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October 2007
Marjorie McKinley Bhavnani ’57

by Jeffrey Stanley

“I started in first grade at Friends but was not doing well. My parents transferred me to the Woodward School in Brooklyn where I was found to be dyslexic and in need of glasses and repeated the grade.” Fortunately for us, Marjorie McKinley Bhavnani ’57 returned to BFS in sixth grade and found particular support from her teacher Miss Rodger. At that age Marjorie’s life soon came to revolve around family, Brooklyn Friends and Grace Episcopal Church.

During a summer spent in Woodstock when she was 12, her grandmother taught her to type, a skill that was particularly stressed for women in those days. “She promised me five dollars at the end of the summer if I practiced every day. Once or twice I didn’t and forfeited my five dollars. I’ve never felt that was unfair.” It was a skill that would come in handy later. She also recalled that in Middle School she had to complete a community service requirement and chose Brooklyn College Hospital. “That was not a good choice for me at that age,” she admitted. “There was very little supervision or training by hospital staff and I was upset by what I saw and was expected to do. Perhaps unconsciously that experience, which has stayed with me, made me realize the importance of good professional volunteer supervision and training.”

Marjorie vanished from BFS again during her sophomore and junior years to live in Madrid. “My parents thought it would be good for me to have exposure to another culture and learn a language relevant to the Western hemisphere.” During her two years in Spain she immersed herself in the Spanish language while also studying Latin, history and art. “I fudged my age and attended art history classes under Diego Angulo, one of Spain’s most distinguished art historians, at the University of Madrid.”

She returned to BFS for her senior year, which she said was “especially important as it reoriented me to the United States after my two years abroad and readied me for college.” She remembers history teacher Harold C. Vaughan, basketball, volleyball and taking the school bus in the afternoon to the playing field for hockey and lacrosse. “I also remember participating in a reading of Under Milkwood by Dylan Thomas presented in the Meeting House. It was fun if baffling.”

Marjorie went on to Bennington College and obtained a degree in Literature. She soon met Ashok Bhavnani, an architect from India who had come to the United States in 1951 to attend Princeton University. They soon wed, but still her father humbly suggested that she learn shorthand. That and her typing skills landed her a good job as a legal secretary after she and Ashok moved to the West Coast.

“Not only did I take dictation and use a Dictaphone,” she said, “but I typed very fast and with few errors. I took a certain pride in my typing in the days of carbon paper copies and print-ready stencils for mimeograph machines.” Upon their return to New York City she found work as a secretary to the vice president of the American Museum of Natural History. “In other words, in those early years, before I became a mother, I trod the road of quite a few of my generation and many of those who preceded me: I took positions as legal secretary, executive secretary and administrative assistant, as those jobs were then known.”

The birth of her son Raoul in 1971 led to more than a turn from support staff to motherhood. It was the beginning of her life as a professional volunteer administrator. “Volunteer administrators recruit, train, supervise, retain and appropriately recognize volunteer staff,” she explained. “They track outcomes and evaluate programs...They are the leaders of volunteer resources.”

At first she worked at home as a volunteer for the Junior League, a women’s charitable organization, and eventually became a docent at the Bronx Zoo. “I enjoyed the study of the natural world and returned to The American Museum of Natural History where, as a volunteer, I helped coordinate the 340 volunteer facilitators for the blockbuster show Pompeii ’79. I received a citation from Mayor Edward I. Koch for that effort.” By the time her son was 8 she had become a full-time employee at the museum, training and supervising the five-hundred volunteers and six paid staff. “I am very proud of the high standards we maintained and the dedication of the volunteers and staff to a remarkable institution.”

She also served on committees of the Mayor’s Voluntary Action Center and obtained a Certificate in Volunteer Administration through the Association for Volunteer Administration (AVA), a national organization which provides resource management training. She eventually served as the AVA’s regional chair in the northeast, overseeing an area stretching from New York to Ontario. “I initiated and helped present co-sponsored annual one-day conferences on volunteerism in New York City in collaboration with United Hospital Fund, the Volunteer Referral Center, the Mayor’s Voluntary Action Center, the Retired and Senior Volunteer Program of the Community Service Society of New York, and the American Red Cross.”

Additionally, she became regional director of the mid-Atlantic region for the American Association for Museum Volunteers. “The combination of daily hands-on work in a museum setting and the exposure to a wide range of colleagues in other administrative settings and with my peers in the cultural world in New York City and across the nation was nothing short of fascinating.” She also became editor-in-chief of The Journal of Volunteer Administration, a publication that included not only reports from volunteers in the field but research articles by academics.

She values her overall Quaker education and its stress on consensus-building and pacifism. Today Marjorie lives in Manhattan. She and her husband (“We have been married forty-five years!”) spend the summers in Buck Hill Falls, Pennsylvania, a long-time Quaker community in the Poconos. “Many will remember Brooklyn Friends School retreats at the inn there.” Even while summering Marjorie has found volunteer opportunities. “Because the community is fortunate in being surrounded by 4,500 undeveloped acres, there is a conservation foundation, a land trust, on whose board I have served.”

Her son works in the corporate world but is also active in public service, having worked on a mayoral race for Newark mayor Corey Booker, on Governor Spitzer’s Committee for Arts and Culture, on a New York City Department of Cultural Affairs panel which oversees funding to Brooklyn performing arts organizations, and as a board member of the Alliance for the Arts. “He has struck a balance between the corporate and philanthropic worlds that I applaud.”

Marjorie is a shining exemplar of the class of ’57. They have often been remembered as trailblazers, pursuing careers in what were once considered new professions but which are now commonplace. “I see myself as a member of a transitional generation,” she agreed. “Although college educated I worked first as a secretary. I quit to stay at home with our son until he was eight but actively volunteered in what free time I could carve out. I joined the work force thereafter, first part-time and then full-time. I blazed a path in a nascent field, volunteer administration, which to this day is not as well known or as well recognized as it should be.”

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