gender, the planning commission, and nonprofits – everybody coming together. It was such a gift to be there. Not once but twice, I was too happy to sleep. I have been too excited to sleep, too anxious to sleep, too tired to sleep. That was the first time in my life that I was too happy to sleep. I literally spent an hour or two just praying in gratitude for the gift of being part of this. Celeste in Malawi with Chief Theresa Kachindamoto Period poverty is an issue that can change in our lifetime. A lot of things are really hard to change. Menstrual inequity is not one of them. This is something we can change in our lifetime. It can happen. It’s like being part of the suffragettes. We didn’t get to be there when women got the right to vote, but we can do this one. You’ve been part of it, and your daughter is part of it, to make history happen. When I was a young girl, I was mistreated and abused for being a girl. To be part of this shift is heavenly. So I was just sending up thank you’s. That is a gift of my faith. I wasn’t restless, I was just grateful. I find it amazing that if you pay attention and trust, that even closed doors, even the worst things you can imagine, can in the hands of the Lord become truly, incredibly marvelous. The plan I had for my life wasn’t nearly as cool as the plan the Lord had. I was going to be an engineer but the plan was so much bigger than that. And the girl who once didn’t have a home now has three filled passports of places in the world that are second homes to me. It’s incredible. What is your goal for Days for Girls for 2022, and how can people contribute and help meet that goal? In 2022, we hope to reach more than 400,000 more individuals around the world. That number includes girls who can stay in school knowing they have what they need, refugees, women who can be productive and more confident, thanks to those that support Days for Girls’ work. You can donate directly, volunteer, and follow us on social media to help reach more! Is there anything else you’d like to share? I have a friend who said, “I can’t believe my best friend is a Mormon.” She thought women are mistreated in the Church and not seen as important. I just light up and say, “Nope. That’s not been my experience.” As women in this world, we have so many gifts and so many strengths. It’s our season to own it. As a woman of faith, and a woman of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I feel completely held in that. I am absolutely confident of the possibilities that we all hold to change things. At A Glance Name: Celeste Mergens Age: 59 Location: Mt. Vernon, Washington, USA Marital History: Married to my best friend of 39 years! Children: 6 (12 if you count those by marriage) and 16 grandchildren Occupation: Founder and CEO of Days for Girls International Convert to the Church: At age 8 Schools Attended: Master’s Degree in Creative Writing and Literature. A second audited in Global Sustainable Development Languages Spoken At Home: English Favorite Hymn: I Stand All Amazed Website or Social Media You Would Like Featured: http://DaysforGirls.org Interview Produced by Trina Caudle

Fernanda Bollers was a high school student in Brazil when she began dating a member of the Church. After discussing the gospel and attending church with her boyfriend, she was baptized in 2010 and moved to the United States to attend college. Tell us where you were born and a little bit about your country. I was born in Sao Carlos, in the state of Sao Paulo, in Brazil. It’s not a huge city but not too small either, about the size of Knoxville, Tennessee, where I live now. We have a couple of public universities there, which are big in Brazil – that’s mostly why we’re on the map.I grew up there and a couple of months after I turned 18, I moved to the United States. All of my childhood was in Brazil, and all of my adulthood so far has been in the US. I have memories of growing up around family. My parents, my aunts, and uncles all live in the same town so whenever we go back home to Brazil, we see a ton of family. I’m the only one in the US. What made you interested in the Church when you were living in Brazil? Fernanda Bollers I was 16 and in my second year of high school – in Brazil, high school is only three years. I started dating a guy who was a member of the Church, but I didn’t know that. After a few months, he started talking to me about the Church and I was intrigued. I grew up going to church – we were Catholic. My parents would drive us to church or we could walk. We lived ten or fifteen blocks from the church, so we could walk there on Sunday mornings for children’s Mass. Nothing was different between the children’s Mass and regular Mass except they gave us candy on the way out, so there was an incentive to go to church. So I was Christian and I had a belief, but when I was about 15, I stopped going to the Catholic church. At age 14 or 15, you have Confirmation in the Catholic church – you go to a class and it’s a more in-depth study of the Bible. As I studied, I had questions but when I asked things that seemed too hard, I felt like I never got an answer. With that, I didn’t want to go anymore. And as we got older, we had other things we could do on the weekends, so my parents didn’t make us go to church anymore. So a year or two before I found out about the Church of Jesus Christ, I had stopped going to church. As I had conversations with my boyfriend, the gospel sounded interesting to me. People said a lot of bad things about the Mormon Church, but from what he was telling me, it didn’t seem like a bad church. So we started talking more about the Church whenever we were on dates, basically at my house or his house. We would just sit in the afternoon or evening and talk about the Church. He was basically teaching me a little bit at a time and I asked a lot of questions. He invited me to go to church, and I wasn’t quite ready to go yet. I didn’t say yes or no, just, “We’ll see.” I ended up going to church one Sunday and it felt good, it felt right to be there. I kept going. In the beginning, my dad played soccer at a club nearby on Sundays. I still wasn’t an adult, so some weekends, I didn’t go to church. My parents said, “No, you’re going with us.” My mom worked in a factory and they had recreational space with pools and soccer fields and places to barbecue. We went there every other weekend when my dad had games, and we had our family time there. Once I started going to church, my parents sometimes wanted me to go with them to the club, but mostly, they were okay with me going to church. I think they knew it wasn’t anything bad. I attended church for a few months. I went every Sunday with few exceptions, and my boyfriend said, “There are missionaries who could teach you more.” So he introduced me to the missionaries and I started taking the lessons at his house. I don’t remember if my parents didn’t want the missionaries to come over, or if I was too shy to invite them to my house. I went through all the lessons and at the end, they asked if I wanted to get baptized. I said, “I don’t think so, I don’t think I’m ready for that yet.” I already knew the Church was true. I’d gone to church quite a few times and the lessons just helped confirm to me that it was right. I was mainly afraid of telling my parents I wanted to get baptized. Up to that point, it was just about going to church. It wasn’t about me changing my faith or changing my belief and religion. So things had been relatively easy. But the idea of baptism felt like I would be betraying my family – leaving our beliefs and traditions behind to pursue something else. I was very scared, mostly because I’m non-confrontational. I kept meeting with the missionaries but not as often. I kept going to church and doing everything a member would, but I wasn’t baptized yet. A couple of Sisters came into the ward and they said, “Let’s set a tentative date. Let’s put a date on the calendar and if it doesn’t work, that’s fine, then it doesn’t work.” I said, “Okay, we can do that,” but I didn’t have the intention of talking to my parents. A couple of weeks before that date, I gathered courage and went up to my parents and said, “I’m getting baptized in two weeks, do you want to come?” I was 17 and didn’t know I needed authorization. If you’re under 18, your parents have to authorize you being baptized, but I didn’t know that. I told my parents and they were okay with it. Not a shock because they knew I’d been going to church for months. They came with me to my baptism on July 24, 2010. It was during my last year of high school and so many things were happening. High school is only part-time, in the morning, so you usually have the afternoons free. I was doing high school in the morning and attending a technical school in the afternoon. It was the year I decided to get more involved with sports. Life was busy already, and then I started going to church every Sunday so that added one more thing. When I committed to be baptized, it was an extra step to be involved and focused on the Church. But it was a good year. Fernanda Bollers at the SLC Temple What kept you going to church after you were baptized, especially when you were the only one in your family who was a member? In the beginning, it was the people. I knew the gospel was true but it was really hard. I felt like I had betrayed my family and it was hard for me to go and learn all these amazing things, like about eternal families, but not have my family there with me. But like I said, I’m not confrontational. It was hard enough for me to tell my parents I was getting baptized, so I never really knew how to say, “Hey do you want to take the lessons too?” I’m still working on that. But there were so many amazing people in that ward who gave me help and support. My boyfriend’s family went to that ward, so I already knew all of them. People who weren’t part of his family were all very welcoming. The Bishop and the Young Women presidency were awesome. They helped me feel more at home, like I wasn’t a stranger there. I had friends and my ward family, even though my actual family wasn’t there. It was less than a year after joining the Church before I came to the States. Most of that time, I was in Young Women, so I was learning the basics of the gospel at that point. I’m still learning the basics of the gospel. But the people there gave me such a big foundation to know that was the true Church of God. All the questions I had were answered, or I had a way to get the answers. The people were always trying to make sure I had the help I needed to continue progressing in the gospel. The people, honestly, is what kept me going. What brought you to the United States? I found out that some people from my ward were in Utah studying, and I could probably get some help coming here. So I decided to come to learn English, hopefully attend college here, and then go back home. I didn’t plan all of that at once. It was just a nice idea. I was in my last year of high school. To get into the good colleges in Brazil, you take placement tests and each university has their own placement test. It’s not like the US where there’s just one major test for college admission. I was registering for all those tests to get placement in the university, but I prayed one day and it didn’t feel right. It didn’t feel like that should be my focus, even though that’s what you focus on in your last year of high school. The idea of coming to the States kept coming to my mind. It sounded exciting for my 17-year-old self – go to the United States, learn English, go to college, and see where life goes from there. It would take about a year for me to study English and get good enough grades to pass the TOEFL test (Test Of English as a Foreign Language), which is a language proficiency test to get into a university. Then four years of college. I didn’t feel like I needed to think much past that – I would probably go back to Brazil. So I talked to my parents. My mom was not too excited about it but all my family went above and beyond everything they could do for me – they got the money together. It was hard for them emotionally, but they backed me and I went to Utah in April 2011. I went to BYU and the ELC (English Language Center at BYU Provo). It’s one building by the stadium where they do English classes – you’re basically back in high school but just for English. The classes were from 8 to 4 Monday through Thursday, Fridays were tests. So I was in full-time school to study English. I did that for a semester and I took the test, but I didn’t pass it. It’s not a pass/fail but each school requires a certain score on that test to prove that you’re proficient enough in English to attend the school. LDSBC (LDS Business College, now Ensign College) at the time required a certain number, and BYU required a number above that. But I didn’t meet the requirement for either one. That really made me upset. But I had so much help from the Church. My bishop in the singles ward was amazing. He is another person who helped me increase my faith a lot. I knew very little English and I don’t know how he understood a thing that I said. But I could always feel the Spirit close to him. One of the first times I met him, he asked me to recite the Young Women theme. I didn’t know it in English so he said, “That’s fine, do it in Portuguese.” But he didn’t speak a word of Portuguese. I think he spoke a little bit of Spanish. So I was sitting in front of him and talking, reciting the whole Young Women theme in Portuguese and the Spirit was there. He was awesome, he knew how to help me increase my faith even though there was a language barrier. That was amazing. What happened for you to be able to stay in the US? Once I didn’t get a good enough score to attend either college – I had paid for only one semester at BYU – I didn’t realize how much harder it would be. I was planning to get a job while I was going through school. I thought BYU is big enough to have a job I could get, but I never got into BYU. So my parents were financing me for everything – they were paying my rent and food. School had already been paid for. I just felt bad – I promised them that I was going to get a job, but when I didn’t, it didn’t feel right to keep using their money. I felt like I failed them, and I didn’t want to make them pay for another semester of the ELC, which was the same price as the tuition for the university, plus living expenses. During the summer, living expenses were a lot cheaper because a lot of kids leave and are not in Provo. But for the fall and winter semester, it would go up a lot, more than double. That was just not something I wanted to make my parents go through. When I bought my plane tickets, I had a date to go back to Brazil. I was hoping that I would get into college and not go back. I ended up going back to Brazil in August 2011. So I was in Provo for four months. I went back to Brazil for five rough months. Fernanda Bollers and Her Husband While I was in Provo, I met Evan, who is now my husband. I was still kinda dating my high school boyfriend but he was on his mission. I met Evan and he took an interest in teaching me English. We read the Book of Mormon together – I read in English and he read in Portuguese, verse by verse. That took a long time. I would read one verse – he corrected my pronunciation on words, and when he read, I knew what I was reading. He helped me a lot with learning English. He said he was interested in learning Portuguese – his brother had served a mission in Brazil, so he said he always wanted to learn the language. That was his incentive to help me with English, so I could teach him Portuguese. We became really good friends and by the time I was going back to Brazil, I realized that I liked him a lot. So I broke up with my high school boyfriend. Evan and I were kind of dating, but not, because I was going back to Brazil. We basically Skyped through the next five months. I was studying English as much as I could. We talked on Skype all the time so I could practice my conversation and listening skills. We still read the scriptures together. He was helping me a lot with learning English so I could take the test again. At the end of that year, I took the test again in Brazil and I got a good enough score to get into LDSBC. So I applied for the winter semester and went back to Utah on December 30, 2011. Since then I’ve been here in the States, attending college, and a couple of years later, we got married and life just kept going. How has your faith in our Heavenly Parents developed and been strengthened over the years? I’m still learning so much about the gospel and our Heavenly Parents. From the first time I heard about the gospel, things just clicked and felt right. The more I study and the more I learn about the gospel, the more faith I have in our Heavenly Parents. I wouldn’t be where I am today without Them. Coming here to the States was very hard. My teenage brain did not realize what it would entail to leave my family and travel to a different country. Through the leaders we had in Brazil and the people in my ward in Utah, Heavenly Father gave me a ton of help. I knew that Heavenly Father was using everybody that I met in my wards to help me get through my challenges. I didn’t have a lot of money when I first came here. I didn’t have a lot of friends. I felt like my goals were slipping off, not as reachable as I thought they would be. I didn’t have a cell phone, I didn’t have a computer, I didn’t have an easy way to communicate with my parents. I finally got a computer and phone but they were the most basic stuff. I could talk to my family every now and then, mostly through email, until Skype became a thing. I didn’t have the family support that I grew up with because of the distance. I didn’t realize I would miss that so much, not just my parents but also my extended family – aunts, uncles, cousins, sister, brother, everybody. That’s when I felt that my faith helped me. I knew my family loved me, and they did all they could to help me be here. So I just kept going and Heavenly Father carried me through it, and He put amazing people in my life to help me – Evan was the main person who was always there for me as a friend first, and then courtship later. My faith just kept increasing because I knew that without Christ and without our Heavenly Parents, I would not have gotten through that semester. I was a country girl that had never left her state before leaving the whole country. I had never seen an escalator until we got to the airport. I had never been in an airplane, and then I got in three different airplanes to get to Utah. There were just a lot of little things that I knew Heavenly Father had His hand in to get me to where I was. Fernanda Bollers and Her Family The time back in Brazil was also very hard because I felt like I failed. I’d spent so much of my parents’ money to come here and then I didn’t do what I came to accomplish. I had lots of up and down in those months back in Brazil. Evan helped me remember my goal and helped me study. There were lots of prayers and lots of crying nights and not knowing what would happen, and everything came together for me to pass the test while not even being in the States. It was a lot harder to learn English while in Brazil because when you’re immersed in a language, it’s so much easier to learn it. Somehow, miraculously, I got a good score and passed the test, and everything fell into place for me to come back and go to college. I know if it weren’t for Heavenly Father giving me the strength I needed to get through all of that, I wouldn’t have come back. Lots of times, I thought about giving up. I could just restart in Brazil even though I lost a year, because I would have to still take all the placement tests to try to get into college in Brazil the following year. I tried to give up lots of times but Heavenly Father and Evan wouldn’t let me. When I finally went back to Utah, I knew I was supposed to be there, taking religion classes at LDSBC – they helped me learn so much more about the gospel and to increase my faith so much more than I ever thought I would. I look back and realize that was just the beginning for me. It’s been over ten years since I was baptized and all that was just my first year of being a member. It was a big part of my conversion. I feel like conversion is a process and you’re continually improving on that. Even today, I find myself being converted over and over again. The beginning of my conversion and studying and learning, going more in depth than just the basics of the gospel – taking those religion courses was very important to me, to be more immersed in the school that not only would teach me academics but would also teach me the gospel. Heavenly Father knew that’s where I needed to be. At A Glance Name: Fernanda Bollers Age: 28 Location: Knoxville, TN Marital History: Married Children: Olivia (4), Marco (2) Occupation: Stay-at-home Mom Convert to the Church: Yes (7/24/2010) Schools Attended: LDS Business College: BS in Healthcare Administration Languages Spoken At Home: English and Portuguese Favorite Hymn: Count Your Blessings Interview Produced by Sasha Beorchia

