A few months ago, I received a call inviting me to attend an event in Ashland as a founder of The Rogue Valley Community Health Network.  It took a minute for me to I realize who was calling  – at first I thought you were the Jackson County Health Department – but soon I understood that a tiny and tenacious seedling, The Ashland Women’s Health Center,  planted by a group of teeangers and twenty-something women in 1972, had grown deep roots, and county wide branches, had sprouted wings to become YOU. I was stunned and speechless and I could not hold in my tears. I look out at us tonight, gathered together across past, present and future, across fifty years of belief and building of women’s health, people’s health and planetary and universal health, and I feel that if we are here in this moment, in a patchwork quilt of possibilities, then everything is possible. Tonight my offering to you is, like we are,  a patchwork quilt –  a bit of my personal story – how the 19 year old me arrived in Ashland from Washington DC carrying a tattered and inspirational women’s self help health document from Boston and the idea for creating something like that in Oregon and how a group of women made it so.

First a little about me: I am the child of Brooklyn, New York parents with working class roots in the Lower East Side. They moved to Washington DC where I was born and raised.. In the early 1950s, mom and dad were a young northern Jewish couple in the south, still reeling from recent Holocaust losses. The Civil Rigfhts Movement simmered, unfolded, and screamed in the 1960s, and in my 11th year, I stood on my father’s knee at the Lincoln Memorial as Martin Luther King sang his “I have a dream” vision and the SNCC Freedom Singers belted out harmonies that I still hear in my head. My consciousness was forged not just from what I heard but how it felt in my body.

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1972, early thinking about women’s health that led to the founding of Ashland Women’s Health Center

Ashland Women’s Health Center, first Women’s Cultural Day, 1972, that grew into the Women’s Space Festival.

Amy Horowitz with Ashland Women’s Health Co-founder Julie Chapman, and Ceci Robe, director of our School Based Health Center program, visiting RCH centers.