by Molly Oleson

It all began with a toast. Raising a glass in her San Rafael home more than 17 years ago, Heidi Kuhn, a fifth-generation Marinite and mother of four, had an epiphany. Deeply inspired by the defining work of the late Princess Diana—who the world had lost just three weeks prior—Kuhn had a strong vision to turn landmines into vineyards.
“It was an epiphany from my heart,” says Kuhn, sitting in the backyard of her home, passed on to her from her grandparents and overlooking the bay. “That the world may go from mines to vines. And you could hear a pin drop. It was an epiphany of turning—almost a visual, of blood to wine, killing fields to vineyards, peace on earth.”t all began with a toast. Raising a glass in her San Rafael home more than 17 years ago, Heidi Kuhn, a fifth-generation Marinite and mother of four, had an epiphany. Deeply inspired by the demining work of the late Princess Diana—who the world had lost just three weeks prior—Kuhn had a strong vision to turn landmines into vineyards.

People around the globe, Kuhn says, understood that the passing of Princess Diana was not just the passing of a princess, but of somebody who stood for compassion. “And the passion she brought through the issues she shed light to.”

Kuhn says that she wanted to give her dinner guests that night something very meaningful, and ensure that the work of Princess Diana would be carried on. “I looked at the kaleidoscope around where we stood and I thought, the Napa vintners, the Sonoma vintners, the Marin vintners—these people harvest the land, they celebrate the harvest, they smell the juicy nectar of the grapes,” Kuhn says. “Whether fermented or not, this is life.”

Encouraged by her guests to take her toast out of the living room and into the world, Kuhn presented her idea in Napa Valley the following week. Support from key vintners like Robert Mondavi, Mike Grgich and Diane Disney Miller—“pioneers and dreamers in their own right”—led to the 1998 launch of Roots of Peace, an organization dedicated to replacing landmines in war-torn regions worldwide with bountiful agriculture.

“We need to focus on the economics of peace,” says Kuhn, founder and CEO of Roots of Peace and recipient of the Pacific Sun’s 2014 Heroes of Marin Lifetime Achievement award. “We need to empower people. We need to provide food security on war-torn lands. We need to help heal communities. And to me that begins by the removal of a simple landmine—it’s a metaphor of hatred, and it’s a physical example, but we need to begin that act of removing the hatred from our one soil and then literally planting the roots of peace.”

Since the global initiative began, Roots of Peace has removed more than one million landmines and unexploded ordnances from continents across the globe, and has helped more than one million farmers to improve orchards and crops. “Like little Johnny Appleseed, I go around the world, giving people cards and inviting them to join me,” Kuhn says. “We’ve planted rice in Cambodia, grapes in Afghanistan, orchards in Croatia, flowers in Bosnia.”

Kuhn refers to her work as “changing the tide of hatred into love” by restoring damaged communities to economic self-sufficiency. “When you plant a seed, regardless of the color of your hand, the politics in your mind or the faith in your heart, that seed will grow, as it has for thousands of years,” she says.

A deep respect for the land can be traced back to Kuhn’s family roots in Marin County. Her great-great-grandfather sailed to California from Maine in the early 1850s, purchasing thousands of acres of land in what is now Marin and Sonoma. Her grandfather was president of the Rotary Club of San Francisco in the early 1940s, and his legacy was to help establish what was to be called the United Nations.

“For me, Marin County is really about the land and its people,” says Kuhn, noting that the original model for the Golden Gate Bridge was once laid out on her living room table, when her grandparents lived in the house and hosted a fellow “dreamer” who wanted to “turn his vision into reality.”

Kuhn’s grandmother, she says, encouraged her to dedicate her life to doing something for peace. “And to take those riches that we derive from the land and from its people, and to bring that beautiful spirit of Marin County out into a world that is so thirsty, so hungry … for love.”