Sandy Falter is a mother of six in Olympia, Washington, USA and in 2019, she faced a series of challenges: her marriage ended after almost thirty years, a daughter was diagnosed with a brain tumor, and two family members passed away. She has drawn strength through prayer, the scriptures, and developing her relationship with our Heavenly Parents and the Savior. Tell me about your background. When and how did you begin to develop a testimony of the gospel? I grew up a member of the Church, I was raised by faithful parents in a big family. I’m the middle of seven kids and we lived on a dairy farm. We worked and prayed and played together, and fought and all the things you do as a family. I don’t remember not having a testimony.Throughout my life, I have often felt unworthy of God’s love. I faced bullying and some significant trauma as a child and as a youth. I was born and raised in Utah, but I always say that I grew up in Washington. We moved there when I was 15 and my life changed. It was a good move for me. I definitely had to learn to stand on my own two feet. I was suddenly a minority as a member of the Church, and that was a really good experience for me to question, “Why do I believe?” and “Do I believe?” The answer for me was yes, I do. I feel it and I know it. What practices or behaviors have helped you feel more peace in your life and strengthened your relationship with God as you’ve gone through your divorce and other challenges? Sandy Falter Obviously, the scriptures. I read my scriptures before, although I don’t necessarily have a consistent habit of hours of scripture study. Some nights, it’s just a verse. But when my ex-husband left, I needed God’s word. I needed to hear Him in a big way so I just dove into the scriptures. I ordered a study guide before my husband left that was about women from the Bible. It sat on my desk until after he left and I looked at the title: Broken: Six Encounters with the God Who Mends. I thought, “That’s what I need to study.” When I started studying, I wasn’t even familiar with all the stories, but as I studied the first story, Tamar, from the Bible—studying her brokenness and the process of her healing—it was amazing that it was just the right words, everything was what I needed to hear. When I opened myself up to hearing His word, it wasn’t even necessarily what I was reading. Sometimes it just took me off on a thought and the Spirit spoke to me. I just so desperately needed to hear Him, and that is where I found so much strength. In studying those stories from the Bible, did the fact that they were women have special resonance to you to see that God saw His daughters then and He sees you now? Did you feel that connection? The fact that I was studying about women was very important to me, I needed that. I needed to hear their stories, their struggles and their resilience, and that they were seen in their trials. After my ex-husband left, I was so devastated, and my heart felt shattered. I didn’t know how to even get up the next day, I didn’t know how to function. I didn’t know how I was going to do anything. Sometimes even breathing was hard. I remember feeling, What did I do wrong? I started taking all of this blame, and reliving anything I’d ever done wrong. I prayed for forgiveness of anything I could think of and asked to be able to feel God’s love for me because I felt so unloved at that time. I was so broken and I just needed to feel His love. One afternoon as I poured out my heart in prayer, my answer came as a tangible feeling of a hug from my dad, who had passed the year before. What better way to know that our Father in Heaven and even our Heavenly Mother love us than to feel an embrace from a parent who has passed on? I could move forward from there, and I don’t need to go back to that place, because He’s told me that He loves me. So when I’m feeling bad, I just need to go back to that place and receive that witness. I don’t need to question this, I can move forward. How do you go back? Do you journal moments like that or do you just remember them? I’ve rarely journaled, but when I’ve had significant spiritual experiences, I’ve journaled them. When my mind was spinning after my ex-husband left, I learned to journal more. That was a coping skill that I’m really glad I learned. I journaled that experience feeling God’s love and it’s a beautiful thing to read again. What were some other things you learned as you were studying the scriptures? After my ex-husband left, I questioned everything. Was it right? Should I have not gotten married? Was the last thirty years a lie? We had struggles and we had kids who struggled with different things—there is no perfect family, but I felt like things were good. So when it suddenly ended, I wondered, did I make the wrong choice? Sandy Falter with Her Children I had to really think about that. The lesson I learned is that my choices were right and there was a lot of good in there. I have my six children and honestly, I was happy. We had challenges in our marriage and in our family and struggles in all that, but I was happy. So I can confidently say, it was the right thing, it wasn’t a mistake. But the divorce happened. We live in a messy world, and God still sees me.I know I have a purpose. I’m still a mother and a grandma. I want my kids to know that I still believe in eternal families, in the gospel of Jesus Christ, and in God’s promises. We’re mortal and we make mistakes, and it gets messy in this world, but God is a God of order. We can’t understand it because we see things through a mortal brain. But God loves and wants all His children to return, and He keeps His promises. When I start questioning where I fit in the Kingdom of God as a divorced woman, I hold tight to the things I know, not the unknown. When I started reading the Book of Mormon intently, I noticed that God prepares us. He always prepares a way. I had started reading the Book of Mormon over again just before my husband left. I was looking for patterns, and one of the patterns is that God always delivers His people. He always prepares a way. I thought, “Okay, when something bad happens, then He will prepare a way.” But as I read the scriptures I realized, no, the planning goes on way before that. It’s not a coincidence that Ishmael had just the right number of daughters, even one for Zoram. That’s not a coincidence, Heavenly Father knew and prepared a way in advance. That kind of preparation is found all throughout the Book of Mormon. God prepared a way for Ammon to convert the people of Limhi, and Abish, a woman of faith, was part of that preparation. God prepared the mothers of the stripling warriors to prepare their sons. I saw that pattern and recognized that He had prepared me. Besides starting the Book of Mormon over again…you were already in it when things hit, in what other ways did He prepare you? I think my callings prepared me and even our business. Because of my childhood trauma and being bullied, I had low self-esteem and self-worth. When I was called as Stake Young Women president, I had a Stake Presidency who truly knew how to counsel, and if I wasn’t speaking up in a meeting, they would say, “Sister Falter, we want to know what you think about this.” My voice mattered. I think this was one of the first times I realized, my voice matters. I have life experiences and I have strengths that I can add to the table. That grew something inside me that was dormant. I recognized I can do this. I can add value here. I felt empowered for the first time in my life. And that was huge. I recently taught the oldest youth Sunday School class in my ward. Every calling I’ve had teaches me something, and in that class, I learned how to be vulnerable. As they were vulnerable, there was a greater connection. We don’t have to be perfect, we can let other people see our struggles. What allowed you to be able to do that? Was it seeing their vulnerability and feeling like you had to respond in kind? Absolutely. They taught me that lesson. I felt safe in their vulnerability because there was so much love in that group. I’m still growing up in Washington! It was just beautiful to watch them share their hurt, share their questions, share their struggles, and help each other work through it. I always thought I had to be the example and that meant I couldn’t be vulnerable. That experience with the youth taught me about vulnerability and that’s where you really have connection and grow. Sandy Falter with Her Parents and Siblings That led me into being Relief Society President. That was a calling I didn’t expect and didn’t want. Honestly, I wanted to stay right where I was, teaching my Sunday School class. But I think that calling was one hundred percent for me because it stretched me. It was a year before this tragic event in my life, and there were lessons I needed to learn. Some of the preparing-the-way for me was that as Relief Society President, sometimes you know way more than you wish you did about struggles in the ward. That calling helped me recognize that everyone has a struggle. They may look like the perfect family on Sunday, but they have struggles, we all do. It gave me more compassion to treat everyone with more kindness and not to judge. Having those experiences really prepared my heart and my mind. Most importantly, it gave me confidence in myself. In what sense? In your ability to receive revelation or answers to prayers? Or just that you can do things? That I can do things. That I have worth, I have abilities, I am loved, I am enough. I could share my struggles and be open, and instead of feeling like I was less than because I shared, I felt connection. It’s such a beautiful experience because it also taught me to be vulnerable with my children. I always thought, I’m the Mom and they don’t have to see that I have all these weaknesses and bad habits or whatever. Being vulnerable with my kids has been the greatest blessing in our relationship. We are all going to have trials, and sometimes they come all at once, and that’s how it happened with us. My husband had all these health issues and then he left. Ten days later, my daughter was diagnosed with a brain tumor. My kids and I started a gratitude journal listing all the blessings we saw and the ways we saw God’s hand. We prayed and we fasted and we had faith in the Lord’s timing and a miracle happened. Absolutely a miracle, the doctor doesn’t know how to explain it any other way—what the doctor thought was cancer wasn’t. A couple of months later, my son and daughter-in-law had their first baby, and there were complications with the birth. The baby was life flighted and spent three weeks in the NICU (Neonatal Intensive Care Unit). This was right after our school shut down for COVID. I could have thought, “Man, our school just shut down, this is terrible.” But what I thought was, “Because school is shut down, I can pack up my daughter, and hit the road.” So I spent three weeks helping my son and his wife and my cute grandson. I can see God’s hand in the timing of these events. If we look for it, we can see it, and I’m just so grateful for that. Gratitude is one of the things that has helped me through this and helped me to not become bitter. The other thing is turning my heart to God. When you are hurt, when things are unfair, it’s okay to be angry. That’s a feeling I need to go through and experience, but I can’t let it sit, I can’t let it fester. I have to release it and fill it with something else. For me, compassion is the easiest thing for me to fill that space. One night, I was so angry—there had been an exchange of emails that were very hurtful and I was really angry and struggling. I didn’t have good thoughts, I was very bitter. I prayed, “I don’t want to feel this way, I know I shouldn’t feel this way, but this is how I’m feeling right now. Please help me.” I went to bed, saying not very nice words about the situation, and woke up the next morning filled with love. That’s the power of turning it to the Lord and was a really powerful lesson for me. If the Lord did it once, I know the pattern, so when things get really hard again, in any circumstance in life, I know I can just let it go. I can tell Him how hurt I feel. I can say, “I am feeling this way and I’m really angry. I don’t want to be, but I am.” I can let go, and I can let Him turn and change my heart. That’s powerful. Do you think that some of the experiences you’ve had with vulnerability, like with your Sunday School class and your kids–did those experiences help you to be more vulnerable with your Heavenly Father? 100%. Yes. Those experiences prepared me. I knew I had loving Heavenly Parents. I knew I had a Savior that atoned for my sins. But I still felt like I had to earn it. I was obedient because I wanted to be obedient, I always had a desire to do the right thing. But I also was obedient because I wanted to be enough. I wanted to do the right things to make it. As I have gone through some of these experiences, what I have learned is that instead of having routines and rituals and habits, the most important thing is a relationship. It’s a mind-shift from prayer being a rote thing to, “I really need you, I’m really hurting, and I don’t know what to do.” Being vulnerable with Him helped me recognize that He really is a loving Father. I’ve never had a relationship with our Heavenly Mother. I’ve never really thought much about it. But there were times that I needed Her, and Her wisdom and Her love. I prayed to feel that, and I did. That was remarkable. And it was whole mind-shift of just knowing something, but then having an experience and it becomes very real. I don’t know if there is a difference between knowing something and having it be real, but that’s kind of what happened to me, so then my motivations were different. What made it difficult for you to create that kind of relationship before? I think it was a combination of insecurity, and probably pride, too. I grew up with the mindset of “walk it off, dig in and get to work.” I think it was both insecurity and a little bit of pride that made me think I should do it on my own. When my pride was stripped and I was knocked off a pedestal, knowing about God was not enough. I could no longer do it alone. I needed a relationship with my Heavenly Parents and Jesus. I can see what a great blessing it was to me to be humbled. The Atonement means so much more to me now, because I’ve lived it, and like the people of Alma in Mosiah 24, I’ve learned how the Savior lifts our burdens, how He carries them with ease. It’s true, it can happen. If we are yoked to Him, He will deliver us and lighten our burdens. I go to that passage of scripture often because it teaches me how the strengthening and enabling power of the Atonement really works and how I can use it in my life. I love that. As you were talking about some of the things you have learned, I wondered how you feel the Lord has prepared you to be the head of your family now? Sandy Falter with Her Grandchildren Yeah, that is really scary and hard. Again, the Lord’s timing. A week after my ex-husband left, the Prophet gave his talk, “Spiritual Treasures,” where he told women to learn about the Priesthood, and learn about our access to the Priesthood, to study D&C 25 and the other sections. I took that very seriously because I needed to figure this out. And he said in there: if someone tells you that you don’t have the priesthood in your home, they are wrong. You don’t have a priesthood holder, but you have the priesthood if you’ve made covenants in the temple and you honor those covenants. That gave me so much hope, it gave me confidence, and so I started to study. I went to the temple a lot and tried to listen, and I learned new things. I mean, I’ve been going to the temple for 28 years, and I was learning new things and seeing things so differently. It was beautiful to recognize how much the Lord prepares us and that we do have access to Priesthood power. We can lead our families. I told my son that I really wanted to dedicate our house and said, “maybe I’ll have a family friend come do that.” He said, “Mom, you can do that.” That thought had never come to me, and you know what, I can. I can do that. I am the leader in our home, and I do have priesthood power through my covenants to guide me and to bless my family. That’s what it’s for: to bless. The prophet said we have the right to draw liberally on the Savior’s power for our families. Wow. I took it seriously. I have the right, now I need to figure out what it means to draw upon the Savior’s power, how do I do it? I’ve made that a study, and I think that’s a lifelong study. I keep learning, I think I’m just barely starting to understand the magnitude of His power and what we have access to. Thank you, I love that. Is there anything else that you wanted to say? One thing that helped me is before my husband and I split up, I had started writing down some affirmations that I was going to say every day. I had two affirmations that I woke up and said every day after this happened. One was, “I choose hope.” The other was, “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.” (Philippians 4:13) I would get up and say those every day, and throughout the day—”I choose hope, I can’t go into this place of despair, I’m choosing to have hope. And I know I can do all of this through Christ, through His power.” I think that it’s very empowering to remind ourselves every day of our own capability to choose. I can choose how I respond, I can choose how I react, I can choose to follow. It’s all a choice. I can wake up and say, today I choose to do this, and I can do all these things because I have Christ. That has helped me feel empowered. Empowered was my word to focus on in 2021. It means to be strong in God. I’m not this tough lady who can just do it all on my own. To be empowered is letting go of control and letting the Lord prevail. I am going to work hard at allowing the Lord to lead me and take me places and help me become so much more than I can imagine. I have come to define empowerment as choosing my path of discipleship, choosing to let Christ guide me to greater heights and glorious blessings. It’s not a weakness to include God. When you were talking about priesthood power, that’s the ultimate sense of empowerment, isn’t it? He literally lets us borrow His power, we are empowered by His power. That’s exactly it, and tapping into Christ’s power makes me empowered. When I tap into that and let Him into my life and into my heart, oh, I’m mighty. I’m mighty in His strength when I let Him in. His work will go forth, and it will go forth through me because I’m allowing it. That’s why my focus has been on being empowered, holding my head up, taking a deep breath, moving forward each day yoked with Christ. It’s hard, I get knocked down, and you know, I lay in bed too much and scroll on my phone or play mindless games, or whatever it is. But then, “No no no, I can do this, I can get back up again, and let’s do this.” I have learned that the Lord is patient with us. I think He knows that sometimes we need to lay in bed, it’s okay to have that time to just hunker down and feel the feelings and let it all work through us. Then get up and He’ll help us take that next step. He meets us where we are, again and again, and helps us become more! At A Glance Name: Sandy Falter Age: 50 Location: Washington State Marital History: Divorced Children: 6 Occupation: Real Estate Professional Convert to the Church: No Schools Attended: Some college Languages Spoken At Home: English Favorite Hymn: Be Still My Soul Interview Produced by Erin Smith

