In My Third Act: Jane Fleishman on Keeping Her Gaze on the Future

For the latest edition of In My Third Act, Lynn Armentrout interviews Jane Fleishman, outgoing author of this series and co-facilitator of Third Act Tennessee.

“How am I going to live today?” asks Jane Fleishman, co-facilitator of the Tennessee Working Group and, until this profile, the author of these “In my Third Act” profiles. “Things are bad, but I’m not going down without a fight.” No, she’s going to resist, and have fun doing it. Like at the People’s March in January, where she got her Third Act buddies to come dressed up as oligarchs.

While Jane would never have called herself an “activist,” she was “always doing something in that arena.” Her propensity to stand up for justice began at home, where her parents, though Republicans, rooted for the underdog, disliked extreme wealth, and believed in basic fairness. By the end of their lives, her parents’ politics had shifted so that they would have voted for Bernie Sanders for president. Jane’s mother would have loved Third Act too, having become an environmental and democracy activist after the kids were grown.

 

At college in Ohio Jane joined anti-war protests, often against a hostile community. And with no script or organization, she took it upon herself to knock on doors to talk about the war and the dangers of nuclear power. Jane’s efforts continued after college, in Nashville, where she got involved in Central America solidarity work and helped organize a statewide protest against Ronald Reagan’s slashing of social programs.

Jane’s passion for community empowerment really came into focus with her early job as a paralegal in a rural Legal Services office near Nashville, where she represented indigent clients in Social Security hearings. A woman came into the Legal Services office one day needing medical care but lacking insurance and resources. Jane told her about a little-known Congressional Act (Hill-Burton) that required medical centers who received aid under the Act to set aside funds for needy patients. Jane prepared the client to advocate for herself to obtain that assistance and will never forget how “lit up” the client was when she returned to report her success.

This ignited Jane’s belief in the value of self-advocacy. She convinced her Legal Service program to create a permanent staff position for community legal education, and then got the job. A rich memory for Jane is the group of older Black women, tenant leaders at the Nashville housing projects, who came in asking for legal education lunches in the projects’ community rooms: “we’ll bring the food; you bring the lawyers.” Over home-cooked traditional Southern fare, tenants learned about their rights and responsibilities. This was community legal education at its best—on the clients’ terms.

Jane married, moved to Massachusetts, gave birth to her son, and continued to work as a paralegal, but after five years returned to Nashville and began to work again with ideas of self advocacy and participatory democracy, now at Vanderbilt University and focused on youth civic engagement. Her role there was to broker the needs of the community to faculty and students who wanted field experiences—such as connecting a student doing a women’s studies project with the woman who led a hospital worker strike that led to the founding of a union local in Tennessee.

 After five years at Vanderbilt, Jane went to graduate school for her master’s degree in social work, and then spent  most of the rest of her career – 22 years – at a youth-centered non-profit, the Oasis Center. There she helped create, and operated, vehicles for adolescents to be engaged in the community through volunteering, leadership training and advocacy for causes they cared about.

 

Jane found Third Act while searching for a way to get involved in the climate movement. She had always been concerned about human impact on the environment. This concern grew as she learned about the climate crisis and contemplated the impact it would have on the world she would pass on to her own son.

She finds Third Act tremendously gratifying. It has opened up possibilities: she always loved to write, for example, but who knew she’d ever be writing for a blog? Third Act supports her need to have fun while doing the serious work. And Jane especially appreciates that Third Act “Backs up the Youths!” When we really listen to them, and let them exercise leadership their way, “we get to see a little of what the future is like.”

Jane’s identities, like her experiences, center on the collective: family and community. She is a mother and an excited new grandmother; she is a sister to four brothers; she is the family matriarch. She is also deeply involved with Al-Anon, a 12-step fellowship program for family and friends of people with addictions, which is relevant to her work with Third Act in helping her understand how power operates in a collective. She walks a Buddhist path.

Jane is also an artist. She has been drawing and creating her whole life, and while not professionally, it’s been a surprise and delight to have been getting commissions recently (examples of her work can be found on Instagram at @pointing_at_the_moon).  Her artistic skills come in handy for creating graphics for print materials and protests. Her experience leading expressive arts classes, where she learned how to encourage others to contribute their unique gifts to the world, also serves her at Third Act.

 

Looking ahead, Jane hopes to spend more time with her granddaughter and her brothers and their families, and later this year to visit the big redwoods at Sequoia National Park. She acknowledges that despite how dark the world looks now, she doesn’t know what’s going to happen and isn’t going to assume the worst. Systemic change happens over time. We don’t know the ultimate effect of our individual actions. All we can do is “make our offerings.” And “look for the helpers,” like Mr. Rogers. “That’s where I keep my gaze.”