2026 July Oak Cliff Advocate

Your Next Move Just Got Easier

OAK CLIFF ADVOCATE VOL. 17 NO. 7

COLUMN

4 Opening remarks

PROFILE

8 Bettina Bennett

DINING

10 Lola’s

FEATURES

12 Girls powerlifting

14 Women to know BACK STORY

22 Isis Brantley’s arrest contents

A plush of Lola the Llama paired with the chips and hot dog combo available at Lola’s Catina & Snacks. Read more on page 10. Photography by Justin Schwartz.

Hello!

OPENING REMARKS

By JEHADU ABSHIRO

You know when I tell people my job, their first instinct is to say, “like Miranda Priestly,” or some other fancy editor. And I assure them, hyperlocal community journalism doesn’t really have space for all that. My job is probably more similar to her first assistant, except I have to do payroll.

For more than a decade, our July issue has been our women’s edition. For about six years, it was referred to as Fierce Females. We’ve gone back to just referring to it as the women’s edition.

In the entirety of the Advocate’s existence, even when my predecessor, Rick, was running the show, we’ve had a staff made predominantly of women. Seeing as our audience averages 60% women and most journalism schools skew female, it makes sense.

Our women’s edition has featured an interesting cross-section of women across the city — a world champion boxer, one of the creators of Sesame Street, a leader in community gardening for public schools, the women running some of the most influential PR companies, neuroscientists, artists, nonprofit leaders and teachers. The list of dynamic, creative and exciting people we’ve written about is comprehensive.

That’s why, for the month of July, we’re sharing a story of one of the many women we’ve written about every day on social media. You’ll see a special section in our newsletters featuring the weekly seven.

One of my favorite aspects is how many times we find these women because their significant others, colleagues, children and friends contact us to let us know how influential or kind they are. How much they believe in the work she’s been doing. How she’s changed lives. How they’ve pioneered in a space that needed to be changed. She’s one of the best people they’ve met.

But this issue is particularly special to me because it marks five years since I’ve been the president of Advocate Media. Back in 2021, when we were making the transition into a nonprofit newsroom and I was appointed the president in the midst of a pandemic and general uncertainty, I was 26 years old. I regularly remind Rick what an insane decision it was to leave his legacy in the hands of someone who could barely rent a car without young driver fees, for crying out loud.

But the perk of working in this industry is talking to an exhaustive list of people who can teach you a little bit of something.

This includes our former editors and neighbors, like Keri Mitchell, who is running the Dallas Free Press, or Lisa Kresl, who spent two decades at The Dallas Morning News, and our Judy Liles, who kept everyone, including Rick, in line. Or our former staffers who left our humble abode for fellowships, to chase stories much bigger than themselves or start their own businesses. There are our interns who have become news anchors, reporters, lawyers and Ph.D. candidates across the country. And of course, there’s our staff members like Jynnette Neal, who has been at the Advocate for more than 25 years, and seemingly has an archival memory of every story and photo ever produced here.

I’ve begun writing significantly less as the years have gone by (eight years!) and the number of photo shoots I attend has been greatly reduced. For this year’s issue, I’m shooting portraits of the cover story subjects for their stories. One thing I’ve learned at the Advocate, is I should find the room with the smartest person in it and listening to her is worth it. The room happened to be our photo studio this month.

sincerely,

P.S. I’m told that I am supposed to include something about why you should donate to support hyperlocal journalism. Please do! We have potholes, libraries, preservation, history, art, music, education, so much zoning and of course, interesting neighbors to write about.

WOMEN OF

THANI BURKE

I’ve called Oak Cliff home for the last decade. What first drew me here was the architecture. From Tudors and Craftsman bungalows to midcentury gems and Spanish-inspired cottages, the diverse architectural history of this neighborhood is what makes Oak Cliff so distinct—and so special.

Over the years, my husband and I have restored and renovated homes throughout the community, deepening my appreciation for the craftsmanship, character, and stories that live within these walls. That experience has given me a perspective that extends beyond market knowledge alone. But what has kept me here is the community.

As a mother of two with a third on the way, the friendships and connections I’ve built in Oak Cliff are unlike anywhere I’ve ever lived. It’s a neighborhood rich in character—not just because of its homes, but because of its people.

Every home has a story. Every person does, too. One of the greatest privileges of my work is helping connect the two.

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Confidence-building

TIME FOR ANOTHER FIRST

From Germany to Oak Cliff, Bettina Bennett is paving the way across industries

Story by VICTORIA HERNANDEZ | Photography by LAUREN ALLEN

Bettina Bennett, 69, has been an Oak Cliff resident since 1994. Prior to that, she had spent five years working between Los Angeles and her home country of Germany.

