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Town of Fairfax
Save Fairfax: 2019 Update Part I
Our Story: We are residents of Fairfax who work to scale growth and support our local neighborhoods, the environment, our historic downtown business district, and the livability of Fairfax.
Save Fairfax is modeled after Save Orinda. Save Santa Cruz came into being after Save Fairfax. The development pressures we all face are universal.
Where did the Summer go?
The Fairfax Town Council Election is Nov 5th. Two council members to be elected.
Meet STEPHANIE HELLMAN. A number of us believe it's time for a breath of fresh air on the Fairfax Town Council.
Stephanie Hellman was born in San Francisco and raised in Terra Linda. After graduating from Redwood High School in 1989, Stephanie attended UC San Diego where she met her future husband, Ted, and graduated with a major in history. The two moved to New York City soon after and lived there until 2003. Upon their return to California, they chose Fairfax to call home, seeing it as an affordable, peaceful and idyllic community in which to start a family.
During this period, Stephanie embarked on a career in banking, spending more than two decades at American Express, Citibank and Wells Fargo. While at Wells Fargo, she co-founded a workplace Diversity and Inclusion Council which hosted a wide range of education and enrichment opportunities to team members including: a LGBT senior leadership panel, meditation and mindfulness courses, the business case for diversity, among others.
This desire to do meaningful work outside the bounds of traditional office culture led her to establish a program dedicated to raising awareness of water scarcity and quality across the globe. And in 2014, she traveled to India and taught underprivileged children about the importance of hand washing in order to stave off diseases that cause thousands of preventable deaths each year.
Upon her return, she knew her days in banking were at an end. She aspired to spend her life doing something that had a positive impact on the world. With this in mind, she left her position at Wells Fargo in 2017 and reflected on what else she could be doing to make a difference.
The
answer is she’s immersed herself in non profit work and our community,
championing local issues like public education funding and open space
preservation. She’s invested herself in raising her three children to be
empathetic and aware citizens, taking them on service trips to the
Dominican Republic and Tanzania in conjunction with various charitable
organizations. And she’s sought out opportunities to use her 20 years of
leadership experience to build Fairfax into the best community it can
be. For her, that means running for Town Council in November 2019.
When she’s not on the campaign trail, Stephanie can be found listening to her husband or girls playing guitar and ukulele, or hiking the Yolanda trail above Phoenix Lake with her dog. She also enjoys her yoga and mindfulness practices, and camping with her family in the same place she was married in Yosemite.
Stephanie is quite concerned about Fairfax being able to resist the kind of out of scale development we are starting to see pop up. 288 Bolinas Road and 7 Olema Road, Fairfax's latest $3 million dollar houses and the proposed subdivision above Marinda Oaks, ten $3+ million dollar houses with swimming pools.
Our cherished open space and ridge lines are under attack.
To learn more about Stephanie go to:
https://www.stephaniehellmanforfairfax.com/
For additional information and questions, email us at: savefairfax@aol.com