Meaningful Mentoring for Afghan Women Evacuees with Tressa Lacy founder of Undaunted Women

We had a great October meeting with Tressa Lacy. She told us about her own terrifying growing up story as a child lumberjack and how she’s using the skills she’s learned to regain her health and spirit to help newly arriving women evacuees in the Seattle area.

Mentoring has been so meaningful in her own life and is now helping evacuees from Afghanistan, Ukraine and other places around the world. Their goal is to foster resilience by personally connecting evacuees to existing organizations and resources so they can more effectively identify and remove barriers to self-reliance.

One of the Undaunted Women volunteers attended our meeting and told of her work teaching Afghan women to drive and how empowering it is for them and for her too.

Another volunteer is working with women creating sewing businesses in their homes so they can still take care of their children but also earn some money. Two high-end clothing manufacturing are partnering with Undaunted Women to make this possible. One thing that surprises the evacuees is that both parents really have to work to keep a family going in the United States.

Another volunteer works one-on-one with evacuees to talk to them in English online once a week. They are already taking classes in English, so this is an opportunity to practice and learn more in a safe space. Since this volunteer work is online, there are women from all over the world that are helping the evacuees become more proficient in English.

Undaunted Women is an all volunteer organization that works in Seattle to find every newly arriving evacuee women a mentor. They collaborate with community members and organizations to help evacuees reach their self-reliance goals. In doing so, they bridge differences to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion; and create meaningful mentorship that benefits volunteers as much as those they mentor.

For more information and volunteer opportunities, check out the Undaunted Women website.

Lacy received an AAUW Fellowship award in 2019. She is a mentor, accountant, educator, presenter, and champion for change around the issues of gender, diversity, education, mentorship, and sustainability. Tressa brings with her a unique personal story of overcoming child labor and catastrophic logging injuries through education and mentorship.

She recently completed a book about her life, “None So Blind: Memoir of a Lumberjack Child” which focuses on the profound effect mentors have had in removing her blindfolds. She says: “The writing was the easy part. Learning to accept the reality of my story and begin the arduous journey of untangling identity from past, faith, and family is my most challenging endeavor yet.”