My First Job: Ellen Southard, principal, Belt Collins Northwest

January 7, 2007

My First Job: Ellen Southard, principal, Belt Collins Northwest

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Ellen Southard

Current position: Principal, Belt Collins Northwest, a planning, civil-engineering and landscape-architecture firm.

First job: Blueberry packer on a farm in New Jersey, putting picked blueberries into cartons and covering them with cellophane secured with rubber bands.

What I learned: First, that good work has a higher value. Second, and much more important, a lesson about social inequity. At the end of the season my mother and aunts gathered up clothing and household supplies to give to the migrant workers. They then sent me out in the truck that delivered water to the workers' shacks and I saw firsthand the shocking social inequity between my life and the lives of the other middle-class girls working indoors doing the cushy packing jobs with nice lunches, bathrooms and fans to keep them cool and the lives of the migrant workers and their families. Especially the girls my own age who were out in the hot fields all day only to come home to a primitive shack. It was eye-opening and life-changing.

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