Sandy Holman - 2022 (Citizen of the year)
Sandy Holman has been a unifying presence in the city of Davis for decades, working to promote understanding and love for diverse cultures and groups.
Since founding the Culture CO-OP in 1991, Holman has led countless seminars, assemblies and presentations for residents of all ages, but with a particular focus on children. She also has mentored hundreds of UC Davis student-interns who have since gone on to make their own impacts on the world, and spearheaded local events like the International Festival and Juneteenth.
Longtime Davis activist Sandy Holman is this year’s Citizen of the Year. Courtesy photo
And all the while, invariably dressed in her favorite color purple, Holman has never shied from the tough topics of racism and supremacy ideology, bullying and more, but rather embraced the conversations with her trademark approach of love and compassion.
For all of that and more, Holman is this year’s Citizen of the Year, an annual award (previously known as the Covell Award) bestowed on a Davis resident for outstanding service to the community over time. Individuals are nominated for the award and a committee of residents representing various activities in Davis select the recipients. The awards are presented at the annual Davis Chamber of Commerce Gala, to be held on Feb. 18.
“Sandy Holman’s contributions to the Davis community are as vibrant and authentic as her signature purple color,” said City Councilwoman Gloria Partida.
“Her mission to create a culture of caring, optimistic, open-minded people has left an indelible mark on every child that has attended one of her school assembly presentations, read one of her books or accepted one of her soul-filling hugs.
“Her documentary, ‘The Cost of Darkness,’ is forthright and moving,” Partida said. “The conversations she facilitates around the film expertly call you in rather than out, allowing us space to explore and remedy our racism and grow to be the best versions of ourselves.
The color of action
“Whether you know it or not,” said Partida, “if you have spent any time in Davis, you have been made better by the Purple Lady.”
That “purple lady,” as Holman is known, has lived in Davis since the 1980s. She is a graduate of UC Davis, with a degree in psychology, and earned a master’s degree in school counseling from Sacramento State University.
She also is the author of several books, including “We All Have a Heritage” and “Grandpa, Is Everything Black Bad?” and produced that documentary, “The Cost of Darkness,” which looks at the national and global history of racism and how its legacy is expressed to this day.
She is best known perhaps, for the Culture CO-OP (which stands for “caring, optimistic, open-minded people”), which she founded more than 30 years ago with the goal of providing a paradigm for transforming individuals, communities and systems, as well as culturally relevant and responsive services.
Her work over the years is inspired by “the babies,” the children and young adults who, she said, “really just deserve the right to survive and thrive and deserve a better world than what we’ve been modeling for them.”
Holman noted that the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police in 2020 “really brought things to people’s attention, but this stuff has been going on for generations and it’s just more inflamed because we never really deal with it. It’s always this foundational kind of a mold that hangs around to be spread by an opportunistic situation, person or event.
“So for me, it’s the young folks, because I see them with my whole heart… out there in a place that’s looking pretty bleak for a lot of them.”
She meets weekly with her UC Davis student-interns, who work on a variety of projects based on their interests.
“That’s honestly my greatest legacy when I leave this earth,” Holman said, “because they’re brilliant, and in their woundedness and pain and fear and anxiety and depression, they are determined to make a difference and looking and searching for what they should do and how they should carve it out as they make a life for themselves.
“It’s just been a transformative experience for me and, from what they tell me, for many of them to have this space… They’re like love seeds. I see them as oak trees that have been planted all over the world to use whatever their purpose is to try to make a difference.”
And they are grateful for Holman’s impact on their lives.
“As an aspiring educator, she showed me the important role I play in my future students’ education,” said former intern Vivian Pham, a 2022 graduate of UC Davis.
“She’s inspired me to aspire to become a transformative educator, driven by social justice, educational equity and positively impacting my home community.”
Tahseen Ahmed, a 2020 UC Davis graduate, said Holman “told me to never doubt myself, to never give up, and to always ‘keep my eyes on the prize.’ I keep Sandy’s words in mind to this day. She will always be a role model and I’m very grateful for the time I got to know her.”