Born and raised in Kassel, she grew up with an affinity for literature and the arts. As she got older, she developed an interest in technology, which has led to creating Kaffeeklatsch, a friendship app for women over 50.

She started her career by earning a publishing degree in Goettingen through a traditional apprenticeship. For three years, she went through the different departments in a publishing company, like learning how to print books and run bookstores.

“I did that for a number of years and worked in that industry, and then I realized that technology was going to have a major impact on that entire environment. It was going to change it, and I wanted to be prepared for that because I also saw opportunity.”

She went on to earn a double master’s in literature and law with a specialization in entertainment and copyright law from Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt. While her peers wanted to go on to practice law, Bennett sought to use her degree as a tool in the publishing world.

One of her professors was an editor at one of the largest publishing companies in Germany, so he introduced her to the CEO who said they wanted her to work in their rights department.

“I said that was too boring. I didn’t want to sit and just look at paperwork all day long. I wanted to do something more exciting,” she says.

Instead, Bennett suggested that the company create the first ever media department in a European publishing company to look into selling the rights of their books to movie and television production companies. They were skeptical.

“They kind of laughed at me and said, ‘Oh, we haven’t made much money that way in the past, but if that’s what it takes, and if you can help our rights department in the process, you can have those two rooms in the basement, and your two computers that you want, and an assistant.’ And it turned into a seven-figure profit center within a very short period of time.”

Her role was to know what producers and actors wanted when it came to books, what production companies may be interested in and how she could get them to co-produce.

She was the connector.

“At some point, the publishing company decided that this now needed a vice president, and of course, I raised my hand, and like many other women before me and after me, I got patted on the head, and doctor whatever was hired to take up that role, and he explained to me that, of course, I could continue to do all the work,” she

says. “I could sit in my basement and do all those things, but that he now would be the one to do the interviews, he would be the one to sign the important contracts, he would be the one to be the public face, and now that I’ve lived in Texas long enough, I said the equivalent of, ‘Bless your heart.’”

So she started her first company, Media Rights Management, in February 1988.

With Media Rights Management, she was now on the other side. She worked with production companies, television stations, producers and creatives to negotiate. Then, she received a call from ICM, a talent agency in Hollywood, to become their European partner. After an introduction at the Cannes Film Festival, she had an office in Los Angeles by June.

This new opportunity led to Bennett doing many more firsts, including the first ever co-production deal between an American and a European production company, the first co-production for the children’s program, and introducing film finances to create a bond or an insurance policy for film projects into the European film industry.

“I enjoyed that a great deal, but it was also very exhausting work,” she says. “I was usually the only woman in the room, so I kind of find myself in that place over and over again, and that can be wearing because you have to find ways to stay true to yourself and, at the same time, participate in an environment that isn’t really built for you or for your participation.”

She and her husband decided to move to Dallas, and with that, Bennett also realized she needed to do something different.

She continued to work in consulting in the industry, including working with her husband on some of his projects. In 2005, she started working on a new venture that would be at the cross-section of technology and publishing again.

By 2008, she launched WhichBox Media. Bennett says she and her co-founder joke that they created user-generated content, and it found its way into the universe.

“At the end of 2007, there was no iPad. Facebook was still only for college students. YouTube was still small and just YouTube, not Google owned. There was no Instagram, no Pinterest, none of that existed, and I believed that what ultimately is the most important component in the relationship between brands or organizations or communities, and the people that participate, is that it is a two-way street,” she says.

WhichBox allowed a brand or a publication to invite their users to share their own stories in an environment that was specific to that

community, she says. Her innovations in the industry led her to hold two tech patents because of the new ways she created software around that type of content.

But, Bennett says the pandemic was not kind to them.

“We believed that we were even more important than ever before, but the way structures changed in companies made us a nice to have and not a must have … so we decided that it was time to say goodbye after 15 years, which is not always easy when you’ve invested a lot of yourself into an environment like that, but you know you can’t force it either.”

At this point, Bennett decided to take a break.

“It’s something I had invested 15 years of my life into, and there is a period of mourning when you realize that something that you’ve given so much to is no longer,” she says.

Around that same time, Bennett received a text message from a much younger friend sharing that she was no longer getting much out of their “get-togethers” due to being in a different season of life. This moment led Bennett to realize she didn’t have friends her own age anymore and inspired her next endeavor: the Kaffeeklatsch app, which is named after the German phrase for coffee and conversation (and maybe sometimes a little gossip, she adds).

“I want to find women in my own neighborhood where I don’t have to plan a month in advance, where I can just pick up the phone and say, ‘Hey, you feel like doing whatever?’ and to give that a chance to, over time, develop into a friendship because nobody starts out with that, you start out with people that you may like,” she says.