Analia Hoole was raised in Argentina, went to college in the US, and married a man from the Netherlands. Moving between three continents has helped the Hoole family realize that the gospel can make a difference to families anywhere in the world. Haz clic aquí para leer la entrevista original en español. Tell us a little about yourself. Where were you born? Analia Hoole-Ungaro I was born in Mar del Plata, Argentina. My parents learned about the gospel as single adults. At 17, I moved to New Albany, Ohio. I lived there for two years and then went to BYU-Idaho. My grandparents on my mom’s side are from Belgium. Although they died when I was still little, my family traveled to Belgium in 2005 to obtain Belgian passports. We were looking for a place to rent during my stay in Belgium. My brother said that he knew Jurgen, someone from the Netherlands who he had served his mission with. So he called him, and Jurgen told him that he didn’t know of anywhere to rent in Belgium, but since we were relatively close, he invited us to attend the YSA (Young Single Adult) camp. We went to the Netherlands for the camp and became friends. At that time, I was studying at BYU-Idaho. When we later decided to get married, I moved to the Netherlands. Together we have five children who were all born in the Netherlands. We have two girls ages 12 and 11 and three boys ages 9, 5, and 1. What has been the reaction of your neighbors and friends in different countries to the size of your family? I know that in many parts of the world it is no longer common to have more than one or two children. Whenever I say that I have five children, people are very surprised. In Argentina, they often asked if I had them all with the same husband. I have always expressed my love for children and my desire since I was a child to have a big family. I think it’s important for every couple to decide what is right for them. If there is a prominent theme in my life, it is moving according to the will of the Lord. I have lived in different cities and countries, and I feel that every time I moved the Lord was leading us and trying to teach something different. I lived 17 years in Argentina, 4 in the USA (2 in Ohio and 2 in Idaho), 11 years in the Netherlands (3 in The Hague, 2 in Enkhuizen, 6 in Lelystad), 2 years in Argentina (1 in Mar del Plata and 1 in Buenos Aires), 1 year in the Netherlands again, half-year in Buenos Aires, and now we’re back in the Netherlands. Analia and Her Family What have you learned in all these moves in your life? We have learned so much! Because of these trips, I have grown personally and we’ve grown as a family. I have learned to rely on and trust in the Lord and ask for His guidance. All these moves are not coincidences – every time, we have checked with God and asked for guidance to where we needed to be at that time. Every time, it’s been the answer to many prayers and consulting with the Lord. The experiences we had while moving has helped us to increase our faith, and have led us to understand what we personally and as a family can contribute to the world. We have learned how to function more effectively as a family, and how to improve our personal and family relationships with our Heavenly Father. As someone married to a man from the Netherlands, and with five children born in that beautiful country, I’ve learned to appreciate some things about how they raise children in that culture. In the Netherlands, children go to bed between 7 and 8 p.m. Sleeping too little brings about behavior problems and health problems. Children who sleep well have healthier immune systems and perform better academically, are better behaved, and have better mental health. Children in the Netherlands eat healthier than in other countries, and they read a lot. Children go to the library with their parents and read together. And the Dutch love to be outside. They go out and do everything, even if it rains, sleets, or snows! I realized that things that I thought were “normal” are different in other countries. It’s very normal to go where you have to go on a bike instead of the car. The Dutch love riding bikes, walking, and just being outside in general. One of the things I really noticed about the culture of Argentina after having returned as a mother is how important families are in Argentina. Of course, family is also important to the Dutch people but, for example, in Argentina if something isn’t going well with a family member, they bring them into their house to take care of them. They set aside some of their other responsibilities and demands to care for that family member. Family is taken care of, and they protect each other within the family. They don’t find a nurse to come to the house or send that person to a home where they will care for them. In Argentina, I realized that families leave a lot of other interests aside to take each other in and take care of each other. Even though no country is perfect, I am grateful for the things that I have learned from the Dutch and from my country that have helped me to organize my life and my family. This might be why our family focus has been strengthening families in the world. We have been guided to meet certain people who are key in the development of these projects, such as Alejandra, with whom I decided to start Refugios Fuertes. Can you tell me a little more about how you met Alejandra and how Refugios Fuertes began? Analia and Alejandra In 2019, my family and I lived in Buenos Aires. My husband and I went to the temple once a week and we met Ezequiel, Alejandra’s husband, and he mentioned that he had a wife and children and we all decided to meet together. Ale and I became friends immediately.One of the first times we met, Ale told me that she would like to start a blog for women. In 2020, I returned to the Netherlands with my family, but still talked to Alejandra. Once I asked her if she had started the blog and she told me that she hadn’t yet. At that moment we thought, why don’t we do it together? We started blogs and podcasts because we saw that there are many resources on the internet in English, but very few in Spanish, and nothing like what we are creating. We created it because of the need we had for ourselves. Ale made a beautiful 2021 planner to share on the site and in about three months more than 7,000 people downloaded it. For me, that was the moment that I realized that Refugios Fuertes was more than a hobby and that our Heavenly Father guided us to meet and start this project together. With these social networks, we want women to help and support each other. Each of them has experiences and knowledge that can help someone else. All of us together can help so much more than if only Ale and I were the ones sharing resources and experiences! How have you combined your talents to form this fellowship? Ale is very good at design, creativity, writing, and the podcast. I have a lot of experience with online marketing, and I know how to make the website easy and attractive to navigate and how to make it reach a lot of people, like having subscribers and that kind of thing. At first, I was not excited to write, but Ale encouraged me and I have written some blog posts and I will be writing more in the future. I think we are the perfect example of coming together to achieve things that we could never have dreamed of if we tried to do it alone. We want the content to serve not only members of our church but all Christian women and women with good values. You write a lot about mental health, family organization, and psychology. How did you come to have such an interest in how our minds and our interpersonal relationships work? Since I was a girl, psychology interested me, especially human behavior. At that time, I didn’t understand what it was that interested me, but, for example, I remember being in the supermarket waiting to be checked out and watching people and wondering, “Why are people the way they are? Why does one person act one way and another person another?” It’s something that just fascinates me. I haven’t studied it formally (I would love to in the future) but I have read and looked up a lot of information about psychology and human behavior. I think it helps me to better understand myself and also to help my children and others. The more we understand why we do what we do, the more we can change and choose how we act instead of reacting and allowing things to happen to us. One of the issues that seems most important to me personally is to take a moment to align myself with God every day. It is a very difficult subject for mothers who feel that they do not have time for themselves, because they have children, have to work, etc. For many years, I felt stressed and exhausted from everything I felt I had to do and accomplish. We have seen that many women feel insecure or alone in their roles. Many of the questions or insecurities they have are the same that we and other women have. That is the part that we focus on. What tools, knowledge, and help do we personally need as women to become our best version? We need to start with ourselves. That is a lesson that I personally learned from bad experiences. When I got married, I started my marriage giving everything mentally. My thought was that if I gave it my all, there would be no other option than to have a successful marriage. Many years and children later, I realized that I was exhausted, I realized that I couldn’t give more of myself because I didn’t have more to give, because I hadn’t taken care of myself. We definitely want to help women become better leaders, because we cannot consistently help others effectively or harmlessly in our lives if our personal foundation is not firm. One of the things I have seen in common across different neighborhoods and countries is the light that comes from people who constantly and actively apply the gospel to their lives and build a personal relationship with our Heavenly Father AND Jesus Christ. But one of the things I have also seen in common in the world is that there are only a few families and people supporting each ward and branch. There are only a few who rotate in the heavier callings. Analia's Children I think that because of the weight that these people carry, they often get stressed and their personal experience in the Church is not what it could be. I have seen leaders who stopped attending church out of exhaustion. We need that personal foundation to then act in any other role that we have in our lives. To help others, be a light in the world, and even discover what our mission and purpose is in this life so that we can begin to carry it out. All of this while always looking toward our Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ and aligning ourselves with Him. Elder Uchtdorf addressed this topic in his October 2021 general conference address, “The Daily Restoration.” Looking at my children as their mother, I understand much better the love that my Heavenly Father has for me. I also understand better His help, patience, and understanding when I make mistakes. When my baby falls when trying to walk, I don’t think, “How silly, why did he fall?” I know that it’s a part of the preparation and experience that helps him to start to walk. I am sure that our Heavenly Father sees us in the same way, with perfect understanding and love when we make mistakes. Can you also tell me a little about how you found the LDS Women Project, and why you wanted to get involved? Ale was the one who found The LDS Women Project site. She searched the internet for LDS women and read everything she could find on the subject. She loved it from the first moment and shared it with me. I love the project. How beautiful it is to be able to show the example of other women, to see that we are all important, different, and at the same time equal. I know that everyone has a purpose in this life, no matter where we are from or where we live. I am inspired by reading other women’s stories, and it helps me think about my personal purpose and further builds my faith and confidence to act. But the greatest inspiration for growth and change in my life has been Jesus Christ and my Heavenly Father. They have always been at my side accompanying me. In every stage of my life, even though I didn’t realize at the time, They were there guiding me constantly. They are my source of faith and hope in my personal future and in all areas of my life. I know that They love me and I love Them as well. Because of this, if you are having difficulty, pray. Tell our Heavenly Father about your difficulties and ask Him to help you. He will give you the strength necessary to grow and change to become more like Him. The LDSWP began a collaboration with Refugios Fuertes in June 2021 to translate interviews into Spanish.LDSWP/RF collaboration announcement. At A Glance Name: Analia Hoole-Ungaro Age: 35 Location: Buenos Aires, Argentina / Apeldoorn, The Netherlands Marital History: Married Children: 5 children. 12, 11, 9, 4, and 1 Occupation: Online marketing tech specialist Convert to the Church: Born in the Church Schools Attended: BYU Idaho Languages Spoken At Home: Dutch, Spanish, English Favorite Hymn: How Firm a Foundation Website or Social Media You Would Like Featured: https://www.refugiosfuertes.com/recursos?fbclid=IwAR2UXetEpRA7YFxqOUl6ZstgJw38Cby43gzLrKsb-ZNx9FtkTokgceNmc10 Interview Produced and Translated by Jenny Willmore

Elizabeth Atuaia and her siblings attained success in the performing arts as the pop music group The Jets from 1985 to 1990, performing around the world, having two of their albums certified Gold (selling over 500,000 copies), and one Platinum (selling over a million copies). But she always defined “success” differently than people might think. What is your family’s story? My grandfather, Iohani Wolfgramm, was a pioneer for the Church in the islands of Tonga – he was a labor missionary and helped build a lot of the chapels. His family gave their land on the island of Vava’u for the Church, where the Neiafu Tonga Temple is being built now. My grandfather’s gift of healing is well documented. He actually brought my auntie back from the dead when she was about five years old after having been run over by a jeep. It’s an amazing story and she’s still alive today with a great testimony of faith. Wolfgramm Family My grandfather was a great man of faith. He knew that he needed to come to America to go to the temple – the covenants were very important to him and he needed to get to the temple to seal his family and receive his endowment. The closest options at the time were New Zealand or Salt Lake City. They emigrated to Utah in 1965 – my grandparents, my parents, and my oldest brother who was born in the islands. My parents eventually had ten kids by 1976, and I’m number seven. My parents had been very young when they got married, and my father’s education was very limited. They were in a strange land for them, they barely spoke English, but they were really hard workers. Polynesians did a lot of yard work and a lot of cleaning. And back in the 60s, they did a lot of entertaining at luaus and other parties.My parents wanted something to keep us together as a family. My father saw the Jacksons and the Osmonds performing on the TV variety shows back in the day, and thought, “Wow, I can do this with my family, because I have all these children.” He was working at a grocery store and my mom was working at Beehive Clothing, and they decided that he was going to buy all these instruments and bring them home, and we were going to build a band. At that time, I was only about four years old. The story told in our family is that my dad quit his job, bought the instruments and brought them all home, set everything up, and said, “We’re going to become a band.” We had a Family Home Evening, asking everyone what they wanted to do – continue doing yardwork as a family or do music. Everyone chose music. My mother taught my brother basic chords. My brother had only one piano lesson that they could afford. Everything was learned off the radio, picking up the guitar, and figuring it out. My oldest brother learned everything by ear and then taught another brother the bass, my sister the keyboard, and a brother the drums. The beautiful thing about this for me is there was no money. We were immigrants. It was my dad’s faith, and my grandfather’s faith – we were already regularly fasting as a family and the Lord was always present in what we were doing. Great faith was something very familiar to us and a constant in our home. That’s basically how our family band started. If Nephi can build a ship, then we can build a band. How did your father find jobs for you to do? Elizabeth Atuaia It was kind of like Lehi leaving with his family and figuring things out as they traveled in the wilderness. From a very young age, I thought it was normal for everyone to get in a motorhome and live on the road while looking for work. We did that for eight years – Canada, all over the West Coast, the Midwest – striving for this dream my father had of keeping the family together, and doing something in the entertainment business that would make a difference. It was very simple – make people happy and keep us together as a family.Some places would hire Polynesian groups – hotels, fairs, restaurants – to perform shows. A contract could be a week or a couple of months. There was a hotel chain in Iowa, Minnesota, and North Dakota called the Hawaiian Inn. They contracted with Polynesian groups and we basically brought Hawaiian luau to the locals who probably couldn’t afford to travel to Hawaii, performing island dances and singing. When the show was done, we’d play the popular Top Forty music for the people to enjoy and dance. Music was a very singular thing in my dad’s vision for our family, so we lived, ate, and breathed it as a family, with the sacrifices and hard work that came with it. People ask if I feel like I missed my childhood. In some ways, Yes but in a lot of ways No, because it was a happy childhood. Looking back now, I can recognize that there was no food, surviving on peanut butter in a bus that my dad ripped all the chairs out of. But the scriptures became real to me. We talked about Nephi in the wilderness – how did they survive? We grew up with this dream, and the gospel was ever-present with daily family scripture study. Family Home Evening was every day. We had a meeting of talking about the family dream and reading scriptures, then practice, and then go to these places and perform. We did that for a long time until we got stranded in Minnesota in 1981-2. There was a big blizzard, and the hotel chain we were working for went bankrupt. My dad realized that we needed to do something else – when we performed popular music after luau shows, people responded really well. We got our own place and ended travel, and started playing in clubs. My oldest brother was only about 16 and the ages went down from there. My sister Moana and I were about 8 and 9 then. But they would let us come in because my dad was a soundman. We would play the shows and leave, but we were in nightclubs. All these Polynesian LDS kids in the Midwest performing in nightclubs – how does this tie together? My father was an out-of-the-box person for a Polynesian, and my grandfather was too. They were always led by their faith, especially when it came to the family – where does the Lord want us to be? For me, it was a wonderful thing to lay the foundation of my faith. We were living it, not just reading about it. If we didn’t work together, there was no food on the table. It wasn’t just my parents – it was all of us as a family. From a very young age, we were all in it together. That was probably the happiest time of my life because everything is about family. It was constant prayer and fasting for work as a family, knowing that the Lord brought us to the Midwest for a reason. My grandfather told my dad when we left Utah to go on the road, “I’ll only ask you two things. Wherever you go, pay your tithing and go to church.” My dad was faithful to that, I can look back at all the years and I’m very grateful – we were in a business that is not great with what we believe in. Every time I smell a cigarette, it’s not a bad thing for me – it takes me back to my childhood with all the bartenders and waitresses we got to know backstage. It became a beautiful kind of interaction – we were so different obviously. We didn’t drink but we were in these clubs, we were a family, and we were pursuing this dream that we felt was inspired – the Lord gave us this talent. We’re Polynesian and we didn’t have an education, but we have this gift to do something. We were just going to do whatever the Lord wanted us to do with it. Jets 1984 We were there at the same time a music trend was starting called Minneapolis Sound. Prince was making his mark, so a lot of record producers came to look for groups. There was a man who had worked for Motown for a long time – he worked with a lot of artists and was the manager for David Bowie and Stevie Wonder. He was jaded by the business and just done with it, so he retired. I don’t know how my parents heard about him but they kept calling him and he told us later that he eventually ran out of excuses. So he saw us at a nightclub – he was taken aback and didn’t know if we were real or not. So he came again the next night without telling anyone – we had known he was coming the first time so we could have prepared ourselves extra, extra. So he came a second time with no notice, and he decided to help our family. We signed with him and he got record companies to come out and see us – from Los Angeles, from New York, everywhere. We signed with MCA Records in 1984 and became The Jets. I was 12 during our first album – I did vocals. This is what happened before we became The Jets. Our faith was an ever-present thing that I think gave our family a foundation to recover later from what we went through in the music business. And after all this, we were an immigrant family coming to America with no education, living the American dream, and reaching the heights of success. That’s an interesting word to me, because what is success? What is success to you? To be successful is being with my family. Being happy, whatever it is. If we had been mowing lawns for our entire lives – doing it as a family, to me, that is success. We’re together. We love each other and we’re having fun doing it. That’s what the music was at the beginning.When we did have success and all the fame, then life happens and money becomes part of it. You have to deal with the business, and your values get tested with every decision you make – what you look like, what you sing, the way you present yourself, what the record company wants. I pretty much lived my teenage years in the public. I’m grateful that the media then wasn’t like it is now, into everything. It was brutal enough then. The record companies told us we had to grow up and be more current. They told my sisters and me that we needed to lose weight. Sex sells