Celebrating Women’s History Month

Happy Women’s History Month from Seeding Success!

We are grateful for the expertise and dedication that the women on our team—who make up the majority of the organization—contribute every day to improving outcomes for local children and their families. To close out Women’s History Month for 2025, three of our team members reflected on women who have deeply inspired them throughout their lives:

Melody Freeman, Director of Engagement

My grandmother, her name is Hazel Thompson. She was a missionary, and she's kind of where we learned almost everything from early on. I learned how to serve people and how to not be afraid. What we would do in the summers is go shopping at all these Goodwills and buy these miscellaneous bags full of things. And I never knew why until I started seeing what she was planning to do with it. We would go and deliver goods to single moms and people in need.

They actually wrote an article about her in the Commercial Appeal, I think maybe in the early nineties [“Fashion flash: Thrift is chic” by Dewanna Lofton]. But she would go and buy all of these bags, separate [them], and then deliver [them] for free to people in need. So we used to do that with her. She was an organist and so she was also a musician, singer. We attribute all of our benevolence and just our heart for service to her.

Racquel Harris, Director of Continuous Improvement

I'm from St. Louis, Missouri. My mom [Bobbie Watkins] is from a small town that doesn't even exist anymore. It's called Swift. She is one of 10 children, and she actually had 10 children. She lost two, so there were seven of us by the time I came around. So she had eight that she raised. She was a teenage mom, and she married fairly young and moved to St. Louis. Then her mom passed when she was 25, so she ended up taking five of her younger siblings and bringing them to St. Louis to raise them.

Through all of that, my mom eventually became a single mom. When I think about women who inspire me, she is just like the forefront of everything because I talk to her a lot, and I know about her struggles as a child and coming up in what is beyond poverty with so many siblings. Her mom was eventually a single mom as well, and understanding the hardships, even through all of that, she just always put family first.

She had her own children and she still raised five of her younger siblings because she refused to have them split up […] but she did all of that, and she got her GED when she was in her late thirties, early forties, and always just pushed to do everything that she could do for her family.

[My uncles and aunts] are just genuinely living full lives, happy people. And I think it was because of her and what she did. It grounded all of us into placing the importance on that which is important, which is the people in our lives and not things that may or may not be of value in the long run.

Rachel Starks, Public Policy Analyst

My mentor in grad school was Dr. Ruthbeth Finerman, and she was phenomenal. She was a mentor for me in the anthropology department at [the University of Memphis] as I was kind of transitioning out of [...] majoring in biology and was struggling with wanting to find something that was a little more human-centered work.

I was still interested in science, kind of an overlap with health, but really was starting to explore other social science classes. At the time, her expertise was in medical anthropology, which I had never heard of before, and it's very much human-centered and understanding from a qualitative perspective or interview or storytelling lens of how different perceptions, culture, experiences affect someone's health beyond just social determinants of health or beyond Western medicine and influence. So that alone was just a very fascinating focus area and field that I had not been exposed to before. That wasn't the path I ended up pursuing, but she also was very influential as far as what to do with my life and navigating grad school, navigating finances, understanding how to find my place in Memphis beyond just academia. I knew I wanted to work in Memphis, and she was a big proponent of that.

Aside from just the mentorship of things, she was just a delightful person. She brought so much joy and passion to everything she did and every interaction she had with people. That really is also something I carry with me, especially these days. It’s easy to carry a lot of the burden in this work and field we do, but she chose joy in everything she did. Some days, it feels like the more radical thing to do is to actively choose to find joy in your life, so I try to carry that.