So, she started asking the women in her community if they felt this way. She would talk to women her age at the coffee shop or during her morning walk, and after some initial laughter, they would answer similarly. They struggled to make friendships due to other life obligations like moving to be near grandchildren or retiring and losing those work friendships.

Bennett dug deeper. She researched the loneliness epidemic and found that loneliness led to higher chances for heart disease, anxiety and depression.

Kaffeeklatsch is currently in the beta launch phase, starting with four local ZIP codes. Participants answer questions up front up to help find compatibility between users, with the goal to build a human connection that can lead to face to face interactions, for at least a cup of coffee.

“That’s what we really need, even if we have to do it on a walker. It doesn’t matter, but we need that,” she says.

As she began developing the app, her mother was ill. While her sister and brother were at the hospital with her one day, she told the physicians and the nurses that she had a really good life and that there was nothing left that she would want for. Specifically, she mentioned to them that she had great kids, a great marriage, great travels and that she had great friends.

“Those four things were the pillars of her life,” Bennett says.

Because of her condition, Bennett never told her mother about Kaffeeklatsch, yet it felt impactful to her that she would mention the importance of friendship.

“And here it is, one of the cornerstones of her life that was so important to her that she mentioned as she was dying, and I think that’s what it has to be for all of us,” she says, tearing up. “I think the reason I’m building this is because I want all women to have that. I want them to say that the friendships that they had and the people that they had around them was one of those most important things in their lives.”

Correction/Clarification: This story has been updated from the original version, which appeared in the July print issue. The introduction misstated that Bettina Bennett and her husband lived in Los Angeles for six months. Bennett worked in Los Angeles before her move to Dallas, but was traveling back and forth between L.A. and Germany for work. It has been updated to correct her time spent working in L.A.

GUESS WHICH LLAMA GOT A CANTINA

At Lola’s, each drink presentation is intentional, with a carnation as a signature in the Lola-RITA ($9).

Lola the llama is back for a new dining concept

Story by VICTORIA HERNANDEZ

by JUSTIN SCHWARTZ

If you’ve stopped by East Dock and recognized the familiar shades and heartshaped nose on a pink and purple sign that resembles the yellow one from the East Eighth Street Snackateria, your eyes are not deceiving you. In fact, that llama mascot has been on the move for quite some time.

Pollo and Polla Canal are the owners of Lola’s Cantina & Snacks, their newest dining concept that recently joined the storefronts of the old ice house. The mascot was inspired by the couple’s daughter, Ayleen, who questioned why their former nonprofit, Love in Motion, didn’t have a mascot.

“And I’m like, ‘What, that’s ridiculous. Nonprofits don’t need mascots because it’s like a serious thing, right?’” Pollo says. “And she’s like, ‘Why can’t they have a mascot?’ And again I’m like, ‘OK, if we did have one, what would it be?’”

And that’s how Lola the Llama was born.

Starting about 15 years ago, Love in Motion was a volunteer-led nonprofit that was dedicated to providing recurring appreciation efforts designed to honor, motivate and help retain the community’s most valuable commodities, such as teachers, healthcare providers, first responders and postal workers. Pollo says that they built great relationships with Dallas ISD teachers to support schools, and while the nonprofit has since ceased operations, Lola the Llama has remained.

After her nonprofit stint, she made an appearance as the mascot of a cleaning business known as Lola’s Cleans until inspiration struck their daughter Ayleen once again.

About four years ago, as a student at Yvonne A. Ewell Townview Magnet Center, she mentioned the lack of snack options surrounding the school for students. She suggested that her parents should rent a nearby spot and open up a snack shop. And so they did, opening their first food industry venture after years working in construction and cleaning with their Snackateria in April 2023.

“She changes up a little bit for every one,” Pollo says of Lola. “For the snack shop, I think the vibe is mainly orange and yellows. When we did the cantina here, we’re like, ‘Yeah, let’s put a beer in her kind of line of sight, right?’ So anyway Lola the Llama, she’s a little bit a part of everything. Some people say we pimp her out too much. I’m like, ‘She enjoyed it.’”

Even before the opening of Lola’s Cantina & Snacks, folks were swinging by since the sign went up because they recognized the Snackateria mascot.

“It’s been really refreshing as we’re working here, doing something, and people are like, ‘What’s up, I found y’all.’ I’m like, ‘Cool. I’m glad you did,’” Pollo says.

Though the Snackteria concept is temporarily closed, Pollo says they hope to bring the snack shop back to East Dock, too. As for Lola’s Cantina & Snacks, the menu takes inspiration from the success of the first food concept with a bit of a more mature twist, introducing alcoholic options and changes in presentation.

“The product presentation, we try to go tiny bit (further). I don’t think we will ever claim that we came up with something that never existed,” Pollo says.