in that business, but we were so young. I was 12 recording the first album, 14 or 15 with the second, third album I was 16, and by the time I was 18, the record company dropped us. I was a has-been at 19. That spits you out. Prince wrote a couple of songs that were offered to us to record, and our manager took us to his Paisley Park studio to listen to them (we filmed some of our music videos there). It was great music – unfortunately, the lyrics were not appropriate for a family to perform. They had to remind him, “Prince, you know this is a family band.” He stopped and said, “Oh, yeah.” We never recorded his music. We had to change the lyrics to some songs – for example, Private Lover became Private Number on our first album. Today, I can play all my music and all my videos for my children – there’s nothing that I’m ashamed of or wish I didn’t do. I don’t mean that in a holier-than-thou way, but I was able to be young in the music business and be appropriate. I’m so grateful for my faith and my conversion to the gospel because we were exposed to drugs and a lot of other things from our peers in the music business – we saw what they went through. I saw things that I would never want my own kids to see. I give a lot of credit to my parents for instilling our faith because even though we were exposed to all these things, we still stayed somewhat innocent to it all. We didn’t partake of it. We knew it was there, we saw it, but we were always together as a family having our study and going to church wherever we were. The Jets' Gold Record, 1985 I felt like there was always a protection against the music business, especially for my sisters and me – it could have totally jaded us and taken us down a different path, and taken away our self-worth as daughters of God. Our faith really kept me in tune, even when our record company said, “They don’t want to buy fat kids’ records.” It hurt, but I saw a lot of my peers experiencing eating disorders to stay thin. I was crying, but then went to church and said the Young Women theme. I know who I am. I’m a little pudgy, I’ve got zits on my face, but I know when I sing a song, my family is with me and my faith. But there’s nothing you can do about the consequences – we were dropped by the record company after our fourth album. As we grew up and left home to get married, my parents had to continue to figure things out and we each had to find our own voice. That left a wedge in the family that lasted for a long time. You’re trying to keep the peace, but you have to be true to yourself. Eventually, it led to a lawsuit between the siblings about who owned The Jets – brothers suing the sisters, you can’t perform or use the name, cease and desist. Wait, we’re an eternal family, right? We’re supposed to be together forever. Those were hard years. It was finally put to rest in a settlement. My father passed away last year, and my family was able to find forgiveness for one another. When the lawsuit happened, we wondered how we were ever going to get together as a family again. I look at my brother and I want to punch him and want to hug him. I live in Virginia and my brother visited Washington DC – he said he wanted to visit me and I said, “I’m not ready, I don’t want to be fake.” If I love you as I should as a Christian and what I believe as a faith, I want to do it truly and not just go through the motions. That was really hard. I think that finding what I believe and what my faith is, I’ve realized that going through our interesting family life – and I don’t think we’re the only interesting family because I think everyone has an interesting story to tell – it has always been my faith in the gospel and especially in the covenants that always reminded me who I am but more importantly, who everyone else around me is. I think you have defined success in a way that is not usual for the current perception. Success is a funny thing and our family had to learn that. Even today, our family has forgiven each other, but we still see things differently when it comes to being The Jets. My sisters and I always crack up – what is success? Success is a road that can take you down so many paths. Some of them can be really dark and regrettable. I had breast cancer and was given only five months to live, and was not supposed to be able to have children. Now I’m in my 25th year as a cancer survivor and I had seven children. So success is a very funny word to say. Success is: if you’re one with the Lord, you’re gonna be great. You had breast cancer in your 20s? I had met my future husband but found a lump in my breast that didn’t feel part of my body. I had a mastectomy on my right side and was told I wouldn’t be able to have children. But he still loved me and wanted to marry me anyway. When I was pregnant with our first, a little lump came back and the doctors wanted me to have an abortion. Elizabeth and Mark My grandfather gave me a blessing and his words were powerful. He basically said that I would live by faith. I always tell my kids that my faith grew but it wasn’t from being healed from the cancer. Faith is to know that whether you’re healed or not, it’s turning to the Lord. There could be great miracles that happen in your faith but that doesn’t necessarily turn people to the Lord. We see time and time again in the scriptures that people experience amazing things but they are not truly converted. The true miracle is not being healed from the cancer but that my faith was made more sure. That’s the most important thing that can happen in any kind of situation. I never went back to the doctor and have been fine. How have you passed the principles of faith and family commitment to your own children? The thing has just been very simple – know who you are, that you’re a daughter or son of God, and know Him. President Nelson has been amazing in his leadership as the prophet because he says to “Hear Him” – that’s something I had to learn. The greatest and most important gift I can give my children is to teach them to recognize the Spirit, to know who they are, and have a relationship with the Lord. That’s going to be different for each of them. Hopefully, whatever that is, they recognize it and it becomes to familiar to them to “Hear Him,” – whether it’s a thought, or seeing Him in something, or a dream, they realize and it’s not something that they second guess, but they act on it. It reminds me of when I grew up – Nephi didn’t know beforehand what was going to happen when he went to get the brass plates. It’s been ever-present in my own life – I’ve seen that kind of faith in my grandfather, my parents, and just within my own search. Elizabeth and Mark's Children When I go to church on Sunday, I’m amazed at the stories I hear. It’s the same thing of people learning how to hear Him. For my kids – your life is going to be this amazing thing and you’ll learn what you’re supposed to learn, and as a parent, I will be here for whatever that is. I’m very grateful that today my family, of my brothers and sisters, has relearned how to function together. It really is because of the gospel, the Atonement. I can visit my brothers now. We probably won’t do business together. My brothers do a Jets show in Vegas. My sisters and I and one brother also do shows of the Jets, but we do it separately. We’ve come to a point that we respect each other and love each other. But keeping it real and being a member of this church and having the covenants we’ve made – I’m grateful for my continuing conversion. It reminded me that being a member of this church is not about living an image, but living truly and authentically your beliefs as a Latter-day Saint. Now I’m raising my own seven children and realizing that your conversion is truly your own. My husband and I raise them as we see fit, but really, it’s between them and God and their journey through what this life is. Hopefully the life I’m living and the example I lead will convey my beliefs to my children, and then they can make their choices and decisions. I don’t want it to be words, I want it to be what I’m living. At A Glance Name: Elizabeth Atuaia Age: 49 Location: Crozet, Virginia Marital History: Mark Atuaia, 26 years Children: 7: Anessa, Alema, Tai, Teanekuma, Abi, Ropati, and Heperi Occupation: Homemaker Convert to the Church: Born in the Church Schools Attended: 9th grade Languages Spoken At Home: English Favorite Hymn: Oh May My Soul Commune With Thee Interview Produced by Trina Caudle

A series of career steps in arts administration and management led Mykal Urbina to the Center for Latter-day Saint Arts, a nonprofit organization committed to displaying and performing art by Latter-day Saints from around the world and sharing it with the broader public. She was recently named Executive Director. Tell me about how you came to work in management in the arts. Mykal Urbina I grew up in Gilbert, Arizona through high school. I went to college in upstate New York in Ithaca, which was a departure from what I was used to in every respect – the weather and community and political leanings – it was a culture shock for me. But I absolutely loved being in New York and being in a very different environment. I studied nonprofit marketing and after my four years in school, I moved to New York City to pursue my career. For the first five years, I worked for a crowdfunding platform for public school educators called Donors Choose, doing fundraising and sponsorships. I loved it largely because it showed me the power of a singular voice and a personal story. On that site, individual public school educators are invited to post requests for classroom materials they need, and donors can fund specific projects. I loved that it added tens of thousands of perspectives to the educational conversation directly from the classroom and that I got to be part of supporting teachers and elevating those stories. That became very important to me. I noticed that the projects that I loved helping fund were those that exposed students to the arts, took classes to see The Nutcracker, or brought musical instruments into the classroom. I realized that I wanted to take my personal passion for the arts and translate it into my professional life. So I accepted a position with the New York Philharmonic at Lincoln Center to run their corporate sponsorships team. It was an absolute privilege and an honor to have an office at Lincoln Center, to work for a world-class arts organization with such a storied history, to see the inner workings of an organization with that kind of legacy. I realized that I was missing the community piece and wanted to bring that back into my daily work, so I moved to Orange County, California to lead the corporate and foundation relations team for the Segerstrom Center for the Arts. It’s one of the largest arts education providers in the country and they’re doing groundbreaking work in community involvement with free community events for under-represented communities, for children, for youth, for families. I loved getting to be part of that and learning from that. Then the opportunity arose to become more involved with the Center for Latter-day Saint Arts with which I’d been volunteering for a couple of years. Looking back, the three dream jobs in a row that I had were all leading to this unique intersection of my personal and professional passions. It felt like an opportunity that was divinely designed for me and was the next step I needed to take in my career. So I came back to New York. Back to Lincoln Center. When I worked at the New York Phil, I used to get lunch at the deli across the street that is now the Center Gallery for the Center for Latter-day Saint Arts. Coming full circle! Not just in the area, but literally the exact same location. You said you combined your professional pursuits with your personal passion for the arts. What is your personal passion for the arts? In a past life, I played the piano and the violin. I still play the piano. I danced with a pre-professional ballet company for many years. But it was pretty evident by the time I got to the college level that my skills were better suited to the kind of choreography and orchestration that happens behind the scenes, in arts administration. I’ve always loved the arts, I’ve always participated in the arts, I’ve been an advocate for the arts, especially in public school education. I knew my role was to be behind the curtain and champion the arts from a fundraising and administrative perspective, so that’s where I’ve made my career. I think there’s so much to be learned and expressed and understood in a way that only art can fill. That’s the power of art – to express what we can’t put into words and feelings that are extremely complicated and complex, and may not have a resolution at this point. Art is an opportunity to explore those in a new way. What was the intention for creating the Center for Latter-day Saint Arts, and the reasoning to have the gallery in New York City rather than in Utah? The Center Gallery is a project of the Center for Latter-day Saint Arts. The goal was to have a physical gathering place to celebrate with the community, to host fine art exhibitions, to have lectures and performances, and just be a physical meeting ground for the connection point that is the arts. It’s really been a privilege to watch the gallery grow. It was difficult because we opened during Covid so physical gatherings were limited. But eventually, we launched a series of Friday night, free community events spanning everything from readings to live music performances to artists talking about their work and the development of their art. It’s had such an incredible community response. Mykal Urbina at New York Phil I think the goal was to have a space in New York at Lincoln Center, which is a cultural hub of the world, across the street from the Met and New York City Ballet, and the New York Phil. It’s such a unique location in the heart of Manhattan to celebrate the Latter-day Saint art community. It shares the façade of the building with the Manhattan Temple – it’s such a beautiful and perfect space to celebrate the artistic heritage and contemporary art of our Latter-day Saint artists. It’s technically in the same building as the temple – any time Church members do a session at the Manhattan Temple, you’re right there, literally downstairs. To date, about sixty percent of the gallery visitors are community members, not members of the Church. So for us, it’s an artistic version of a visitor’s center. It’s certainly a destination for local ward groups, visitors coming to the temple, and visitors to Manhattan attending church in the temple building. The gallery is open on Sundays so that it can be a resource for those who are coming to church. But it’s been a special space that gets a lot of foot traffic from art lovers who wander in and are surprised and delighted by what they see and the relevance it has. I know you recently had an exhibit (January-February 2022) about Heavenly Mother. If sixty percent of the gallery visitors are not members of the Church, what was the reaction to that art? It was a very, very positive reaction all the way around. The title being, “The Sacred Feminine in LDS Art and Theology” upends expectations about some of the cultural stereotypes of the Church. There’s warmth and excitement to see this type of work and work with this kind of feminist tone displayed in association with Latter-day Saint theology. From members of the Church who visit the exhibit, there’s an overwhelming sense of peace and being seen and understood and represented in the art that’s being displayed. I think what’s special for everyone who comes in, is that this work is so extremely diverse and global in its nature. There’s work from Argentina, Canada, Mexico, and Nigeria. There’s Native American art. It really speaks to a very broad and diverse audience, regardless of their entry point to the gospel or their familiarity with LDS theology. All of the art and all of the wall text are on our website. Many of my friends and family on the West Coast are simultaneously relieved that this kind of exhibition is happening, so thrilled that it exists, and desperately frustrated that they couldn’t see it in person.This exhibition predated me. It was designed by our brilliant gallery manager, Glen Nelson, and his gallery committee long before I was part of the picture. It was especially impactful for me to come in and see something that I care so much about represented in this organization and was certainly part of why I was excited to get on board. What was your personal reaction to the Heavenly Mother exhibit? Mykal Urbina with Her Family The doctrine of Heavenly Mother is something that I’ve studied personally for a long time. My feeling about this topic is that we’re seeing such a surge of interest in the doctrine of Heavenly Mother, within the Church especially. I taught Relief Society a couple of weeks ago and there were at least three comments that just naturally referenced our Heavenly Parents and Their love for us. When I was in Young Women, those were not references that were made. So to see doctrinally sound, artistic representations of this topic is very refreshing to me and it’s something that excites me about where we’re headed with these conversations. Where do you think we’re headed with these conversations? I can’t quite tell. I can’t either. In my studies of Heavenly Mother, in all that I’ve read and all that I’ve learned, I think my favorite point of reference is from President Hinckley who said that logic and reason suggest that if we have a Father in Heaven, we have a Mother in Heaven, and that doctrine rests well with him. There are certainly some things within the Church that don’t always rest well with me, but this one does. This one brings a lot of peace and I hope that we learn more. I hope that there’s revelation to come, but even if not, this doctrine resonates with me personally. You said that the exhibit included art from multiple countries – how did you find those artists and their work? Margaret Olsen Hemming, who curated the Sacred Feminine show, has a very rich network, particularly regarding this topic of the divine feminine. She brought these amazing artists together. Richard Bushman and Glen Nelson, the co-founders of this organization, also have a deeply rich network of artists and connections within the arts community. We have an advisory board that includes a number of artists also sharing the work they’re becoming aware of and referrals to artists in other countries. The Center has done a couple of calls for submissions on specific topics – we did one in the early months of Covid about artistic expression of the pandemic and the experience of the pandemic. We did a call specifically for BIPOC creators. Both calls brought new artists to us and are helping expand our reach. The area of opportunity I’m most excited about is bringing that global perspective and elevating artists outside the United States. We’re working on some projects to start finding and unearthing the art by Latter-day Saint creators internationally and making them available as a resource to the Church, to our audiences, members of our faith, and beyond. That is fantastic. Do you have a personal goal that you want to accomplish with the Center, or are you working toward goals that Richard and Glen have already set? Richard and Glen have built this incredible organization based largely on curiosity and exploration, and the belief that good art and stories and important conversations come from everywhere. That’s a tradition I’m excited to continue and hopefully complement with my own experiences and my own perspectives. I’m excited to partner with them in that effort. My goals for the Center personally are two-fold. I would love for the Center to be a resource to members of the Latter-day Saint community, to broaden their identity in the Church through art; to give another lens and another angle for grappling with the conversations within our community every day – social issues, issues of diversity and inclusion, of faith and heritage within our community. All of the ways we interpret those things can be beautifully expressed through art. I want to help members be aware of and proud of our cultural identity. Second, for those who are just learning about our faith or are interested in learning about the gospel – I’d like to expand their expectation of who we are and our relevance in the world, and the contribution we make to the larger faith community. Mykal Urbina at Donors Choose One thing I love about the Center is that there are so many entry points to understand that art has significant value. Some art will touch some people that may not reach others, and perhaps those individuals haven’t found their entry point yet. Some people feel the Spirit through music, some feel it through dance, some through the written word. I think there’s an exploration that needs to happen. I’ve never met anyone who couldn’t find inspiration and connection and value in one form of art or another. How do you understand and define our cultural identity? So many of my peers are choosing to step back or away from the Church and the reason why that I hear most often is “church culture.” That’s challenging for me because