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So I never had sisters.  Just one younger brother who ended up going to Brown with me. Although I was admitted in the last class of Pembroke College (all women), became a student activist leader, and later a Trustee of the Brown Corporation, I felt like an outsider. Not rational. I also attended Boston’s Girl’s Latin School for six years and had many friends, but they were from different parts of town. Not connected. It’s not that I do not have women in my life. I adore my mother, who lives next door, and I have reared three girls who taught me how powerful and important sisterhood really is.

I developed four relationships over my life with women I consider sisters. Only one lives nearby and one died when I was 29.  I still miss her sorely, our secrets and sharing such sweet dreams for ourselves, our world. I have not been mentored professionally by any women. All highly successful men. Yet when my middle child pledged and joined a sorority at her undergraduate college, I did not grasp why this was so important to her. She was about to embark on medical school. What could compete with that ambition? Or drive it beyond her childhood vision of becoming a physician, the first in our family?

Recently, a colleague asked me to join her in seeking membership in the Montgomery County Alumnae Chapter of the Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Incorporated. Surprising even myself, I quickly seized the opportunity as if I’d been waiting for something like this for a very long time. Sisterhood and public service. College educated Black women organized since 1913 to make “the world a little greater.” I did it. I competed, pledged, and made the serious commitment. Last weekend, before a large audience of officials, friends, and family members, I was accepted into the sorority along with 65 other line sisters and became a Soror in full standing.  Someone asked why, at my age?  Because it is precisely at my age that I truly can now seek to fulfill my yearnings for myself. I now have a wonderful and authentic experience of sisterhood, as I follow in my daughter’s Delta Sigma Theta footsteps. At last.

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Author

Name: Dr. Sheryl Brissett Chapman

About: Dr. Sheryl Brissett Chapman, Executive Director, is a passionate, internationally recognized and award-winning advocate for children, youth, and their families, who struggle with extreme poverty, abuse and neglect, domestic violence, and disabilities and related trauma. An author and expert in child and family welfare, she believes in the sheer power of “community” as it reinforces unimaginable resilience when it provides the basic support to those in its midst who have need. Dr. Chapman envisions a healthy, happy childhood for each and every child, regardless of the circumstances of their birth or the socio-economic status of their family.

ABOUT US

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Founded in 1915 as an orphanage in the District of Columbia, NCCF is a private, nonprofit child and family welfare agency with a commitment to serving poor, disadvantaged, abused, neglected and/or abandoned children, youth, and their families.

Current program services include emergency shelters and transitional housing for homeless families, a high-intensity therapeutic group home, therapeutic and traditional foster care and adoption, independent living for youth transitioning to adulthood, teen parent services, and community-based prevention services that promote academic achievement, parental involvement, economic and vocational stability, and healthy families. Our programs have become social service models, redefining both NCCF’s reputation and the agency’s position in the human service continuum in the Washington Metropolitan Region.

blog-sidebar-aboutUs-logo

Founded in 1915 as an orphanage in the District of Columbia, NCCF is a private, nonprofit child and family welfare agency with a commitment to serving poor, disadvantaged, abused, neglected and/or abandoned children, youth, and their families.

Current program services include emergency shelters and transitional housing for homeless families, a high-intensity therapeutic group home, therapeutic and traditional foster care and adoption, independent living for youth transitioning to adulthood, teen parent services, and community-based prevention services that promote academic achievement, parental involvement, economic and vocational stability, and healthy families. Our programs have become social service models, redefining both NCCF’s reputation and the agency’s position in the human service continuum in the Washington Metropolitan Region.

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