Pollo added that their carnation-topped margarita, the Lola-RITA ($9), is their best seller by far. Other drink items include their spiked Mango-Mala, that includes mango, chamoy, tajín and lime ($10), the strawberry lemonade Fres-nada ($9), and Sandi-Boom watermelon jello shots ($5).

“Food wise, we don’t have a full kitchen, so if we can put it in an air fryer, you’ll probably be able to enjoy it here,” Pollo says.

They’re bringing back the Snackterria’s best-selling elote in a cup ($6) with a small stop to the left of the bar filled with toppings options like Slap Ya Mama Cajun seasoning and Flamin’ Hot Cheetos bits. Combo options include the Llama (hot) Dog KOMBO with chips and a beer, and the Cantina Queso KOMBO with a beer, warm queso, and chips each available for $12. There is also the Lola’s KOMBO that comes with your choice of a Lola-RITA or Mango-Mala and elote in a cup for $14. Future plans to expand the menu include mini mozzarella sticks and mini tacos.

Pollo says with the opening of Lola’s, they are striving to reach the same quality of service as the Snackteria, which earned over 100 five-star reviews. That environment is something they are trying to mirror with the cantina.

“We’re trying to allow that to be a common thing in our culture,” Pollo says. “Just try to be creative, have fun with it, make that person feel better than perhaps they didn’t before they walked in.”

Lola’s Cantina & Snacks, 900 E. Clarendon Drive, Ste. 110, instagram.com/ lolascantinasnacks

GIRL POWER

How

Roosevelt

High School’s girls powerlifting team is giving athletes strength and confidence

Story by VICTORIA HERNANDEZ

WHEN YOU THINK OF POWERLIFTING , the first image that may come to your mind is Mark Henry.

The 6-foot-4-inches and 400-pound Olympian exudes the strength and size typically associated with the sport.

But for students at Franklin D. Roosevelt High School of Innovation, powerlifting can also come in the form of a typical teenage girl.

Taryn Saxon, Justice Mcfarland and Alexis Coit are the founding members of the Roosevelt girls powerlifting team. In their freshman year, all three athletes became interested in the sport because of the strength training component.

“I’m wanting to get stronger. I like lifting weights, that’s a hobby for me,” Saxon says. “So I decided now that we have a powerlifting team at the school that I wanted to join.”

Saxon added that Roosevelt already having a boys powerlifting team was influential to her choosing the school.

For Mcfarland and Coit, they both added the desire to try something new in addition to the influence of their coaches to try powerlifting out. All three teens play additional sports, whether it’s volleyball, dancing, swimming, or track and field.

Charles Howington, the football and powerlifting coach,

says powerlifting is a workout that adds on to their current athletic training. When it came to the recruitment for powerlifting, he let the girls come to him to make the new team a reality.

“First, I had to test out their max in their three lifts, so squat, bench and deadlift,” he says.

With powerlifting, they are able to build up their strength to excel in their other passions. Their first year out of the gate wasn’t easy.

Howington says there are often rules that athletes have to squat certain depths, with two judges in competition watching their side depths and a third judge checking for other aspects of form.

“They have all these commands that you have to listen to, which is pretty hard, especially because it’s your first year doing it,” he says. “You’re just trying to lift the weight, and sometimes, you don’t hear the judges … It’s a little difficult sometimes, but luckily they listened very well.”

Well enough to qualify to compete in regionals, a big accomplishment for a first-year program.

“I was scared though because I felt like it was just too

The

unreal,” Mcfarland says. “Like, as freshmen going to regionals, it was really exciting.”

While the young women have found a new found passion in powerlifting, there were pessimists at their start that made comments about the sport.

“Before starting, my mom did not want me to do it because she said I would get too manly, but I mean, I see other people do it,” Mcfarland says. “It’s true, a lot of people do get a lot manly, but I feel it depends like how you lift the weights. It depends how much you’re lifting, and I just didn’t believe it. I still wanted to try something new to see.”

For Coit, she says her cousin was flat out against it.

“He did not want me to do it because he thought I was going to get too buff and stuff. It was just a lot,” she says.

However, despite these opinions of what constitutes “manly,” all three still pursued powerlifting for themselves.

“Personally, I don’t care because it’s my body and what I want to do in life, so I could do whatever I want to,” Coit says, noting as long as she still gets parental approval.

She adds that powerlifting is often focused on boys, and for girls, it’s something very different.

“For me, it was building up my confidence, so I got confident every time that I lifted, and my coach, he supported, they supported me,” Saxon says of her teammates.

All three powerlifters have found a new found footing in the sport, despite how the sport can be male-dominated.