when we talk about church culture, I think of the social culture of the Church. There’s so much to be proud of and inspired by and connected to in our artistic legacy, in our artists, our dancers, our composers, our poets, our authors. There’s a richness to who we are and the way we express where we’ve been and where we’re headed that I believe should be a point of pride. I’d like to see us shift the language of what “church culture” is to something that’s very inclusive, very expansive, and encompasses more than just the social conversations that are happening. I think the word “culture” is the filler word for customs and behavioral patterns that at one point may or may not have been declared as doctrine. It summarizes in one word all the random things that we do that are just things that we DO, they’re not our teachings. That’s how people are using the word “culture” but I like your definition much better and I think it’s more accurate. We need a different word than “culture” for behavioral traditions, but right now we don’t have one. I completely agree. I was at the opening of the Center Gallery several months ago and the lead curator for that exhibit talked about how contemporary art and modern art can be an opportunity to use the Holy Ghost and be an experience of faith that’s testimony building. I think there’s an opportunity for art to fill that space between what we define as culture and what we know as doctrine. I think we’re also learning as a community that language and representation are important. We’ve seen recent shifts to the Young Women theme – from “We are daughters of Heavenly Father” to “I am a beloved daughter of Heavenly Parents.” That’s an important and significant shift. I’m reminded of the moment when it was brought into clarity for me how important representation is in the art within our faith. I was a counselor for a youth conference, and I wanted to get my group of Young Women some little tokens and treats and things for the end of the conference experience. I picked out a postcard-sized print of Christ surrounded by young women – it’s a piece I’ve always loved, have felt connected to, and carried in my scriptures. I got copies of that. At the end of the conference, I pulled out all of the things to get ready to give to my girls, and I recognized that the young women in my group were all Polynesian and the women in this painting were all white. In that moment, I thought, “How am I going to give this image to these girls that is completely not representative of them and who they are?” At the same moment, I realized I didn’t know where to turn for more diverse representation. That’s something I’m thrilled about with the Center, especially with the Sacred Feminine exhibit – the diverse representations of the divine, the diverse representations of members of our faith. Some of the depictions of female deity weren’t people at all – they were symbols or nature. There are so many illustrative representations of Heavenly Mother and our relationship with Her. There’s so much power in that and so much identity to be found in that. That’s extremely important to me. As people find connection and identity and faith in God through art, is there a specific piece of art that has really touched your heart and strengthened you spiritually? Woman of Faith by Rose Datoc Dall, Used with the Artist’s Permission Rose Datoc Dall has a painting called “Woman of Faith,” about the woman with an issue of blood. That’s my favorite New Testament story and she has a beautiful piece of that individual’s experience with Christ. The first time I saw a piece of art featuring that story was in Magdala, Israel. There’s a large-scale canvas – it’s a massive piece – of a woman’s hand reaching out to touch the hem of the Savior’s garment and it absolutely stopped me in my tracks. I had never seen that particular story represented through art, and it was a very emotional experience for me. When I found Rose’s interpretation of the same story, it resonated in the same way. It’s such a beautiful moment. There’s a longing and a hope in that story, and especially in the woman’s expression as Rose has captured it that I think is universal. That’s been a very powerful piece for me. What’s the intersection between faith and art and your professional life, and how do you put all that together into one big package? When I was debating in my own mind whether taking on the role of the executive director at the Center for Latter-day Saint Arts was the right position and the right next step for me, someone shared with me a quote that has stuck with me: We should never let our critique of a cause outweigh our contribution. There’s a lot that I wrestle with within the Church. There’s a lot that I wrestle with in doctrine and in what we talked about with this filler word of ‘culture.’ But I feel a responsibility to contribute where I can. The experiences I’ve had professionally have led me to a place where I feel like I have an opportunity to do something meaningful here, that this particular path has a purpose for me. I’m not entirely sure what all will unfold from this, but I’m compelled to stay, to be part of this community, to contribute in the way I’ve been uniquely prepared to contribute, and to help resolve some of those questions for myself and hopefully pave the way for others to find their own answers. If not answers, then their own faith-building experiences specifically through the arts. The Encounter by Chilean Artist Daniel Cariola in Magdala Israel At A Glance Name: Mykal Urbina Age: 33 Location: Holladay, Utah / New York, NY Marital History: Children: None Occupation: Arts Administrator Convert to the Church: No Schools Attended: B.S., Integrated Marketing Communications, Ithaca College Languages Spoken At Home: English Favorite Hymn: Because I Have Been Given Much Website or Social Media You Would Like Featured: https://www.centerforlatterdaysaintarts.org/ Interview Produced by Trina Caudle

May is Mental Health Awareness month. Fiona Phillips and her husband have supported multiple family members experiencing mental illness. Their experience is being put to good use as they serve as Area Medical Advisor, supporting the health needs of full-time missionaries in California. Tell me about yourself and your family. Fiona Phillips I am currently serving as a senior missionary, living in Vista, California. My husband is retired from his profession as a physician, and for our assignment, he is the Area Medical Advisor and I’m his assistant. We help to coordinate medical and mental health care for all the missionaries in the southern California area. We work with nine missions – the mission health councils, the mission leaders, the mission nurses, and mental health professionals. It’s been a wonderful experience. We’ve really loved it. It’s wonderful to know how well the Church takes care of the missionaries. There are so many things in place to monitor the health needs of the missionaries and we feel blessed to be a part of this process. At one point, my siblings and I had been sharing the care of our father who had dementia, but when my sister and her husband were called as mission leaders in Chile, we decided it was best for Dad to stay with us. After Dad passed away, we received a mission call to New Mexico but six weeks later, my husband’s mom also received a diagnosis of dementia. Our mission was postponed and we moved to California to take care of her. We previously lived in Cedar City, Utah for 22 years. We have five children and twelve grandchildren. We don’t live close to any of them except one son, and we’re very happy that he and his family recently moved nearby. We wish we could have them all nearby! But with the miracles of modern transportation and Zoom calls, we stay in close contact. We visit a lot and they visit us a lot. I’m also an artist. I used to teach drawing, painting, and art history at Southern Utah University (SUU). I also taught high school and junior high school art. Now I’m a studio artist at home. I paint professionally, I sell my work, and show a lot. What types of mental health challenges, in addition to your parents’ dementia, have you worked with and supported? My daughters all suffer from anxiety and depression. Other things have come into play too – childhood insomnia, complex PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) brought on by childhood trauma, suicidal ideation and eating disorders. It’s a lot. I’m so proud of my daughters and their intentional efforts to heal. They are amazing, intelligent and beautiful! But life has definitely taken a turn that I never expected or thought would happen when we were first having children. You learn and you grow, and you adapt and do the best you can. What are some specifics about how your own life has been affected by other people’s challenges, who are close to you? Fiona Phillips with Grandchildren When my children were young, I don’t think I even knew what mental illness was. I was quite an idealist and I thought that if I did everything I was supposed to – if I fulfilled my callings, went to the temple, had family prayer and scripture study, the whole bit – then everything was going to be fine! It was a rude awakening when my children started exhibiting behavior that was troublesome in one way or another. To be honest, I struggled to cope because I didn’t understand. Some of the consequences of their choices were difficult as well. I went through a period of self-blame that wasn’t healthy. I still have those feelings from time to time – sometimes I wonder if they’ll ever fully go away, but I know now how to manage them. But it affected our family relationships, and it still does to this day. Our daughters have all received counseling. My husband and I have been to counseling ourselves for help in dealing with some of these trials, and also to learn how to better help our children and our aging parents. We’re not trained professionals – we’re just parents, a daughter, and a son. We pray and fast and go to the temple, but we need professional help as well. My husband has been with me through this whole process. I think we have leaned on each other at different times – sometimes he’s been my support, sometimes I’ve been his. That’s been a wonderful thing, I just appreciate him and his wisdom and his courage. All these experiences have prepared us for the mission we’re serving, which came about in such an interesting way. Heavenly Father has placed us here in a miraculous way, I truly believe that. What are some things you do for yourself to maintain your own mental and emotional strength? Fiona Phillips and the Fifty Faces Project Mental health challenges have been in our family for 25 years. It’s not been a short experience, in part because of the different ages of my daughters and when they started to exhibit symptoms of illness. Their therapy and other treatments have happened over a long period of time and are still ongoing. So there are things I did at different points during this extended time period. At first, I tried to put more effort into everything with church and callings and family. Funny enough, I started walking early in the morning with a good friend who was in the Young Women presidency with me, and she also had some struggles with her teenage boys. Walking every day and chatting with her was really therapeutic. Having a good friend is important, if you are lucky or blessed enough to have that. One thing I did was go back to school – through distance learning, I got a Master of Arts in Humanities and a Master of Fine Arts through the Vermont College of Fine Art. It was something completely different to focus on. It was also a way for me to work through some of my grief, especially when my mother died. I was teaching at SUU, and we had sold our home and were living in a rental in anticipation of moving to North Salt Lake. Our youngest daughter was struggling and moved home with us, and we were also caring for my father. A year later, we moved to North Salt Lake. A couple of years later, with my daughter in crisis and diagnosed with a mental illness, I began the Fifty Faces Project. What is the Fifty Faces Project? Fifty Faces Project We started attending support groups and classes through NAMI (National Association for Mental Illness), a wonderful organization to help people like us and those who suffer from mental illness. My husband and I began to realize just how prevalent mental illness is. Statistically, one in five people – including children and adolescents all the way to senior citizens – suffer from some form of mental illness. I decided to paint fifty large-scale portraits. The smallest is three feet by three feet, the largest is four and a half by five and a half feet. The paintings are just of the faces. The models were friends, family members, acquaintances, acquaintances of acquaintances, even some strangers. I did them all in less than two years, so it was an intensive project. I was thinking, “With fifty in my group of models, possibly ten of them are suffering from some kind of mental illness.” I painted them the way they actually look, like everyone else, because I wanted to erase the stigma. I wanted to open a conversation about the stigma of mental illness and how we’re so afraid of it and of people who are struggling. So I painted them so you can’t tell who does or doesn’t have a mental illness. At the very end of the project, I sent an email to all the models and asked if they would share their experiences with mental health – whether it’s themselves personally, or a close family member or friend, or as a caregiver. The responses that came back were touching and heartrending and humbling. The stories were presented in a slideshow with music and photography that was projected during the installation of the Fifty Faces exhibit at Dixie State University and also at Art Access Gallery in Salt Lake City. That was very therapeutic and my family supported me wholeheartedly in this project, even though it was very time-consuming because they wanted me to get the word out. So the models weren’t sought out as people with mental health challenges, it was just random selection and you figured that ten had connections to mental illness. How many did? More than I expected. Mental health is so misunderstood. When someone’s behavior is outside the norm of what we consider proper and good, they can be labeled and ostracized. We’re asked to love everyone. We need to understand more about how the brain works and that the process of getting healthy is a long one. What if someone wants to know, How long is long? I would tell them that’s not the correct way to look at it. They need to be patient and educate themselves as to the specific diagnosis, symptoms, and treatments. In my mission experience, we see a lot of missionaries that have troubles with anxiety, depression, perfectionism, a lot of things – there are many who get better with a few counseling sessions and sometimes medication, and they do great. The ones who have underlying or past trauma in their lives – they are going to take longer. If it’s a diagnosis of a more serious complicated disease, it may take a lifetime of management. So I would counsel them to get educated to understand the disease and learn how to help their loved ones get the best treatment that they can. It’s a three-pronged remedy – counseling, medication, and other therapies. There are many therapies. Getting educated is one way for family members to support a loved one in a mental health challenge. What are other suggestions? Acceptance is huge – to realize that mental illness is not because of something they’ve done wrong. It’s maybe something that was done wrong to them, but they didn’t do anything wrong to get this illness. That’s another stigma. Mental illness is an illness, like any other disease. It’s an illness of the brain. We have illnesses of the heart or the lungs or other different things in our bodies. We look at those and say, “Oh, someone has heart disease.” We don’t ostracize them and there are strategies to help them get better. Fiona Phillips with Her Family There are also strategies to help people with mental illness get better. I advise that people get counseling earlier rather than later. One of my daughters has three adopted children – she was very proactive about having them see counselors when they were quite young, to help them with separation anxiety and some of the other struggles they came with, and it has really helped them. If the counselor doesn’t fit, try somebody else. That’s an interesting dynamic – the patient/therapist relationship. It has to work both ways. It doesn’t necessarily mean that the first one you find will be the one that works. We need to communicate often with the person who has mental health challenges, even though it’s sometimes difficult and painful. It’s important for them to know that you love them unconditionally, and no matter what, you’ll always be there for them. It doesn’t mean that you accept bad behavior, and there are times when you need to set boundaries. But make sure they know you’re always there and you’ll always love them. Is there anything you did or said at any point that you wish you hadn’t, and what did you learn from that experience? As my children grew through their teenage years, I knew they were troubled. I tried so hard to talk to them and get them to talk to me, but I couldn’t figure out what was going on. I tried everything I could think of, and they just wouldn’t ever open up. It has come out only recently that they couldn’t get past the fear of disappointing us because we had such high standards for ourselves. The fear of being shamed was just too great. If I could do it over, I would have done something different in trying to learn how to communicate with them better. Maybe counseling to learn communication skills or how to put them at ease. That’s something I would love to do over. Right now, we are going through the Dialectical Behavior Training workbook in solidarity with our daughter – it helps a person to reprogram their brain to process information in a different, more positive way, rather than a negative, detrimental way. One of the things I’ve just been learning about is the behavioral principle of “radical acceptance.” So when you ask what I wish I would have done differently, I am at a point where I am trying to let go of that and realize that I can control today, how I feel and how I think today, and I can look to the future. I don’t have to keep beating myself up about the past. So I’m going to practice radical acceptance right now. How do you define “radical acceptance” and put it into practice? Fiona and Doug Phillips I have my workbook open to this page: “Being overly critical about a situation prevents you from taking steps to change that situation.” You can’t change the past. If you spend time fighting the past or wishfully thinking that your emotion will change the outcome of an event that’s already happened, you’ll become paralyzed and helpless. Then nothing will improve. So the other option is radical acceptance – to acknowledge the situation, whatever it is, without judging the events or criticizing yourself. Instead, try to recognize that your present situation exists because of a long chain of events that began far in the past, and basically refocus your attention on what you can do now. So it’s definitely connected to mind focus, bringing you to the present and being mindful of what’s going on at that moment. Radical acceptance is a little more broad than mindfulness, because mindfulness wants you to be in the moment, but it’s a very similar thing. It helps to calm you, let go of guilt, and move forward in a positive way, which is important when you have a lot of things in your past that are sometimes eating you up. From your perspective of experience, what is some advice for someone at the beginning of the road of mental illness? Number one, honestly, is that we need to have an awareness that the predators of children are most often family members and friends. Ninety-three percent of the time, children know their abusers. That just goes to show that we can’t just think everyone is going to be good to our children. Be proactive in protecting your children – be very careful who you leave them with and whose house they’re going to when playing with other children. I was not aware of that. But radical acceptance – I’m trying to deal with that positively. And we have a gift! The gift of the Holy Ghost, and I do believe that gentle guidance is truly a blessing. This life is long, and it’s so hard to watch our children suffer. But we can trust in the Lord’s compassion who suffered everything for us. Even though we were blindsided by our children’s abuse and illness, I have felt the Savior’s love and grace in countless ways. The other thing is: there’s just so much education available. I go back to that a lot because it’s really important. On the Church website, there’s a lot of great material. That’s a good place to begin, and then you can branch out to other trusted sources like NAMI. That’s where I would start. What are the challenges you see in the stigma about mental illness, and how do you think they can be overcome? Talking about mental health challenges is