Ann Ellen Flescher

(1958 – 2008)

Our beloved friend and colleague, Ann Flescher, died on May 23, 2008 at home, surrounded by people she loved. Ann worked for sixteen years as a social worker, counselor, and administrator at the Michigan State University Counseling Center. For more than a decade, Ann was also intimately involved in the Doing Our Own Work anti-racism seminar for white allies, first as a participant and then as a facilitator and trainer. In addition to co-facilitating the Doing Our Own Work seminars on many occasions, Ann helped to design and lead the Doing Our Own Work Training of Facilitators program in 2003.

Ann had a deep and abiding sense of vocation or call that can best be summed up in the Hebrew phrase: tikkun olam – repair of the world. Ann believed it is our high and holy calling as human beings to lend our time, energy, and talents to heal the broken places within us, between us, and in the wider world. She was keenly aware that this healing required both personal and systemic change; one without the other was a truncated form of repair. As a psychotherapist who worked with individuals, Ann knew that the larger social context could never be ignored. As an activist and anti-oppression educator, Ann believed that the urgent work of changing systems and structures could be sustained only if we also dare to engage in the deep, inner work of personal transformation.

During the past year, as she lived with cancer, Ann reflected aloud with me about how the seeds of this vocation as a healer, a repairer, had been planted in her and watered over time. She gave credit, first and foremost, to her Jewish ancestors who – in the face of great adversity and sometimes terrible suffering – held fast to the belief that we can, with God’s help, heal the breaches, pursue justice, and restore right relationship. She told me that social justice had always been a theme in her life, long before she had words for it or a coherent political analysis. “I just knew things were not right in this world,” she told me, “and I had a sense of responsibility early on that I must join with others in making them right.”

There were events over the years that deepened her passion for justice – her father’s experience as a survivor of the holocaust, the months she spent in a Kibbutz in Israel after high school, her growing awareness in college that women are too often victims of sexual assault and violence, her coming out process as a lesbian, and her growing awareness of white privilege and white racism.  Ann was particularly grateful for all she learned from, and with, her colleagues in MECCA – the Multi-Ethnic Counseling Center Alliance. Her participation in MECCA provided a context for deep and sustained analysis of the interlocking systems privilege and oppression.  Through her participation in MECCA and Doing Our Own Work, Ann grew ever more passionate in her commitment to being an ally and to understanding where she stood in relation to systems of privilege and oppression.

As death grew near, Ann asked that memorial gifts be made in her name to the Doing Our Own Work Program Fund and to The Leaven Center (www.leaven.org), a place she considered holy ground.

Ann’s passion for justice and repair of the world was not an abstract or theoretical conviction. It was deeply rooted in, and sustained by, her abiding love of family, friends, and her beloved partner of 25 years, Dawn Mead. Those of us who had the privilege of knowing Ann as colleague, mentor, and friend, give thanks for her life and her witness. We will miss her deeply.