Said Holman of her interns: “They have schooled me more than I have schooled them, and I have learned so much about love and about difference and about cultural respect.”
In addition to young adults, Holman’s work also focuses on children, through book readings and assemblies and more.
Her goal is to teach them about differences, “in a way that isn’t crisis-driven or fear driven.”
But not all communities are entirely receptive, Holman said.
She described an event in Woodland where some parents didn’t want her to read her book, “We All Have a Heritage,” or allow their kids to have copies of it because, Holman said, it includes Black folks.
That highlights, she said, the need to teach compassion and love as early as possible.
“If we can get those things in the babies earlier, we’ll have a lot less toxicity later,” Holman noted.
“For most people of color, this stuff is just not new,” she added. “I grew up seeing my brothers stopped countless times for just being Black. I had close calls when I was driving.
“I really struggled because when I first started my work, I came from the place of ‘people just do not know’ and if you make them aware, they’ll do the right thing. And I was operating on that because I was taught, and I still feel this way, to see the best in human beings — that even those who are acting out somehow lost themselves within their spirit and their souls and stepped away from what they could be optimally because of whatever was happening to them.
“So that would be my approach. But at some point in my journey… I realized in some cases, a lot of them did know but they did not want to deal with what has often been framed as ‘white guilt.’
Approaching those folks, “I found that coddling them just made them comfortable in staying in the spin cycle of perpetuating the very things that many of them said they were fighting against. And that wasn’t good either. If I was leaving all of my gatherings and trainings and everyone was smiling and happy, I knew I wasn’t doing my job. I knew I was not challenging them. I knew I was making them feel comfortable.”
Even now folks will call Holman asking her to come present to a group of children but ask that she not “talk about those gay folks, don’t talk too much about racism … we just want you to come and talk about respect … and please don’t bring any books,” she said.
“I’ve had to be like a chameleon and keep changing my approaches. But one thing has been consistent: the truth must be shared and we must hear it in order to have a chance of coming up with solutions to address it and to keep ourselves from spiraling down to even darker places.”
Work continues
Community members are grateful for Holman’s tireless efforts.
Holman, said Melissa Moreno, a Yolo County Board of Education trustee, “identifies racial disparities in the United States, the impacts on communities and individual people of color, and emphasizes the solutions to end institutional racism.”
Many, she said, “are grateful to (Holman) for teaching love, understanding and sacredness of all people.”
Among those who spoke in favor of naming Holman this year’s Citizen of the Year was Scott Love, Yolo County Library regional manager at the Davis branch.
Love has worked with Holman on the county’s celebration of Juneteenth for years.
“Many don’t know,” he said, “but planning for Juneteenth usually begins around August of the previous year, and Sandy leads the way each time, and by February each year, it becomes a full-time job, though it never stops her from doing all the other community work that she does. It is impossible to measure the impact she has on the community and everyone she comes in contact with, because there are just so many whose lives she touches.
“I think one of the big impacts she has beyond this community, is with all the UC Davis interns,” Love said, adding that “you could say ‘Unselfish’ is probably Sandy’s middle name, but it is more likely her first name. If it is within her ability, she will do anything for anyone. She does not care who you are, she is here on this earth to help anyone she meets.”
For her part, Holman expressed gratitude for the honor being bestowed on her.
“I sincerely believe there’s so many people who are deserving of such a thing like this,” she said. “I’m very, very humbled that they chose me for it.”
And she has a message for community members about doing their part.
“No one has an excuse not to do something, because it’s part of your own healing, actually,” she said. “The love combined with intention and action and self-preservation, as well as community solidarity, is what will help us survive.
“My faith and my living has taught me that … when we stand aside and are witness to suffering and pain and injustice, destruction, and we do nothing, it will eventually find its way to you.
“You have to do something. If nothing else, do something small. Start some place.”
— From the Davis Enterprise - December 23, 2022. Reach Anne Ternus-Bellamy at aternus@davisenterprise.net. Follow her on Twitter at @ATernusBellamy.
