Politics/Community Involvement

I transitioned into this role almost two years ago—two years in July—July 1st will be two years.  I always think it's important to note our mission is to eliminate racism, empowering women, and promoting peace, justice, and freedom. In our 135 year history there had never been a woman of color and now this is a black woman leading so I thought that was important for the community and for the YWCA Central Massachusetts. And so here we are.

There are JCCs all over America. In fact, we are all connected.  When I go on my email, I have a list—there are lists of people doing similar jobs to yours. And I have colleagues that I know and some I don’t actually know them sometimes, but I know them from being just connected to them. I know what my colleague in Cleveland, Ohio might be doing, and I know what my colleague in San Francisco might be doing, and I know I have a colleague in fa- well there’s no JCC there but she’s part of a reform there like a temple. Now that there’s the whole virtual thing, we have done a lot of virtual programming together. When the [Covid] pandemic started, well first of all, I thought I might lose my job because we work with people, and you couldn’t work with people! But we just kind of - everything kind of morphed on to Zoom as you know. And because I have colleagues all over the country, I was doing programs with people in Atlanta, and Florida, and Cincinnati, and just people who wanted to do like similar kinds of programming. In particular, I do an author series, a Jewish author series, and Jewish meaning the author could be Jewish, the content could be Jewish or thematically it could be Jewish, it doesn’t – or it could have a non-Jewish author but it be something like about World War II and of interest to the Jewish community. So, I plan these book things and it’s a thing, JCCs all over the country do these book things.  Once we were on doing virtual stuff, we could all sort of partner together and get a bigger audience because anyone could get on the Zoom.

When I opened by office, I said, “Okay, I want to find my niche in real estate, how can I combine my passions.” My passion is real estate, my passion is charity. So, I said, “Alright, lets combine the two.” So, basically our mission here is giving back one sale at a time. So, Kindness Coalition was formed when Castinetti Real Estate was formed. After every sale all of my agents donate to a local charity under our client’s name. So that is one way we give back. And then we have a huge network of Kindness Coalition – you can add us on Facebook and check them out – but we do signature events throughout the year for the homeless, for DCF [Department of Children and Families], for Thanksgiving, for Christmas. So, we have signature events, and we do a summer event. We are always trying to do our part and do what we can in the community.

With the current ownership group when they bought the team in 2015, I think the team was exclusively white men on the staff across the board.  It has been what six or seven years since then? I think it has changed drastically. I actually think it’s changed a lot since we made the move to Worcester. We just have had better success finding a broader array of candidates. We have a lot of women, we have over time—and we are finally getting more racial diversity as well—diversity in other areas. It has been a priority. Brooke Cooper who your classmates talked to, is now the Senior Vice President and we now have two female VPs which is great. Since I came to the club, I was the only female VP until Brooke was made one. And I think it’s been good. You know there's always growing experiences and we have been trained well. I wanted to bring more women into the front office, it's a nice and fun environment with that. Not everyone is the same. Everyone has different backgrounds,everyone has different thoughts about baseball, how we should interact with the community and that makes it more interesting.

So now I'm the Senior Vice President and Assistant General Manager for the Worcester Red Sox and there's a lot that goes into it.  People ask what day to day is like, and I always say every day is different. I directly oversee productions and ballpark entertainment and that includes what you see on the video board, as well as social media and the television broadcast. I oversee merchandise, so the team store and all of our branding, community relations.  And then marketing has really been kind of my specialty and that includes advertising, but also outreach and the different promotions that we do. I have a hand in some of our HR [human resources] efforts, including recruiting and hiring and training. So pretty broad, but I think that's one of the really beautiful things about minor league baseball is that you're not put into a box and you get to explore a lot of different areas. We all wear many different hats, and it's been a really great opportunity to grow professionally.