This issue is dedicated to three pioneers in the history of Sacramento. Not ones lured west by a consuming desire for gold in the 1840’s, but dedicated people from today driven by a vision of a shared center for Buddhist practice.
The trail they took was not easy. Along the way they endured untold hardships–storms of paperwork, endless meetings, barren stretches of doubt and disappointment, stampedes of opinions. But with courage and vision, they managed to reach their destination.
Susan Orr, Linda Dekker, and John Penfield were original or early members of the Sacramento Dharma Center Board of Directors. During their tenure, they took SDC from mere idea to reality. In March of 2018, all three SDC pioneers stepped off the board and made plans—not to ride off into the sunset—but to stay involved.
Susan Orr
What can be said, but that Susan is a gifted leader? She guided the board through good times and bad, with optimism, good humor, and wisdom. She is a listener, a peacemaker, a finder of the middle way. Despite health challenges, she is indefatigable. She seems to dwell close to the spiritual, but is practical and funny too. Board duty, she stresses, is inseparable from her practice and she believes that aggravation and setbacks are opportunities for practice.
For Susan, the call for a Dharma center came in February 2009 over breakfast at a café on 10th Street. Jim Hare of Valley Streams Zen Sangha (VSZS) asked if she was interested in a project to acquire a permanent home, a Dharma Center, for the three Sacramento sanghas that shared common roots—Sacramento Buddhist Meditation Group (SBMG), Sacramento Insight Meditation Group (SIM), and VSZS. The idea had come to Jim during a January intensive Zen retreat, and Susan, an SBMG leader, was the first person he approached about its feasibility. After many such breakfasts and lunches with other leaders, the Inter-Sangha Coordinating Committee (ISCC) was formed in the spring of 2010.
The ISCC worked for two years laying the groundwork for SDC, recruiting board members and obtaining non-profit status. In March 2012 the SDC Board met for the first time, with Susan as a representative for SBMG (and later, an at-large member). The new board began the hard work of fundraising to prove to lending institutions the financial viability of the project. It also began to create SDC’s administrative infrastructure–Susan was part of the committees that wrote the bylaws and the SDC mission statement.
But front and center always was the search for a suitable property. Following up on every lead, and touring and evaluating each prospective building was not easy. Every building they debated and rejected, or pursued and lost, created a cycle of raised and dashed hopes. The lowest point came when the board decided not to buy the former Armenian church on B Street. “It was really awful,” Susan recalled. “Peoples’ spirits became despondent. But even then, there was the deeper urge to keep going, to not give up.”
Susan became SDC’s second president in March of 2015 at an opportune time. “I lucked out to be, timing wise, president just as we found the property.” In January of 2016 the board took a chance and made an offer to buy a former credit union building and land on Wissemann Drive, on the eastern edge of Sacramento. So began an intense period of negotiations, inspections, loan approval, acquisition of permits, and construction.
By the time of the SDC Dedication on November 6, 2016, it was apparent that along with pride, ownership of a building would bring with it a completely new set of challenges. For one, Susan discovered that “owning a property meant a mysterious sprinkler system. We found out how to practice with a continually mysterious sprinkler system.” The difficulties, she says, are what her teacher, James Baraz, calls “your curriculum.”
Her most significant achievement on the SDC Board was “helping people find ways to work together for the mission, to let go of fixed ideas and personality issues to the degree they could.” In fact, Susan’s secret goal is to see a Dantesque banner over the entrance to the building reading, “Abandon all preferences, ye who enter here.”
She stresses the centrality of “process,” a word that she invests with great meaning. Process is being patient–“There’s so much enthusiasm to get stuff done, but process is important, so things endure.” Process is how SDC found the right property, one that the sanghas would be able to expand into, rather than one that felt cramped at the start. And someday, she says, “We’ll expand into the space and it’ll feel not big enough. This is just the beginning of something that will keep evolving.”
Based on her experience on the SBMG and SDC Boards, she feels assured that SDC will continue: “People want access to the Dharma, and when it looks threatened, people rally ‘round. With the team approach to governance, the community won’t let something like this fail.”
In the future she plans to stay involved with SDC and keep “butting in” when necessary. She is hoping to be part of an independent SDC Ethics and Reconciliation Council for when big issues come up within sanghas or between sanghas and SDC.
In parting she added, “The best gift to my practice has been to be fully engaged with my sangha’s life and my Dharma Center’s life. So come on in, step up and do something. It won’t continue without people participating.”
Linda Dekker
Linda Dekker can seemingly do it all. She buys and manages property even though she is a lifelong renter. She is a busy bee who does the work of three. She fund-raises, maintains SDC’s donation programs, explains our finances to us. She’s our greeter at the door, our dealer with bankers and workers (and who becomes friends with them), our Office Manager and bill payer and website overseer. But now she’s stepping down from the Board and stepping into the role of proud grandmother.
Linda was there at the beginning of the ISCC and SDC—in fact, she was there before the beginning. She had returned to Sacramento in 2009 after having spent a year and a half living at Green Gulch Farm Zen Center in Marin County. When she departed, her teacher (Reb Anderson) said, “Take care of the Dharma in Sacramento,” and she began at once to carry out her charge. In Sacramento, she and fellow Zen practitioner Jim Hare talked about having a permanent place for VSZS and other local sanghas. She fully supported his dream of acquiring a building, and when his peregrinations from one lunch meeting to another bore fruit, she became a founding member of the ISCC.
