Why I Volunteer: Patty Talbot '61 Talks About Her Commitment as a Bryn Mawr Volunteer

I have done volunteer work for Bryn Mawr since I graduated in 1961. I worked with the Admissions Office, and also hosted a gathering of alumnae to help promote a fundraising campaign for the College. With another Bryn Mawr-Haverford family, we hosted send-off picnics each summer for more than a decade. At a Club meeting last October, an alum told me that her freshman year roommate, whom she had met at the send-off picnic at my house in 1975, is still her best friend!

I was invited to attend District Conferences, and it was at a conference in 1979 that I heard there were over 200 alumnae in New Hampshire and Vermont. (Now it is over 300.) I decided we should have our own Club, so at a large gathering of alumnae on March 15, 1980, the Bryn Mawr Club of New Hampshire and Vermont was voted into being, with me as president. In recent years, the Club has given our New Hampshire and Vermont undergraduates gift certificates to the College Bookstore each year.

It gives me deep satisfaction to create connections between alums, our undergrads, and the College. That is why I volunteer for Bryn Mawr, which has meant so much to me since the day I arrived in September of 1957. 

Patty Talbot is a musician and a nurserywoman. She taught music, kindergarten through college, and has been the Music Director of her Unitarian Universalist church for 42 years. She and her late husband David founded Talbots' Herb & Perennial Farm in 1971. In the last 10 years, Patty has grown annual flowers for Talbots' Creative Gardening, her children's landscaping business in Cambridge, Mass. Dan and Jenny Talbot both graduated from Haverford in 1991 and both majored at Bryn Mawr (history of art and Italian, respectively).