“You can’t just sit at home and not do things, you have to push yourself to try it, even if it does seem scary, or if people say it’s a bad thing to do, or make you too manly,” Mcfarland says. “You got to keep going and do what you believe in.”

women toknow

Someone you could ask for advice or an amusing anecdote. The kind of woman who took unfavorable circumstances and made them favorable. The kind of woman who learns the rules to rewrite them. The kind of woman who props doors of opportunity open and invites the rest of us in. These are the people to know.

The clock was approaching 2 p.m. on April 22. Sitting across the City Hall horseshoe via Zoom was Kat Gamber and her students at White Rock Montessori. They had been on the call since 9 a.m., each waiting their turn to speak, about their concerns and request for the removal of the roofing manufacturer GAF and TAMKO factories from West and South Dallas.

Gamber, who currently works as the middle school lead at White Rock Montessori, is an Oak Cliff native, a Hockaday School alumna and vice president of the Bishop Arts Neighborhood Association. Through her position at the Montessori, she teaches across all content areas to seventh and eighth grade students.

When her students were learning biology and environmental systems, they started to look at water and air quality, which led them to learn about how that quality impacts Dallas, inspiring her students to speak to the city council.

“Dallas doesn’t have great air quality, and that’s a fact that we look at when we study history and that we look at in science,” she says. “I think connection with the land is a really important part of our school’s program, like right now they’re going on camping trips all throughout the year. It wasn’t a specific topic, it was more like we were studying environmentalism and those systems, and learning about how you monitor air quality, water quality, and learning about how you could create change around that.”

Story by VICTORIA HERNANDEZ | Photography by JEHADU ABSHIRO

Gamber earned her bachelor’s in education and psychology at Southern Methodist University. She says that her time in a competitive and high pressure education environment inspired her to earn her first master’s degree in counseling. She was considering opening a private practice when she learned about the Montessori philosophy of not only teaching

kat gamber

academic subjects, but nurturing the emotional health and social skills of students.

“Creating peace is the work of education, and I feel like that’s what actually kept me in education was finding Montessori, and when I did that, I was like, ‘Oh, well, I want to go back and learn more about how I could integrate STEM into Montessori,’ which traditionally shies away from technology, I think a lot of times,” she says of earning her second master’s degree in STEM and Montessori education. “And so it’s been a really interesting balance because in so many ways we are very low tech in terms of writing or things like that, and then on the other hand, we really value technology when we’re about to utilize it in meaningful ways, in creative ways and in ways that help us advocate for change.”

Advocacy comes naturally to Gamber. She says that as a citizen, you have to be involved in your local community if you want to see a living environment you truly desire.

“If you see a problem, you want to solve it,” she says. “I was at Tyler and Eighth Street, and I just would be watching people run across the street, trying not to get hit by cars, trying to get to the coffee shop across the street, and I’m like, ‘What, this is crazy, where’s the urban development here? Where’s the planning for this?’ I was out there with my daughter, and I said, ‘Hey, let’s just make a petition,’ and we just stopped people, and I said, ‘Hey, did you want to cross the street?’ And I was like, ‘How did you feel when you’re crossing? You’re scared.’ I said, ‘Oh, do you think that there should be a stoplight or a crosswalk here?’ And everybody signed it.”

Combining her lived experiences and STEM education background, Gamber brings those lessons to her classroom to help encourage the next generation to advocate for the causes they care about, too.

“I hope that they feel empowered, that they continue. I want them to grow up and be participants,” she says. “As much as the government has a duty to serve the citizens, the citizens have a duty to be involved.”

jennifer klein

When Jennifer Klein left her small Texas town for the University of Texas in Austin, she planned on being premed. That was until she learned the program required four years of a foreign language.

Instead, the East Dallas neighbor ended up with an art degree and spent her last year working at a group home that took care of kids that had become wards of the state. Klein says she took the job because of the free apartment, but it was really her start working in direct care.

“I loved it, and that led me to getting my teaching certificate, and after working with kids that had been taken away or had really difficult lives, were in alternative schools, got in trouble at school. All this, as much as I loved it, and I love the kids, I realized I’m not a great teacher because there’s a lot of preparation that teachers do outside of class that I wasn’t doing,” she says. “So, for everybody’s benefit, I stopped doing that, and a friend had told me, ‘Why don’t you join the Peace Corps?’ because I didn’t have any obligations here, and I was like, ‘OK, what the heck.’”

After a three-month-long application process,

she ended up finding herself back in teaching, but this time teaching art in Ghana and serving in the Peace Corps for two years. She was 29 and had no plan for the rest of her life when she came across an ad that set her on her next path: nursing school at Johns Hopkins University.

