Audio recording clip of interview with Faye Duncan Daniel by Claytee D. White, October 18, 1996

We never really organized. Well, let me just say this. We had one organization that we never really formally organized. But what we did do, we managed to go to Carson City and the Legislature and get five dollars put on each divorce that's filed in Clark County, and created a program at Community College that was called the Displaced Homemaker Program. We just went back last year and lobbied and got that amount raised to ten dollars. And the money was initially sent to Clark County Community College. Well I went there to administer that fund. But because Community College is so ingrained in bureaucracy, we really couldn't function at Community College in their Displaced Homemaker Program. And to be perfectly honest with you, college was not where that program belonged. Women who cover this community, a greater percentage of them, have been in the military for a long time, with their husbands. It seems that their husband's occupations or his earnings, has always been enough for the household. Now sometimes the husband will die of catastrophic illness, he wipes out the entire family savings. These women are left without any means of support and any skills. One year we looked at the suicide rate among women, especially older women, it was astounding. So we wanted to create programs that would eliminate that altogether. Plus all the other 46 issues surrounding divorce, separations, etcetera. But my point with this, most of the women that we encountered did not have seventh grade education. They had the skills sometimes because they had skills management at home. We could always just help them translate skills from housemaker to office worker. But there had to be a mindset, a change of attitude because they were so depressed by their experiences. There were women who came out of college, who had college educations a long time ago, wrote resumes that were out of date and couldn't get hired because of their resume. So we put together "How to Write a Resume," "How to Interview," and some feel-good, kind of fluffy, touchy kinds of programs. And we were able to get a lot of women back to work. But again, we tried it in a college setting but because their academic level was so low, we couldn't integrate them into college programs. They needed English the most and to work with an English college professor at a seventh-grade level, you're just not going to cope with that. We took the program out of the Community College, our funding rather. Community College still has what's called the Displaced Homemaker Program. We send them to the Help Centers of Southern Nevada. Now Help Centers of Southern Nevada, since we had it there about four years ago, have been able to get thousands of women employed. So I feel very, very proud about being a part of that. The other thing that I was a part of while I worked at the Union Plaza, was this thing with the women — well, we never named ourselves. We thought once we had names and structure, we wouldn't be able to function the way we needed to function. Women of Achievement came out of our organization.