Inside Our Room

Beginnings

The Beginning

In July, 2000, shortly after her mother’s death, Darlene Chandler Bassett arrived at Ghost Ranch for a women’s retreat, a box of Kleenex and a copy of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own in her backpack. At the same time, the parish church where Mary Johnson worked sent her for a week of continuing education. The first evening of the retreat, Mary announced, “This retreat was my fifth choice. It’s very difficult for me to trust older women, and I’m not sure why I’m here.” Ghost Ranch’s oddest couple had just met.

Five years prior, Darlene had left her job of twenty years as a corporate executive for entrepreneur Eli Broad, and ever since had been seeking new passion and direction. Mary had left quite a different career – having served the same twenty years as a nun in the congregation founded by Mother Teresa of Calcutta.

At an evening session focused on midlife possibilities, Mary told of her desire to write her story, and asked the universe for “a room of my own and the opportunity to write.” At that moment, Darlene found her passion, Mary found a benefactor, and Virginia Woolf found a realization of her words, “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write.” Recognizing a new calling, Darlene offered to fund Mary’s pursuit of a fine arts degree if Mary would help her create a template for an organization that would offer other women the privacy, finances and creative support to pursue their work.

And just like that, A Room of Her Own Foundation was born. “I decided I would finance Mary’s art, and if I could do it for her, we could do it for other women,” Chandler Bassett said. Together, Johnson and Chandler Bassett developed a model for a foundation which would give creative women the money and space they needed to pursue their creative vision. And, yes, Johnson got her fine arts degree and has written a memoir on her years working with Mother Teresa.

Chandler Bassett now brings a unique combination of corporate and nonprofit management experience to the arts, and is committed to building an efficient public foundation which uses performance standards typically reserved for the for-profit world of business. But above all else, she hopes the foundation will help “women of genius, just beyond sight and hearing, who don’t have the time, privacy or money to devote to their art.”