Her first day of class a woman named Marion D’Lugoff came up to her and took her on a drive to the Lillian D. Wald Community Nursing Center. They talked all afternoon about direct care and what could be possible for her future bridging social work with medicine and healthcare. D’Lugoff, who led the center, went on to be Klein’s very first mentor and her experience at that center provided her the space to figure out what she wanted to do for her role in the healthcare world.

“I had this like daydream of being in this remote place where I was the only provider, and there was a show called Northern Exposure, and it was like they’re part of the community, the provider, but then I realized I’m a brand-new nurse practitioner, I cannot be the only person, so after I interviewed at a few places out in like Washington state and Indian health reservations, I was like, ‘OK, I’m not ready for that.’”

Instead, after her husband received an offer in Dallas, she started her nursing career in a big city. After working at a site that didn’t pan out, she went on to work in South Dallas where a social worker told her to make a call to the first medical director for Prism Health North Texas (PHNTX) Keith Rawlings. A four-hour conversation led to a new job offer.

“So it was again just somebody gave me a door. I went through it and just happened to be the right door,” she says.

Her experience in antiretroviral treatment during her clinical rotations in Baltimore in 1994-95 helped as well.

“I had some exposure, but it had not dawned on me before that I had this big passion to work in HIV care or anything, but then when I got started in it, it was really clear that the science and the community health nursing meshed like perfectly for me,” she says.

Through her current role, Klein says she got her community health dream of taking care of such an awesome group of people, with some of her current patients she met on her very first day of work.

Not only does Klein serve patients as a family nurse practitioner at the Oak Cliff Health Center, which she has done since the building opened in 2011, but she also conducts research. She began that work in 2007 after PHNTX received the National Institutes of Health’s AIDS Clinical Trials Group grant.

“Usually those grants are given to huge organizations, like Hopkins was a site, Northwestern, and we were the very first, and I think still the only community health center ever to get this research grant,” she says.

That opportunity led Klein to be more involved on a national level of HIV/AIDs research with conference presentations and publishing journal articles. With PHNTX, she has helped to conduct investigator-initiated studies where their patients were able to participate in a lot of pharma trials for new drugs, like the clinical trials for COVID-19 vaccines.

“I never thought I would get to do any of that, and just watching how fast the science changed, and being with the people who were doing it, and having this like integral way to bring the people who are really living with HIV every day, like these communities, like in Dallas, that we take care of instead of people in Chicago, LA, San Francisco, who are part of a huge hospital system, and so it was a way to kind of demonstrate to the HIV world that a small clinic could be as cutting edge as innovative and whatever, and be part of the things that are changing.”

Twelve years ago, when Amy Mohon Bengfort and her wife decided they wanted to have their first kid through reproductive technology, the experience felt isolating.

“When we started thinking about that, we were the first in our group to have kids, and we didn’t know any other same-sex couples who had gone through this so we really didn’t know what we were doing.”

She says at the time, there wasn’t a lot of information out there and that they ended up having to figure out a lot of the fertility journey on their own, later finding “a fantastic OB-GYN” to help them along their journey.

“I just felt like that part of the health system, I just wanted to give that experience to other people because of the experience we had going through it,” Mohon Bengfort says. “I think we were just really lucky in the people that we came across, and so it just kind of became something that I wanted to do.”

She decided to start as a doula, after previously working as an overnight ER nurse for about eight years.

“It kind of felt like an easier segway because I didn’t know if I wanted to go back to school yet, and then after that, I think for me, since my background was medical anyway, I wanted to be more of the provider role and make the decisions and not just the support role, which is really more of what a doula is.”

Mohon Bengfort and her wife, Lindsey, already had two children when she decided to go back to school. She earned her master’s in nursing and became a certified nurse midwife at the same time as having two more children.

“I look at our four kids that we have, and I think about how we conceived them and the help that we had, and it’s hard not to want to just give that back,” she says. “And I want my kids to know that I worked hard … I want them to kind of see the value of the sacrifices that they had to make and that I had to make in order for me to get here.”

She came across her current role as an advanced practice RN at a fertility center, where the physician she now works with, who is also in the LGBTQ+ community, had previously done an evaluation on her about a decade ago.

“We are, as our team, we have 75% of our providers are in the community, so

amy mohon bengfort

two of our physicians, myself, and then we have an additional nurse practitioner who’s heterosexual, but I think it kind of creates a safe space for the community because they know we’ve already been through it, and you do feel like when people come in, I think even still, sometimes you kind of wait, you kind of feel it out as to whether, ‘OK, do I disclose?’ Do I just say, ‘Oh, you know, my partner?’ Do I want to say that I have a wife? Is this like an environment where that’s like an OK thing? And I do feel like when I have a same-sex couple, I always kind of make an effort to be like, ‘OK, my wife and I went through

this as well,’ and you can kind of see that body language of relief.”