uncomfortable for a lot of people, and it can be uncomfortable for those of us who are in the middle of it. But talking about it is the best way to find solutions. I do believe that we’re talking about mental health more at church than we ever have, and it’s wonderful and I hope it continues. I think it will.The relationship of childhood trauma and abuse to mental health is so common, but that’s another thing we don’t talk about because it’s too difficult. People don’t want to believe it’s that prevalent. People who have had it happen to them feel ashamed, including at church even though shame is not anyone’s intention – it’s an internal thing. I think if we could be a little more open and welcoming and love the way Christ wants us to love, things could change. That’s my hope. The stigma about mental illness not being real – we encounter that on our mission. Sometimes a missionary needs counseling or medication, and their family says, “No. It’s not real, there’s no such thing. You just need to work harder.” But for someone who has a mental illness, no amount of “working harder” is going to cure that. Sometimes it just makes things worse. We’re hoping that people’s perceptions about mental illness will change – not just in the Church, but in the world. There are so many different kinds of therapy. There’s cognitive behavior therapy, dialectical behavior therapy, talk therapy, EMDR (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing) therapy, (that really works, by the way), and in very serious cases, electro-convulsive therapy. They’re also starting to do therapy with some medicine that was previously considered taboo in our society, but when under medical supervision, it has proved to be helpful in some cases. That’s further down the road, more of a last resort. But it’s something they’re continuing to research because it has possibilities. The last thing – we need to help people understand that it’s a chronic illness so we can’t ever give up. We don’t give up on somebody who has chronic emphysema or cancer. We love them. It’s my hope that we think of mental illness in this way. It changes the way we think of and look at people. How has your faith helped you through all of this? Fiona Phillips I had an experience that is sacred to me, but in this context, I think it’s appropriate to share. I increased my temple attendance. I was driving to the St. George Temple and praying and crying and praying and crying. Along the way, I heard a voice clearly saying, “Be still and know that I am God.” That changed my thinking in a very significant way. Up to that point, it was, “What do I need to do more? What am I doing wrong?” It was about me and how I could help others. I wasn’t letting Heavenly Father do His work in their lives. Doing what we can is important but I don’t think I was allowing Heavenly Father the space to do what He needed to do or being patient to let that work in someone else’s life. We need to trust Heavenly Father that He can affect change that we can’t. That was a big lesson and I’m so grateful for it. We also need to let go of our personal guilt. There’s nothing healthy about guilt – it does nothing for us. We need to give our guilt to the Lord and let Him take that from us. That is part of the Atonement. Heavenly Father sent the Savior to suffer all these things for us so He would know how to succor us. We put our guilt in this precious little package that we don’t want to unwrap but we want to hold on to it – that’s not healthy and it’s not good for our spirit either. If we let go and let God – as President Nelson says, “Let God prevail” – then the Savior will be able to take it from us and that burden will be lifted and we’ll be in a better place. We need to trust in God’s mercy and love – that He will not forget our loved ones. He knows them and loves them, more than we could ever imagine. He will help them heal when we put our trust in Him. I truly believe that. My husband and I have seen many little miracles along this path. I think we’ll continue to see them. We can’t get discouraged when things may bottom out again, but it’s okay, it’s part of the process of becoming more like the Savior. We can trust in God’s mercy. At A Glance Name: Fiona Phillips Age: 68 Location: Vista, California Marital History: Married Children: Five Occupation: Artist, Missionary Schools Attended: MFA, MA, BA Languages Spoken At Home: English, and some Spanish Favorite Hymn: Where Can I Turn For Peace Website or Social Media You Would Like Featured: http://fionabphillips.com Social Media: @fionaphillipsartstudio Interview Produced by Trina Caudle

Lorianne Updike Toler began studying the US Constitution while in elementary school and her interest charted her educational course through multiple graduate degrees. As a constitutional legal historian, she has founded organizations to provide resources for constitutional study. She has been teaching at New England Law: Boston, and will begin teaching at Northern Illinois University College of Law in the fall. How did you become interested in studying the US Constitution and making that the focus of your career? Lorianne Updike Toler I grew up in Provo, Utah and was homeschooled during middle school when my mom was a citizen lobbyist at the Utah state capitol. I went with her to the state capitol when the legislature was in session and did my schoolwork in the galleries and committee meetings, frequently running errands to get bills from the bill room or take notes to members of the legislature. I created a digital game to memorize all the legislators’ names. I never needed to learn how a bill became a law, as I lived it. Later, I also went to lectures with my mom during high school to hear Cole Durham, who helped write some of the Eastern Bloc constitutions after the fall of communism and the Soviet Union. In this way, I was exposed to constitution-writing at an early age. I knew it was something that one could do as a profession. After high school, I graduated from BYU (public relations) and BYU Law, completed a Masters in history at Oxford, and am ABD for a doctoral degree at the University of Pennsylvania, which I still hope to finish at some point. While I was in London after completing my program at Oxford, it was a pivot point in my career. I had been focused domestically on constitutional interpretation and improving it through the better use of history. I founded ConSource, an online library of historical sources related to the creation of the US Constitution after I graduated from law school and before my Masters. But then when I was done with the Masters, finding a job in that career was impossible because, let’s be clear, nobody cares about the US Constitution in England! That’s a really narrow niche! My then-husband sat me down and said, “Let’s look at your goals,” and I had this constitution-writing thing up in the corner. He said, “Why don’t you work on that?” I said, “I’m not old enough.” He said, “You know 95 percent more than 95 percent of the people. You should do that.” The Arab Spring was taking off. [The Arab Spring was a series of anti-government, pro-democracy uprisings in 2010-11, affecting multiple countries in the Middle East and northern Africa.] I had already missed the wave in Egypt and Tunisia. But there was a civil war in Libya at that point and I thought, “I might be able to catch this wave.” I began writing about Libya, based on a first visit I’d done, and I was able to meet some folks with the United Nations there, including the constitutional focal point. We worked together kind of behind the scenes – I helped him with a few things, and he helped me to know what was happening on the ground so I could write a series on constitutionalism there. Eventually, enough people read it that they wanted it translated and they wanted to meet me. So I had an opportunity to go to Libya a second time. I got some funding and went in the beginning of 2013. That’s awesome for your spouse to encourage you in your goals like that. What was interesting was I desperately wanted to become a mother. We were planning to start fertility later that year, and I thought I didn’t have to worry anymore because we were going to start fertility. Of course, when I stopped worrying about it, that’s when I got pregnant. But had I gotten pregnant just one month earlier, I would not have been able to go to Libya. So it was a testament to me that the Lord cared about my career. He wanted me to have this opportunity. My semester ended – I was then doing the doctorate at Penn – and I literally had a month between being 32 and 36 weeks pregnant, when you can’t fly anymore, when I could go to Libya. So I did it. Lorianne Updike Toler in Libya I didn’t tell anyone there that I was pregnant, so when I arrived, they were like, “Whoa, wide berth!” There was a tense moment when I went home. I’d done all my research on which airline had the latest time frame I could fly pregnant. I got to the Tripoli airport – out to here, with my doctor’s note – I was one day beyond when I was supposed to fly. I didn’t think I was showing that much but apparently the airline attendant knew better. They looked at my letter and they looked at the calendar, and I was just praying internally, “Please, please, let me get home.” I did, and safely delivered my son in London a month later. But I had a backup plan. This is also how I knew that the Lord really wanted me to do this. The first person I met on the first trip to Libya, when I went for a different entity altogether, was an obstetrician. With a private practice. With a generator. I actually had an appointment for an ultrasound while I was in Libya. If anything happened, my biggest concern would have been getting my son – who would have been Libyan had he been born there – into the United Kingdom. Given the political state of affairs, it would have been difficult. That month that I spent in Libya changed the course of my career. I don’t help with constitution writing per se; I think it’s poor practice for foreign nationals to step in and write a nation’s constitution. I focus on best practices for constitutional process – how to do it, not what is in the constitution. The last day I was in Libya, my office mate, a Libyan who ran a civil society organization, said that what we need is a big comparative study that can be written at various levels that shows all the decision points for a process – their length and their quality. Could I do that? Because of that trip and that question, fifty percent of what I do now is focused comparatively. I shifted my research, and half of what I do now is focused on using good comparative studies in history to improve the process of constitution-writing. You look at all these different countries: this is how it’s done, these are the results when it’s done in these particular ways, are you going to select or elect the drafters, what should their composition be like. I focus on the 2009 United Nations guidelines, which sets out the standards for constitution writing processes: inclusivity, participation, and transparency. It turns out there’s no hard data behind those standards, so I’m trying to fill that gap. I got funding from the UN Development Programme for fifty hours of work, and it turned out to be a 500-hour project, of course. My research team and I looked at eighteen different constitutional processes to identify the different elements: presence, duration, and – it’s a hard one to judge – quality. We basically wrote a book to put it all together but also distilled it down into an Excel spreadsheet. It was one of three resources that the UN shared with the Libyan Constitution Drafting Assembly. Then the UN in New York got a hold of it and said, “This is gold; we need more of this.” So a project now in the works is to expand it and look at all constitution writing since World War II, which is really difficult because you’re basically doing histories of all these different processes. It’s difficult especially considering all the different languages. But getting that data will help us understand and perhaps develop best practices for writing a constitution. In the meantime, I do historical studies for some of the oldest constitutions. I just got a piece accepted for publication on New Hampshire’s constitutional process from 1784. Next, I’ll be doing Massachusetts, and then Vermont. There’s of course the US constitutional process. Then you skip across the pond and look at Poland in 1791, France from 1791 to 93. Their processes mirror Virginia and Pennsylvania.Poland didn’t have a lot of exposure – there weren’t enough documents – they knew about Benjamin Franklin and George Washington, but how they wrote their constitution was more of a symbolic gesture to what had happened in the US, because they didn’t really know much. There was one Polish general who had fought in the American revolution – he came back and led the charge, but he wasn’t aware of how they did it because they didn’t write it down. Nobody took notes on how you write a constitution. They wrote constitutions but didn’t provide any kind of a “dummy’s guide.” Here’s what’s interesting and I have done this work – I presented it at a conference at the Palace of Versailles in 2017 that I put together. In France, their processes from 1791 and 93 looked like the processes from Pennsylvania and Virginia, in part because of the Americans who had been in France who had been successful – Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. So they basically communicated how they wrote constitutions. Then you jump over to Holland in the later 1790s and their process looks almost exactly like Massachusetts, because John Adams was there, and he’d just written the Massachusetts constitution. He did a tour of the Netherlands to raise money in the 1780s. He brought with him all the Massachusetts documents, all the debates, the drafts and he told people, “Look what I did.” So that showed them how to write a constitution, and it lasted until Napoleon came along. The United Netherlands constitution is one of the oldest in the world, and I suspect that is in large part because of the process they followed, patterned after the Massachusetts process. I haven’t done all the work, but preliminarily, the Netherlands looks like they followed Adams’ rubric. So there’s something about the US process that was figured out in Massachusetts and New Hampshire that then was incorporated on the US federal level and exported to the Netherlands. Norway and a lot of the Scandinavian countries also have very old constitutions, so I want to study all of these. This isn’t something that’s been looked at in terms of their prosperity. A lot of people talk about the Scandinavian countries being so successful and so socialistic – how does this work – some of the answers might lie in their constitutional history. So this is an area of active interest for me that applies to today, not just part of the past. Since I was in Libya in 2013, their constitutional process was a model of organization and rule-following. They did a really good job until they had two civil wars and things fell apart. They were able to produce a draft in 2017. But right now there’s a cart before the horse issue – they can’t issue a new government without a constitution, but there’s no motivation to produce a constitution because the people in power – you can see the issue. But there are more movements afoot to make sure Libya has a constitution at some point. The project I’m working on now for Libya looks at the ramifications of resuscitating the old constitution from 1959. It’s somewhat problematic because it had a monarchy, and usually when you put a monarch over a lot of oil wells, bad things happen. But if you look at it procedurally, there were a lot of good things that happened and that’s more of what I focus on. How does the Church’s perspective on the US constitution being inspired by God factor into your career motivation? Lorianne Updike Toler Presenting at a Conference at the Palace of Versailles There’s a really cool verse that Cole Durham pointed out in a lecture I went to at Oxford when I was there. I didn’t know this verse and he elucidated an interpretation that I hadn’t considered before. It says: “That law which is constitutional belongs to all mankind.” (D&C 98:5) His point was that Joseph understood that “constitutional” referred to the Preamble, and that those laws which accorded with it belonged not just to the people of the US, but those of the globe. I interpret that verse differently as relating to constitutional process — that constitutions written according to good constitutional process and involve the people and abides by its own rules and the rule of law is something that all people deserve. President Dallin H. Oaks has a great talk in the April 2021 General Conference, The Divinely Inspired Constitution, where he discusses what aspects of the Constitution are divine. You could say that there are norms or standards within the US Constitution that were inspired without getting down to the word level. There were obviously some major problems with the original Constitution. It’s sometimes hard for people to grasp that something can be inspired, but not every single detail is God’s truth. There is a difference. I think President Oaks does a really good job. You could write a book-length article on each of his five tenets and I’ve written one about popular sovereignty – what it means truly for “We the People” to be involved in constitution-writing. It was so revolutionary! They took this principle from the Enlightenment that was only theoretically worked out but never practically, because if you look at the Glorious Revolution in England on which it is based, there’s nothing really popular about that revolution. It was parliamentary sovereignty that they conceptualized as popular sovereignty, but the people really had very little to do with it except for electing their Parliamentarian every five to ten years. It wasn’t a popular revolution, it was a parliamentary revolution. You’re using the term “popular” in terms of the population, not “popular” as in well-liked. Lorianne Updike Toler “We the People” – the people are bringing this about. In the American states, you see this very real moment – this is something I point out in the history I wrote on New Hampshire – they have a sense that they are creating history. With the Revolutionary War and the breakdown in government, they had the opportunity to step in and push power forward, to be the propellers of power and the controllers of power.There’s a wonderful point when John Adams was at the forefront and kept pushing for state constitutions, and Congress said No. New Hampshire finally said, “Look, we don’t have a charter. We can’t fall back on our charter and rework it – we have none. We have a literal power vacuum. Please let us write a constitution.” They brought a petition from the people to Congress but the petition was made up by the Congressmen themselves – they never got the petition from New Hampshire, so the delegates in Congress finally said, “We know we need one, we’re just going to make it up.” The New Hampshire assembly voted to create a committee to write a petition on the same day that the Congressmen proposed their petition in Congress. So there’s this fun moment when New Hampshire gets their request, then South Carolina gets their request, then Virginia is allowed to write a constitution. Finally Congress just put up their hands and said, “Okay, fine, everybody can write a constitution if they want to, all the colonies can go ahead.” On May 15, 1776 – two months before the Declaration of Independence – that was when independence was declared because they were acting legally independent. That was when the people said, “It’s ours. This power is no longer Congress’s, we don’t have to ask them for anything. This is our power.” And they stepped up. You see radicals, and mechanics, and shoemakers, and backwoods academics seizing this and saying, “We’re going to work this out for ourselves.” It’s not only that they had the power to create a constitution but they told their delegates what they should be doing – they had written instructions. They took the opportunity very, very seriously. This was the turning point in the Revolution. In constitution-writing, this is when a constitution changes from being how you describe a system of government to a written document. It’s a fascinating point in our history that happened long before the US Constitution was put into place. This is the actual history behind President Oaks’ statement that the principle of popular sovereignty in the US Constitution is divinely inspired. Every single point that he made in that talk is worthy of a volume. That’s a lot of research and writing. Do you have any other plans in the works? Lorianne Updike Toler in Libya This fall, I start a tenure-track position at Northern Illinois University and I’ll be working with students who want to learn how to do historical research and write amicus briefs for Appellate and Supreme Court cases, just providing history, not siding with either party. I’m also working on plans to build the database prompted by my trip to Libya, and I will be headed to Oxford this summer to work on programming for the first constitution-writing software with a live version of the Quill Project, a project that I helped to start at Oxford in 2016. I started ConSource in 2005, and left to go study at Oxford in 2009. Libya was in 2013. I helped to start the Quill Project at Oxford in 2015-17, which is a sister project to ConSource and just acquired ConSource. The software that was built is historically focused, but included the concept that at some point, we would flip a switch and it would become a live constitution writing software. So the plan is to help delegations that are writing constitutions, using the US process as a model. The US Constitution is not people’s favorite document internationally, but by any stretch, the multi-party constitutional negotiations that occurred in Philadelphia were a wild success. So people writing constitutions – if they want to look at a really good model for how to conduct a successful multi-party constitutional negotiation – can look to Philadelphia in 1787 for how to do that. The current software for Consource and Quill is historically-focused, with all the documents telling the history of its creation and ratification. The live version of Quill uses that same platform to allow modern users to write a constitution and, among other things, be able to track all changes. It’s like a group-track-changes for writing a constitution. Which countries don’t have constitutions? There’s four – the UK, New Zealand, Israel – the UK and New Zealand are probably by affirmative decision to not have a constitution. Israel is by happenstance, an accident of history. And Libya. They’re working on it. But there are actually four constitutions written every year, on average. The average constitutional life cycle is 19 years. So Americans, with having our constitution for over 200 years, are the anomaly. The Netherlands, Norway, Sweden – they all have very old constitutions. Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont – they all have very old constitutions. We’re not totally unique but I think it’s worth studying to figure out how constitutions become so long-lived. My goal is to try to push that needle back further. The more entrenched a constitution is, the greater stability you’re going to have for economics and politics and the rule of law. This is a point of disagreement but I think constitutional longevity is a good thing for the stability it provides. So what is your motivation to do all of this? I feel incredibly blessed to be doing what I love – using history to make constitution-writing and constitutional interpretation better – especially as a single mom. It’s the perfect job for a single mom – highly flexible with hours that coordinate to kids’ school schedules, and better than a teacher’s salary. But the reason I got into all of this started when I was a teenager. There was a speech competition I won as a sixteen-year-old that had me speaking with Elder Holland and Governor Mike Leavitt at the BYU Marriott Center to 22,000 people. Not only was I given as much time as the Governor, but I was amazed because quotes I felt to leave out of my talk were used by Elder Holland in his so that our talks fit pretty seamlessly together. It was a moment, because I felt like I had been able to partake of the same source of inspiration as an apostle of the Lord. The difference, of course, was that he wrote his talk on a plane ride home from somewhere in Europe, and I spent months and months researching and memorizing my talk. But it was powerful in another way for me. I did enough research into the founder’s documents that I felt I came to know them and was compelled by the sacrifice they had made. That was a turning point for me in my life. I committed to myself that someday I would do something to thank them for that sacrifice. In a way, I am still keeping that promise. At A Glance Name: Lorianne Updike Toler Age: 42 Location: New Canaan, CT Marital History: married 2009, divorced 2020 Children: Gideon (9), Esther (7), Ingrid Elisabeth (5) Occupation: Constitutional Law Professor Schools Attended: BYU BA magna cume laude (2000), BYU JD magna cume laude (2005), Oxford History MST (2010) Languages Spoken At Home: English Favorite Hymn: I know that My Redeemer Lives Website or Social Media You Would Like Featured: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=1839993 Interview produced by Trina Caudle

Amber Corkin and Aubri Robinson are twin sisters who received a prompting that their daughters need to learn of women in the scriptures while growing up, more than they had as youth. They studied the scriptures and divine identity to help their children, and developed their own sense of divine identity along the way. They recently published Dear Divine Daughter: Inspiring Stories of Bible Women, a compilation of stories of women in the Bible. Tell me about yourselves. Amber Corkin and Aubri Robinson AUBRI: We’re twins, and we’re thirty. I live in Minnesota and Amber lives in St. George, Utah. AMBER: We grew up in a typical Latter-Day Saint family. We were taught the gospel, we went to church and read the scriptures. Nothing was outside of the ordinary with our gospel learning. Fast forward to about four years ago. We were both married, we both had kids. Aubri had two daughters. I had a son and was two weeks postpartum with my daughter. One day, I was nursing her and looking down at her, and I had a strong feeling that I was holding something divine. I knew she was from heaven and that she had Heavenly Parents who loved her. Later that day, I was reading the scriptures and came across a story with a male protagonist. At that moment, I had the feeling that my daughter needed the stories of women that she could look up to and would inspire her, and that I could write them into stories that she can enjoy even while she is young. So I called Aubri, who had her own infant girl at the time. AUBRI: We had worked together on projects and businesses before. We work well together and enjoy doing so. Twins, best friends, business partners … AMBER: We talked about when we were growing up, we didn’t really hear the stories of women. They seemed to take a backseat to all the stories of men from the scriptures that were shared. AUBRI: It didn’t seem like anything was lacking when we were youth, but reflecting as adults with daughters ourselves now, we recognize that there was a space that needed to be filled. AMBER: We wanted that for our girls who we loved with all our hearts. So we decided to pursue the project of writing a book about women in the scriptures. We researched for a year or so – we read the scriptures, and we started writing out their stories. AUBRI: It was amazing, as we were writing, to see just how many women are in the scriptures – all the stories, all the names, and even women who are nameless in the scriptures. When we started the project, we said, “I don’t know if there’s going to be very many.” We ended up including thirty-four women and each one has an inspiring story to tell. How did you choose the thirty-four? What was your criteria to be included? Dear Divine Daughter: Inspiring Stories of Bible Women AMBER: We collected about fifty stories, and a few different factors played into what ended up as our thirty-four. We reached out to publishers and got feedback that we needed to shrink the size of the book. So we knew it needed some cutting, which led us to focus on Bible women specifically and only use the Bible as our reference. So that knocked out a handful, including Eve, which was a painful decision for us. We love Eve but it turns out that a lot of the inspiring amazingness about Eve comes from the other scriptures. AUBRI: Through the lens of the Bible, Eve is unfortunately not painted in the way that we know and love her. We also wanted this book to appeal to a wider Christian audience. But there may or may not be another work coming out, and Eve is in it. We couldn’t help it – not do Eve, not give her a story. AMBER: And we were writing a book for children so there were a few stories that we couldn’t include, because they were a little graphic. Jael didn’t make it in because she stabs a guy in the head with a tent stake. She’s awesome but the book is geared toward children and teens. We whittled it down to the thirty-four that we just couldn’t not have in there. Another criterion was, who did we want our girls reading about and becoming? AUBRI: There is a motive when you have daughters that you’re trying to inspire and to raise well and teach important truths. And I feel that with amazing women role models, they’re much more likely to relate and feel a connection with them. We were raised by moms who live the gospel, love the Lord, taught us the scriptures, but they didn’t focus on the women in the scriptures. But now we are very adamantly focusing on women in the scriptures for the next generation. What do you think has changed in the world, in society, in the Church, to cause this change of focus? AUBRI: I think stories have always been a big part of how we teach and reach children. We grew up hearing stories of our ancestors, including the amazing women. Our grandmother was the first dental hygienist in Utah. Our great-great grandmother was a widow with ten children, and she went to college and got a degree in her later years. Storytelling has always been inspiring. I think that you’re right that there has been a shift. Recently, it’s probably a cultural or generational shift, where we finally recognized that women’s voices have been not as represented in scripture and in other areas of the Church. It’s exciting to see that their voices are now being heard and it’s fun to be a part of that. Amber Corkin and Aubri Robinson with Dear Divine Daughter AMBER: I agree. I think there’s a shift in needing visibility of women. Our generation is starting – I’ll say starting, because I think we have a long way to go – starting to recognize how important it is for girls to see women in leadership roles, in scripture stories. We’re excited to be a part of this shift and momentum. Our mother now is catching the bug. She looks back and says, “Wow, I should have known. I wish that I had known the stories of the women and shared them with my children.” So I don’t know if it’s generational as much as a new movement. AUBRI: In and outside of the Church, there has been a movement for women to have a voice. It’s a very good thing because women bring a lot to the table – amazing qualities and characteristics, unique and beautiful things. In the Bible, there are all different kinds of people – queens and princesses and slaves and servants. People who are strong, people who are caring, a huge variety. Hopefully, the takeaway of our book is: No matter who you are and what your innate characteristics are, you have the potential to do good and inspire others. At the back of the book, there’s a section where girls can fill in their own name, story, and picture. That is an effort to help them realize that they fit among these inspiring women, and they have the potential to do good just as the women of the Bible. I’m grateful for personal revelation. I totally have a testimony and faith of the stories within the scriptures, even though women are not even named. It’s sad to me at times, and disappointing that women didn’t have names and weren’t as prominent in the scriptures. There had to have been a cultural thing back then that has carried through time. It’s all the more reason to learn the names of the girls around us now and within the ward – to learn their names, to be invested in them and their lives and their stories, and to empower them as best we can. One way that Amber and I can do that is through our writing, by highlighting the other amazing women that we know and love. Aubri Robinson Which woman in the Bible is your personal favorite, and how have you followed her particular example in your life? AUBRI: The one amazing thing about Dear Divine Daughter: Inspiring Stories of Bible Women is that there is such diversity. We hope that girls relate to stories throughout their lives, so we hope that the women they’re inspired by changes, depending on their needs and circumstances. I’ve noticed that in myself – I feel a connection to and inspired by and drawn to different women at different times in my life. Growing up, I felt such a connection with the woman with an issue of blood. I was diagnosed with type one diabetes when I was five. I often felt like I could relate to her, living with a chronic illness, and like I was reaching to Christ in a way to help me live with this disease. I gained a lot of strength from her story, and from knowing that Christ saw her even when no one else did. Now I’m going back to school. I have a degree in business strategy. But about a year and a half ago, I felt inspired to go back to school to study medicine and become a physician, so that I can help other type one diabetic women. Recently, I felt really inspired and buoyed by the story of Huldah who is learned in a time when I’m assuming not a lot of women knew how to read and write. She not only knew how to read and write, but people sought her out as a source of wisdom. That has been inspiring to me as I’ve gone back to school. Amber Corkin AMBER: It’s true. For me, it’s been empowering knowing so many of the stories because of this concept that at different points in our lives, we need different things. One particular Sunday, a few months ago, I was going through a really hard time. I was struggling with a reoccurrence of one of my biggest trials – an anal fissure that has caused me debilitating pain, required surgeries, and physically left my body tense and anxious. I was also dealing with another tear, but a relational one, as I learned that my parents were getting divorced. Dealing with both of these tears at the same time felt overwhelming. On the pew in church that Sunday, I was mourning my pain, mourning my family’s pain, and just felt helpless in this situation. Suddenly, the story of Mary of Bethany sprang to my mind. This was after our book had come out, and Aubri and I had learned all the stories. I remembered that she was often found kneeling at the feet of Christ. She sat at His feet learning from Him in her own home. When her brother Lazarus died, she fell at Christ’s feet, and they wept together. During Christ’s last week on Earth, she anointed His feet with oil. In that moment, she helped me realize that sometimes just kneeling at the feet of Christ is enough. Even if I couldn’t lift and bless and serve and do all these things that I normally like to do, I could just give myself over to Christ and take a moment to be at His feet. She helped me realize that’s okay. I think it’s important to know the different stories of the women because you never know when you’re going to need their example. At that moment, she was my favorite. Thank you for sharing those experiences. The title of your book is Dear Divine Daughter and you mentioned that you feel that your children are divine. How have you developed a sense of divine identity for yourself? AUBRI: We’ve always been women of action, at least I’d like to think so. To me, faith is a very active process, as is patience, as is humility. So many of the Christlike characteristics that we talk about require work and action. Becoming Christlike is a very active process. We know that we are innately and inherently divine. No matter what we do and no matter who we are, we already have divinity within ourselves. I want especially girls to know that they are not only divine but that they have the potential to become even more. We have infinite potential, thanks to our Savior and the Atonement, and the fact that we are daughters and sons of Heavenly Parents: a Heavenly Father and a Heavenly Mother. Aubri Robinson with Her Husband and Children Our book, hopefully, is a way for readers to recognize that no matter what characteristics they have, it’s beautiful. For example, some people think that there are strong and weak characteristics. Being brave like Esther is the ideal, right? But that’s not necessarily the case. The softer characteristics are just as wonderful – being receptive, having faith, having patience, being able to be long-suffering. Each of these can be strong in its own way. We wanted girls to recognize that there is a huge variety of characteristics and they’re all wonderful, and each person has the potential to develop anything you want, to become who you need to be to fulfill your divine assignment on Earth. Amber and I have each had experiences where we have developed a characteristic that we wanted but felt didn’t come naturally. I am not an inherently patient person but in my patriarchal blessing, I was blessed with patience. It was a very confusing gift for me because I felt like it wasn’t something that came naturally to me. But like I said, I’ve realized that patience is a very active word. It’s not just something you sit back and wait for. My patience is in the form of doing all I can, and in that process, waiting upon the Lord and His timetable.I feel like my understanding as a divine daughter of God has been a process, and I’m excited that it can continue as I develop divine gifts. AMBER: For me, there was one moment when I knew without a doubt that I was a daughter of God. It was during my teenage years – I really struggled with self-esteem, with body image, with understanding my identity and who I was. I remember one specific night when everyone else in the house had gone to bed. I was standing in the shower with the water hitting me, and I had the thought, “No one would care if I just disappeared.” It scared me. As soon as I got out of the shower, I went and immersed myself in the scriptures. The decision to choose God and believe, instead of listening to other voice, was a huge blessing for me. Amber Corkin with Her Husband and Children Later, in seminary class, my teacher gave us an activity to write a talk in five minutes using just a hymn. I used “Where Can I Turn for Peace,” which was my favorite at the time because I felt like I was going through my own little Gethsemane. The teacher used dice to randomly choose people to share their talks – he rolled for which row and which seat in the row. He got three people and was starting to put his dice away. Then he looked right at me and said, “If I roll your seat, you also have to share,” and I just knew that I was supposed to share. He rolled his dice and sure enough, it was my row and my seat. So I stood up and gave my talk about Christ, and how He can help us through our Gethsemane. That little miracle was huge to me because it really helped me know that I had a God in heaven who loved me, who was looking out for me. I knew that I was His daughter, which made me divine. From then on, I knew that I was a daughter of God. But like Aubri said, it takes continuous work and effort, because Satan’s really good at whispering lies to us. So it’s up to us to strengthen that testimony. I think my relationship with God ebbs and flows in life, but it’s dependent on what I put in. You’ve both mentioned Heavenly Parents, and there’s a shift in vocabulary happening right now. How does that connect for both of you? AUBRI: I think it’s beautiful, I really do. The concept of Heavenly Parents is unique to our church and it’s a beautiful one. It resonates with me. I feel like there’s truth in the concept of a Heavenly Mother. I wonder all the time what She’s like, but writing the book has helped me realize that She could be so many things and be wonderful and inspiring, just like the women in the scriptures. Even if She doesn’t have exactly my characteristics, that doesn’t mean that my relationship with Her can’t be wonderful and amazing. I get a lot of strength and peace from the fact that by developing Christlike characteristics, we are becoming more divine, and therefore more like our Heavenly Mother. So in my effort to get to know Her better, I try to become more like Christ. That feels good and right to me, and I have a lot of room for improvement. So that’s what I try to focus on – less about what I don’t know, and more about who I can become. AMBER: I think it is so neat that there is a shift of recognizing God the Mother, and including Her in what we talk about, just as it’s important to have the visibility of women in the scriptures. It’s so great that we are starting to highlight Heavenly Mother more because growing up, we didn’t ever think about Her. How cool is it that She’s starting to be a bigger part of the conversation, helping girls realize that there is a feminine divine that they are like, and I think it’s beautiful. What’s the relationship between your faith and your work? AMBER: It’s pretty simple that it’s very intertwined. We’re both trying to align ourselves with who God wants us to be and do what He wants us to do. AUBRI: That reminded me of a talk that John C. Pingree gave in general conference a few years ago. (“I Have a Work for Thee,” October 2017.) It’s the favorite talk I’ve ever read in my whole life, I felt that it was one that was written for me. He talks about our divine assignments. I feel like that concept relates so much to our book in a way, because we have been sent to Earth to do something. Just as our gifts and the situations we’re born