When Linda became a charter member of the SDC Board in 2012, something curious happened. Linda, a person who’d never owned property or felt that comfortable with capitalism, transformed into one of SDC’s go-to persons on money matters. She says that she had always avoided finance in the past . But her shift to finances was a transformation borne of necessity: “I fell into the finance end of the organization” and then paused to add, “because nobody else wanted to do it.” “For me it’s been a stretch to do fundraising and be conversant in spreadsheets.”
Besides working with money, Linda willingly took on a range of duties. “I’ve been accused of being a worker bee,” she said. Her responsibilities have run the gamut from buying paper towels for the bathroom to sending out thank-you notes. On the board, she was the secretary from its start till 2016. In addition, she was on the Executive Committee, the Scheduling Committee, and worked with Art and Design. She will continue do administrative work and stay on as Office Manager, making sure the lights stay on and the WIFI is working.
She also took on the role of SDC’s keeper of memories: “I think of myself as our historian because I wrote the bank application and had to do a history.” Recently, she updated that history for the benefit of the new board members.
Linda’s highs and lows of board duty involve the frustrations of falling short in the search for a place, and the satisfaction of ultimately getting something better. She was at her nadir when SDC passed up on the B Street property. “I really wanted it. It’s a lesson in going with the flow because we got something better for us. B Street probably wouldn’t be big enough for us.” She says the board’s most significant achievement was the purchase of the Wissemann Drive building, and points out that it was always a group effort: “We were all working together constantly.”
But beyond the group effort, Linda individually was instrumental in securing the bank loan to buy the property. As the loan process to buy Wissemann neared the end, a problem cropped up with the terms of the loan. The lender, a credit union, SDC had been working closely with for some time, wouldn’t budge on the requirement that every board member of each of the three sanghas sign on as personal guarantors of the loan, potentially putting the board members’ own assets at risk. It was a step many balked at, and the purchase was on the verge of collapse. Scrambling to locate another lender that didn’t ask for individual guarantors, they found a bank through SDC’s third (and final) realtor, Kari Bryski.
Linda (with Kari’s help) had to begin the loan process anew. She had to convince a financial entity that an unproven collection of Buddhists had the financial wherewithal to buy a one-million-dollar building. Thanks to her hard work, the bank approved the loan and we finally had a home.
Besides continuing on as Office Manager, Linda will help Susan Orr start a Friends of the Dharma Center fundraising and support arm. She’ll also remain on the Finance Committee, joined now by new SDC Board Member and treasurer Larry Smith. “He’ll be good and will take on some of that responsibility.”
In closing, she added, “I’m really proud of what the SDC Board has done, and I think we’re going to be around for a long time, ‘taking care of the Dharma in Sacramento.’”
John Penfield
John is not a slacker, despite what he says and the credit he gives to others. He is a laid-back guy–most of the time; but he has been known to get worked up, especially when living only on nutrition shakes. But despite serious challenges in his life, he never walked away from his work at SDC. Once he gets around to something, he really comes through, such as producing administrative documents full of nuanced arguments.
In board meetings he is able to lay out the competing positions of a seemingly intractable argument, and then offer up a surprise solution, one that finds a middle path. But he must be watched. He is blessed with a gift of speaking and persuasion and will use his talents to lobby for his positions outside of meetings. As a recruiter for SDC he is a natural salesman, tending sometimes toward underplaying the difficulty of board service. One feels he could persuade Sisyphus that rolling a rock up a hill all day isn’t as bad as it might seem.
John’s initial involvement in the board involved some serendipity. Around 2013 he was taking a yearlong group class with Linda Ruth Cutts from San Francisco Zen Center. One assignment in the class was to look for a community involvement activity. Thus, Jim Hare unknowingly stumbled upon fertile ground when he spotted John at a bank in the Camellia Shopping Center. Jim had been looking to fill an unexpected vacancy on the SDC Board, and wondered whether John might be interested. Surprisingly, without any deliberation, John agreed to Jim’s request on the spot. “It fell into my lap–I was already looking for things to do to put the Dharma into practice,” John said.
John was on the board from 2013 to 2018—not quite at the start of it all, but there for the string of property tours, offers to buy, and the struggle to secure a loan. He was on the Administration Committee, the Executive Committee and was the Treasurer—but, he insists, “because of Linda’s stellar job as office manager, it was easy tenure. She did the bulk of the work.”
As with other retiring board members, the lowest point in his service came when the board passed on the Armenian church property: “Because of the real estate market and limited resources, I felt it all slipping away when we didn’t get the B Street property we were looking for. But there was lots of encouragement to keep trying from other board members.”
He credits good fortune and working together for the successful purchase of the Wissemann Drive property: “It was a joint achievement, getting this building after disappointments and setbacks. We were very lucky”
At the new Dharma Center, John has found a place to indulge his interest in birds: “I’ve always enjoyed unexpected encounters with different kinds of birds on the property when no one is around.” Love of birds explains his strong advocacy for leaving the backyard of SDC in a state of nature, where a knee-high meadow of unmowed grass and haystack-like piles of sticks would offer food and refuge.
Now that he is off the Board, John plans to work more with his sangha: “Being a shirker and a slacker by nature, I hope to get more involved with Valley Streams, which I’ve kind of neglected.”
His final thoughts are on the future. SDC might just be where American Buddhism is headed: “I feel like this could be the next wave of Dharma because it’s more community-based, and it brings together different groups in one location.”
“I would like people to be patient because SDC will continue to evolve and hopefully it’ll be here for a long time; and who knows what it’ll become?”
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