Not only does Mohon Bengfort’s role help support other LGBTQ+ individuals seeking fertility treatments like she did, but she also finds value in working in a profession that examines women’s health.

“I think that women’s health as a whole, we’re just not there. The research isn’t there, the protections aren’t there. I think it’s an important role,” she says. “It’s important to have females in this role because ultimately we need to have presence to help keep these things safe and keep moving forward and breaking down barriers.”

masha dyachok

Masha Dyachok currently works as a mechanical engineer in Fort Worth, but has called Kidd Springs home for nearly four years since moving to the neighborhood for her first full time job.

Her day to day consists of designing buildings, using her skill set to help create the blueprints for the projects. This includes calculating the heating and cooling requirements for the space, selecting the air conditioning units for those requirements and working in 3D modeling to make sure they know how to build the project in real life.

She says starting out with her first professional role was a bit of a shift.

“The place that I started working at was a really cool place,” she says, “but in terms of having diversity, and I would say, (there were) a lot of really cool women who supported me, but it wasn’t the best fit in terms of workload and work style, and so that was kind of a learning curve for me to figure out, ‘OK, how can I work best, and what is it that I find to be exciting about engineering, and maybe what am I not getting from this role?’”

She began her new position as a data center mechanical engineer this year, which she says helps her tap into her creative side by working on buildings amidst the changes of the industry.

“I would say data center is a big one that’s really growing, and I think for me as a person who wants to see the world improve and want to have a hand in that,” she says, “I believe that working on data centers is really going to help us create tools that are more powerful and can help us do our jobs easier and do better work, and I also like believe that with working on data centers I have a direct input on making them more sustainable and more efficient, and that’s something that’s just super exciting to me.”

Although she has been working full time as an engineer for three and a half years, her start to engineering began in high school roughly eight years ago.

At 16 years old, she took her first engineering class after her mom and sister encouraged her to take advantage of the career and technical education programs available during high school.

“They knew engineers make good money, they were like, ‘Masha, try taking a class there at your high school,’ because it’s part of our curriculum, and so it could

be like a really good way to dip my feet in the water there,” she says. “So I ended up taking an engineering class there, and it was like a lot of modeling, and it went swimmingly for me. Little did my mom and sister know, it wasn’t software engineering that they knew made a ton of money. It was more mechanical engineering, but since then, I was more hooked.”

Dyachok says that her engineering teacher in high school really supported and encouraged her passion for the subject.

“I think me being one of two or three (women) of 30 students in that class, and it was maybe (why) I got even more special attention just being a woman because there was kind of a push that we want to make sure women succeed.”

Because of her experience, she decided to major in mechanical engineering at the University of Texas at Dallas. The coursework was rigorous, but Dyachok says that her determination and community pushed her through to make her goals for college a reality.

“When I was in my sophomore year of college, I really wanted to do a study abroad program, but those opportunities are really limited for engineering students, and especially me, I was quite particular, and I really wanted to go to Spain,” she says. “So I had to fight, I would say, like tooth and nail to find a program that would accept me, make sure that the credits would be accepted for my university and transfer back, so that I could complete my degree on time, and then create that opportunity for me to actually go abroad, and I was able to be successful in that, and study engineering in Spain, which was a really incredible chance for me to do that.”

Outside of her engineering roles, Dyachok says she loves to have a side hustle and create small businesses. She teaches private swims lessons around Oak Cliff and recently earned her yoga teacher certification, teaching classes at Kidd Springs Park.

“I’ve been talking with my friend to start teaching classes at Elmwood Farm, and kind of creating that community aspect there,” she says. “I’ve had some yoga studios that I’ve been connected with in Oak Cliff as well, so I’m just really excited to see where those are going to take off and grow, and see how I can serve the community more.”

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AN OVERHAND WEAVE

How Isis Brantley created legislative change

Story by VICTORIA

HERNANDEZ

DID YOU KNOW IN 1997 AN ARREST OF A LOCAL HAIRBRAIDER LED TO LEGISLATIVE CHANGE?

That’s the story of Isis Brantley, the South Dallas native who currently runs Naturally Isis in Far North Dallas and is the longtime hairstylist of Erykah Badu. In the ’90s, she ran the Institute of Ancestral Braiding on South Beckley Avenue.

“I had been braiding 10 years before my troubles with the state,” she says. “So the community made me ‘the queen of braids, the mother of braids,’ because most of the beauty schools did not teach braiding, wasn’t something that they taught, so they would recommend people to me.”

On the day of her arrest in 1997, an undercover cop came in requesting services, claiming her sister had her hair done by Brantley and she would like to do the same.