into are unique, the divine assignments we’ve been given are unique. And we get to include God and Christ in the process of understanding what those divine assignments are, and then accomplishing the work we’ve been sent to do. That is so empowering that each of us has a role to play and that it’s important. I love that our book is about empowering girls because I feel like “Strong Girls, Strong World.” Each of us has so much potential to do good and to be good. I love the shift that’s been happening with giving women a voice. It’s exciting to watch and to play a small part in it.I want to put on the record that I love being a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It brings me so much purpose and happiness and is grounding. It is just beautiful. It makes my life what it is, whether I’m with my girls at home, or back in school, or working one of my jobs. Faith and what I know – and also what I don’t know, but what I’m trying to become or what I’m trying to learn and understand – makes each of us unique in the best way. Amber Corkin and Aubri Robinson I am excited to be offering this book to our daughters and girls around the world and to be an example. When my daughter was six, we were reading the scriptures and she asked me out of the blue, “Mom, how come there aren’t any girls in the scriptures?” That broke my heart, but I turned to her and said, “Wait, just wait.” We were in the middle of writing the book about this. I was so excited to show it to her. On Mother’s Day in sacrament meeting, the only example from the scriptures that I heard was Nephi and Lehi. It was really sad in a way but was such a validating moment for me, in the fact that the stories of women are already there. They just need to be highlighted and shared and talked about. I’m excited for my girls to grow up hearing these stories, and for other girls around the world to do the same. What better way to show our girls how to reach for their dreams and to become like Christ and to do all we can and fulfill our divine assignments than to show them how. That’s a big expectation. But I know that we can live up to that expectation. AMBER: Women are so powerful, collectively and individually, and I love that. The more that we can inspire and encourage the next generation to live up to their divine potential, and our generation, the better. Join us for a conversation with Aubri and Amber on July 27, 2022 at 8 pm EST, as part of our Fireside Series. This is a virtual event. At A Glance Name: Amber Corkin Age: 30 Location: St George, UT, USA Marital History: Married Children: 3 children (6-year-old boy, 4-year-old girl, and 2-year-old girl) Occupation: Author Schools Attended: B.S., Business (Marketing Emphasis) Languages Spoken At Home: English Favorite Hymn: Praise to the Lord, the Almighty Social Media: Instagram @deardivinedaughter @ambercorkin Name: Aubri Robinson Age: 30 Location: Rochester, Minnesota Marital History: Happily Married Children: 3 strong, smart, and creative daughters (ages 7, 4, and 1) Occupation: I am currently transitioning from a career in business to medicine. I own a brand development and website design company (Aubri Robinson LLC), work part-time as an ophthalmic technician at Mayo Clinic, am the co-author of Dear Divine Daughter: Inspiring Stories of Bible Women, write abstracts for an OB Anesthesia medical journal, and volunteer as a certified doula at Mayo Clinic’s Family Birth Center. Education: Bachelor’s degree in Business Management with a strategy emphasis from Brigham Young University Provo; currently taking medical pre-requisite classes at the University of Minnesota Rochester. Languages Spoken at Home: English (my daughters are in a Spanish immersion daycare, so I’m slowly learning Spanish) Favorite Hymn: A Child's Prayer (Primary song) Website: www.deardivinedaughter.com Interview Produced by Trina Caudle

Jennifer Dinning does not consider herself a writer but felt prompted to create a blog to share the tender mercies of the Lord in her life. She hopes to inspire others to recognize the Lord’s tender mercies in their own lives as well. Can you give us a little background on your life? I grew up in Utah and after high school, I went to Ricks College and served a mission in Sendai, Japan. When I returned home, I went to BYU Provo where I met my husband. We got married and moved to Colorado where our first two children were born, then moved to Ohio where I had an ectopic pregnancy and our two other children. Then we moved to Texas for ten years and recently moved to Utah, after 23 years of being away. Will you explain how your project Tender Mercy Moments came to be? I love all that has transpired. There’s some background. After the birth of our youngest child, which was 15 years ago, I received a very distinct impression that our family was complete, and the Lord was preparing me for something else. At that time, I didn’t know what it was, but the inspiration was distinct, and it stayed with me. On a regular basis, I thought, “What is it? What does He have in store for me? What is being prepared for me?” And it was eleven years. In that time, things came up and I thought, “Is this it?” I would go for it but then after some time, “No, this is not it. This does not feel right.” When we moved to Texas, I helped as a copy pal at the elementary school where my kids attended. I went to the school to help the teachers, so they could focus elsewhere – the volunteers would make copies for them. I eventually became the copy pal liaison and had interactions with the administration, the teachers, all the parent volunteers. I scheduled the calendar to coordinate between teachers and parent volunteers to have copy pals for each grade level. When my youngest was in fourth grade, I received the impression that it was time for me to turn it over to someone else. He still had one more year in that school but the impression was so strong and I knew, “This is it. This is the time.” I didn’t know what the “something else” was yet but in the fall, I turned over the school liaison position to someone else who would cover it. In January of that school year, four and a half years ago, in the night I received divine inspiration to do a blog. That was interesting because a blog is all about writing and I am not a natural writer at all. When keeping a diary or journal, I would start something and then you see a gap for a long period of time before I wrote again. I’m very detail-oriented, so when I shared something in my journal, it would take me a very long time to write big, long pages. And I didn’t have that kind of time. I have spaces and gaps of my life that are not written down. So when that inspiration came to do a blog, I thought, “Wow, okay.” Jennifer Dinning Going back – when my kids were young, I went to a talent show at a church. When you think of talent, it’s music or art or something you can showcase on a stage. Those are not my gifts. And I wondered, “What is my talent? I don’t know what my talent is.” It came to me then: “Your talent is spiritual in nature, and that’s not something that you can showcase in the same way on a stage.” But what do you do with that? When I think of talents, I think about singer-songwriters – they can sit down at the piano and a song just comes to them. In my mind, they’re natural at that. But I am not a natural writer. Writing has always been a struggle for me my entire life. I’ve worked really, really hard with anything I had to write in school. Anyway, so here I was being inspired to do a blog. I wrote a welcome letter that night and the words just floated, like a singer-songwriter, just in those minutes. I was so grateful because I do need Heavenly Father’s help. This is not something that I can do alone and He has been by my side the whole time. My desire has been to align with His will, whatever that is, and having the courage, the strength, the faith, trusting in Him as I go forward. So it all came to me. The next day, I shared with my family, “This is what I’ve received, and I’m moving forward.” That was January 2018. It was not until August of that year that I stepped out of my comfort zone to share with others. So it took all that time for me to push that invite button for others to see my blog. There were two things I saw when I looked at different blogs – blogging was about content and rebranding. I said to Heavenly Father, “I don’t want to rebrand. I don’t have technical skills. I’m not good at it. I need something that will be long-term, that I’ll never have to change. So whatever the title is, that’s what I want. And I don’t want to come up with content. What am I gonna put out today? What do I put out tomorrow?” That’s really hard. I spent six weeks trying to figure out the name of this blog. I was throwing out names left and right and settled on Tender Mercy Moments. When I looked up domain names, that had not been taken. And I was wowed. Where I first heard and connected with the phrase was Elder Bednar’s talk, “The Tender Mercies of the Lord” (April 2005 general conference). I understood the concept of tender mercies, and maybe that was part of the preparation – that I was given something I already understood. The domain was not taken and it answered both concerns. I will never have to rebrand the domain, never have to change because miracles haven’t ceased and they never will. They are constant, consistent, always. The content is the tender mercy moments, miracles – the Lord’s hand in our life is 24/7. He’s there and we just need to see what’s right in front of us every single day. You may see one tender mercy, you may see multiple in the day, there may be so many you just can’t get a handle on it because they just keep coming. I mentioned the big time gaps in keeping a journal, but over the past four and a half years, I’ve been recording tender mercy moments on a daily basis. You said that you struggled with writing before, so have you been able to do that consistently since beginning the blog? I can see how important it is to have a personal relationship with Heavenly Father. When life is chaotic and hectic and crazy, who do I listen to? There’s one truth, the direction from Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ and the Holy Ghost. Having a relationship with Heavenly Father is so critical, especially right now. It fascinates me that this began four and a half years ago, before COVID, and now here we are, and life is getting that much more crazy. And now it’s even more important to have that connection with Heavenly Father and to know that He is mindful and aware of us individually, uniquely, personally. So even though writing a blog is super hard for me, I do it because it’s about the one. That’s another prompting. It’s not about the followers. It’s not about the likes. It’s the one – if one reader reads the posts that I’ve published, and what they read draws them to Heavenly Father and a connection with Him, that’s exactly the purpose of the blog. The blog starts with a personal experience I had. I’m a very private person so there’s a vulnerability for me in opening up about my own personal experiences. But at the same time, it’s not about me. It’s about connecting the reader to their own tender mercy moment that maybe they haven’t recognized yet. So you get a published post from me. At the end, it asks the question, “When have you experienced something in relation to what I’ve just posted?” It draws you in to reflect and ponder, “Have I had an experience like that? Wow, I have, so cool.” That is Heavenly Father’s awareness and mindfulness of each of us individually. It is a tender mercy when He shows up in our life. And do we see it? As you’re telling the story, I’m seeing the tender mercies and inspiration that led you to this point. I heard once that it’s important to not only feel the Holy Ghost, but to recognize that’s what it is. It’s amazing that you were inspired and knew something was coming and had patience for eleven years to wait and be prepared when it came. When you said the world is chaotic, so busy and loud, you’re right. There are so many tender mercies every day in our life that so many people miss or don’t see, because they’re so focused on something else. I’m excited to look for tender mercies more for myself. As the blog has grown and people are following you, what are stories and feedback that you’re getting from them? I haven’t put myself out there other than to friends who may share with their friends. I don’t know who’s reading it and there haven’t been many responses. All I know is when I post something, I felt inspired to post that story. I don’t know about other people, but I do a lot of reading that I don’t respond to. I feel the Spirit and I’m grateful for what they’ve shared, but I don’t comment. So I believe that there are many, many others like me that are reading. I don’t keep track of the whole technology aspect of it. I have no idea. I just know that I am inspired which things to post, and if it’s helping just one person, that’s great. I get some responses on the blog here and there, and they’re amazing. Someone reads my blog and pulls out a completely different experience that they’ve had. It doesn’t have to be identical. I share the experience of having a flat tire and what happened, and somebody will pull out of that storyline something of their own experience. I am truly amazed at the stories, the personal experiences that others have recognized in their own lives and also their excitement to share with me. The key is staying on top of it. You get excited and say, “I see the tender mercy moment! It’s right there!” As I’ve been doing this, I get excited every single day, because I look for them. I acknowledge them, write them down, and express gratitude to Heavenly Father. I love seeing His hand in my life. I’m so grateful to be an instrument in His hands to help others recognize and see that Heavenly Father, Jesus Christ, the Holy Ghost are mindful and aware and recognize us where we’re at. As we seek them and look for Heavenly Father’s hand in our lives, he’s there all the time. Has there been a shift in how you’ve managed this project? Have you written daily blog posts all this time? The struggle has always been in writing, but one day, I was inspired to put a Tender Mercy Moment cue on Facebook. I didn’t have to write a story or share an experience. I put a question up for readers to ponder and draw them into the relationship they have with Heavenly father and recognize His hand in their lives. It has been a tender mercy for me that I can still be an instrument in His hands but take off some of the pressure and struggle I have with writing. The blog is still there, but it has tapered to one post per month instead of over twenty posts in a month. So I am grateful for that. I was then inspired to connect the project of recognizing tender mercy moments to doing a retreat and bringing in hosting, and I love every aspect of that. This has background too. When we lived in Colorado, the Relief Society sisters hosted a progressive dinner at Christmas, going from one house to the next, to the next. I love Christmas and while I was in each home, I felt the Spirit and I said to myself, “I’m going to do something like this.” We moved soon after that to Ohio, and in our new ward, the geographical boundaries were huge. There was a need for the sisters there to come together, so they formed a monthly girls’ night out. There was a calendar going around, asking who wanted to host the Christmas girls’ night out – I’d had that experience in Colorado so I signed up for it. The following year, I waited for somebody else to sign up for Christmas but nobody did so I did it again. I was so giddy and excited. I would make homemade gifts and they got pretty amazing. It was about giving to those who came and I loved it. I spent nine years in Ohio, hosting the Christmas girls’ night out most years. When I got to Texas, it was a different time and season. In 2019, after the divine inspiration to start the blog, I hosted a Christmas tender mercy retreat, similar to the girls’ night out in Ohio. During COVID, I was inspired to host a virtual tender mercy moment sweet mini retreat. That brought people from different states in to participate, and I called it the pilot program. That was in February 2021. I knew there would be a break for the retreat while we moved from Texas to Utah, but it would pick back up. We moved into our new home at the end of March this year (2022) and my first retreat in our home was in June, and I’ve done one per month since. Jennifer Dinning with Her Husband It’s called “Uncover your very own tender mercy moments.” The first part of the retreat teaches the definition of a tender mercy, because that’s something not everybody understands. Then we look for tender mercies, reflecting, “Where is the Lord’s hand in my life?” After pondering, we acknowledge by writing it down and expressing gratitude. It’s very interactive and the participants are involved. The second part is utilizing the five senses to uncover your very own tender mercy moment. It is very much about the individual. It is so cool. I love it. When attendees first arrive, they may be reluctant and apprehensive, but also curious. They walk away with the understanding to go out and see for themselves, and they will find the tender mercies. We talked earlier about you having a spiritual talent, and I had the thought that what God asks of us is to give our time and our talents to building up the kingdom of God. This is something that He has blessed you with, and what an amazing opportunity that you are willing to share. Talents are unique to each individual. I love authenticity. I am not about comparison. There was one year in Ohio that I wasn’t able to host the Christmas girls’ night. There was hesitancy and reluctance, but the woman who did host that year was incredible. Her individual gifts and talents. I am all for whatever your talent is, whatever your gift is – pursue it and be authentically you. Go for it, be you. I love it. I am not about perfection. That can really hinder somebody and their ability. I know that firsthand with the blog. When I’m ready to post, it marks up the grammar. I’ve got some struggles, but you know what, this is me. This is my style. It’s not perfect. I’m not perfect. That’s what I love about it, you get the authentic me. I think that’s so important because we see so much on the internet that is made to look perfect. We compare our every day to someone else’s highlight reels. I think it would be life-changing for so many people to see God’s hand in their life every day and know how much He cares for them. How would that influence how they react and live and treat others? God’s awareness and mindfulness of us individually is amazing and wonderful. I hosted a retreat last night and was reminded it’s not about the masses, it’s about the one. I invited many people but most responded that it wasn’t going to work for them that night but they would like to come another time. As it got closer, only three people confirmed for last night. It’s discouraging when everyone says No, they’re not going to make it. But I was reminded it’s about the one, so I moved forward, I wasn’t going to postpone it because there were only a few. The three came in all about the same time, and I felt such joy! I recognized Heavenly Father is completely aware, I felt it, I knew it. We came to find out that the three people who came are very quiet. If they had been a larger group, they wouldn’t have talked. They would have just listened to others and not shared their own experiences. They felt safe. They didn’t know each other but that combination was perfect for them.I give some little gifts throughout the retreat presentation and I had only three of a particular item. I didn’t know when I would use them, but they were perfect for last night’s retreat. Heavenly Father heard my prayer. He knew. It was a tender mercy for me to be able to give the right number of gifts, and a tender mercy for them to be in such a small group. It was for them. I’m someone who does not count my chickens till they hatch. I don’t get overly excited if I don’t know what the outcome is going to be. But I will say this – there is opposition to everything that is good. I have received opposition as I have begun these retreats. There is also the tender mercy of having greater spiritual power. Heavenly Father has assured me, “This is what I want you to do right now, this is for you.” That has come through very sacred experiences and I am grateful for that power and strength that is greater than the opposition.I don’t know where this will lead to and what’s in store. I do know the importance that each of us individually have a relationship with Heavenly Father to recognize His hand in our lives, that He is mindful and aware of us. He will provide a way. At A Glance Name: Jennifer Dinning Age: 49 Location: Utah Marital History: Married 27 years Children: 4 Occupation: Stay-at-home mom and blogger Schools Attended: Office Education degree from Ricks College, Family Science degree from BYU Provo Languages Spoken At Home: English, occasional Spanish Website or Social Media You Would Like Featured: http://TenderMercyMoments.com Interview produced by Darcey Williams