“(I) never ever got suspicious about her, even her stance, how she was standing,” she says. “Now that I look back on it, it was intimidating or authoritative or something, but I didn’t penetrate it because I was thrown off by the fact that these were people in my community that were saying that their families were coming to me, so that’s how I looked at it.”

Brantley says before she went to respond that

the woman needed an appointment, multiple police officers in full regalia were standing in her salon. That’s when the undercover cop told Brantley that she would be going to jail for braiding hair, specifically for operating a salon without a license.

“I was dehumanized. I was very much so traumatized. I was humiliated, and it was a shock to me and my entire community … so I did everything she told me to do,” she says. “They took me and threw me (in jail) after fingerprinting me, strip-searching me, making me take my clothes off, putting on something different. And that was something that should have never happened, whether it happened for three hours or whether it happened for 30 years. It was wrong, and so I had to go and get help.”

While the state arrested her for not having the proper cosmetology license, Brantley argued that braiding is a legacy of African ancestors and that those requirements should not apply. For about 10 years, Brantley worked with one of her clients, who happened to be a lawyer, against the requirement to stop her work as a braider and require her to attend cosmetology school where she would learn how to use chemicals with hair, even though chemical use was not a part of her practice.

“I don’t put my hands in processed chemicals that

people go to their schools for,” she says. “I don’t use sharp instruments, I’m not using scissors to cut anybody’s hair or anything like that.”

An injunction was put on her building, shutting her down and leaving her and her five children homeless, she says.

“Somebody in the community that knew I had been braiding their wife’s hair said, ‘You can come and have my house,’ and that’s when me and the children went back into the house, and I had to wait a long period,” she says. “My livelihood was put on hold until my lawyer could get them to release the injunction.”

In 2007, Texas began regulating hair braiders into the state’s barbering statute. This meant that to teach the 35-hour braiding curriculum Texas now required, Brantley had to install barber chairs, obtain at least 2,000 square feet of floor space and mount five sinks. Additionally, she was required to become a licensed barber school instructor, which would require up to 750 hours learning to teach barbering and pass written and practical exams on barbering instruction.

Brantley says when that ruling came down, she was told there was no one who could teach her.

“These people owe me because they were already in violation of what they sent me through for the first 10 years, and then after, they said in 2007, ‘Well, we can’t find nobody to teach you ancestral braiding. We don’t even know what ancestral braiding is, so there’s nobody here that can teach you. So we’re going to grandfather you, but we’re going to make every other Black person pay us $500 to $1,000 for 35 hours, and we’re going to use your curriculum that you so graciously gave us during the hearings,’” she says. “They captured my whole concept of ancestral braiding, and it’s just sad, and what they did was they put it in their curricula, and then they said, ‘Well, you are free to braid hair, but you’re not free to teach any classes.’”

Brantley says it was beautiful to see others protest these new rulings in her community.

“I kept teaching. People started rallying up against the unfair laws of cosmetology, they would go and say, ‘I’m not going to pay the money to come get any training because what I want to know how to do, Isis is teaching it, so I’m going to give my money to Isis to be trained, and I’m going to keep standing up in protest against this particular ruling of 35 hours,’” she says. “Even after people were rebelling and saying no, I was teaching so many women in (the) Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex, people that were moving here from Vegas and California and Iowa and different places. I was training still, and we just stayed with what I was doing.”

After that, Brantley says the Institute for Justice learned she was grandfathered in, and she worked with the organization to file a federal lawsuit against Texas on Oct. 1, 2013, because braiders are not barbers, and they should not be required to train as such.

The lawsuit was a success. In January 2015, a federal court declared that the barber school requirements were seen as unconstitutional to apply to hair braiding schools,

and by June 8, 2015, Gov. Greg Abbott signed House Bill 2717 to officially exempt hair braiders from having to obtain a cosmetology license.

Brantley says the 2015 signing had a lot to do with opening the doors for the 2023 CROWN Act, which prohibits racebased hair discrimination in Texas workplaces, schools and housing policies. But she says, “It’s a sloppy-written bill.”

“We still lost some of the children’s opportunity to exercise their right to wear their hair in several schools in Texas, especially the one in Houston,” she says, referring to Darryl George who claims the male-only hair length limit placed by Barbers Hill ISD is unconstitutional. Because of these outcomes, Brantley says she is far from done with the fight.

“Just to continue to make the whole world respect and stay open when it comes to Afro hair, and people are still being fired because of their afros. Young girls, young boys are still being harassed in schools. I mean, we’re still under this whole slave mentality when it comes to just getting any type of reciprocity or respect for being original people here in America and those that were forced here,” she says. “There has to continue to be advocates for social change, advocates for economic liberty, economic freedom, the right for people to own their own businesses, the right for people to be able to decide, ‘I don’t want college, I want a trade,’ and making it legal for these things to happen.”

Defined by Detail