A graduate of San Rafael High School, Kuhn holds a degree in political economics of industrial societies from UC Berkeley. A reporter and producer for CNN and other news organizations in the ’80s and ’90s, Kuhn was living in Alaska with her husband, who was working for IBM and who is now the president of Roots of Peace. She then went on to begin her own television news organization—NewsLink International—reporting on the Exxon Valdez oil spill and the melting of the Ice Curtain between U.S./Soviet relations.

The road hasn’t always been smooth. Before the birth of her fourth child, Kuhn was diagnosed with malignant cancer and told that she would not live. “That stops you in your tracks,” she says. “But it can also either paralyze you or make you realize that each day is a gift.”

She’s held on to the latter. “That’s the way I’ve always chosen to live my life,” she says. “I’ve just had to lead with faith, not fear, and be that pioneer woman that I know my great-great-grandfather would be very proud of.”

Although Kuhn is honored to win the Lifetime Achievement award, she says she’s far from done with her work. Her biggest goal? “World peace,” she says, without missing a beat. “Don’t blink.”

“It’s in my soul; it’s in my DNA; it’s in my spirit; it’s in my mind; it’s in my intelligence, to do whatever I can with the human footsteps that I have, and with these hands, to inspire the world to not forget the legacy of war,” she says. “Those beautiful leaders who have been in my life—let’s use them and draw upon that inspiration and believe in the world what is possible rather than what’s not.”

Hero FYI

• Kuhn has been honored with the Cal Berkeley Alumni Award for Excellence and Achievement and the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Award/National Jefferson Award for Public Service, among other local and international recognitions.
• She recently launched a crowd-rise campaign, sponsored by Jeff Skoll (co-founder of eBay) in which people around the world can participate in a “virtual walkathon” for peace.
• Kuhn says that political landmines have been her biggest challenge, and that her most gut-wrenching experience has been the Taliban’s attack on Afghanistan—a country 80 percent dependent on agriculture—this past May.
• Most rewarding has been “the farmers and the families on the ground,” Kuhn says. “It’s the face of my children and my husband, and it’s the light in the eyes of the children around the world that keeps me going.”

by Stephanie Powell

I don’t see myself as a role model,” says Emily Sims, founder of West Marin Advocacy, the driving force behind the Marin County Human Trafficking Task Force and recipient of this year’s Pacific Sun Heroes of Marin Role Model award. “I just see myself sort of trying to survive every day in Marin County.”
Raised in Marin, Sims spent her elementary years at San Anselmo’s Wade Thomas and a year at Branson on scholarship. It wasn’t until she began attending Sir Francis Drake High School when she really began to grasp a larger sense of Marin’s community.don’t see myself as a role model,” says Emily Sims, founder of West Marin Advocacy, the driving force behind the Marin County Human Trafficking Task Force and recipient of this year’s Pacific Sun Heroes of Marin Role Model award. “I just see myself sort of trying to survive every day in Marin County.”

“[It] really opened my eyes to what I wanted to be a part of in Marin County and what I didn’t want to be a part of,” Sims says, speaking about her experience at the Branson School and the eye-opening financial disparity that can be found within the county. “I realized that folks that had less, who were sort of judged as being less than, were the folks that actually had the most compassion.”

In her teens, Sims moved with her mom to Canada, where she had a formative experience with law enforcement that, little did she know, would precipitate an influential career shift.

“I saw friends whose parents treated them poorly—both when I lived [in Marin] and when I lived in Canada. I remember one instance, when I lived in Montreal, a friend of mine was beaten by her father and [the police] didn’t do anything,” Sims says. “They said that it was normal, and that parents were allowed to beat their children.”

It was that disconnect, Sims says, that propelled her into her career in advocacy work and into establishing West Marin Advocacy (WMA)—a nonprofit based in West Marin that provides direct, confidential advocacy services to survivors of community and family violence. WMA offers a breadth of services from assisting survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault to working with clients who have had unfavorable experiences with law enforcement and mediating between the parties to achieve whatever goal the client may be seeking—from obtaining a restraining order to filing a police report.

“I guess there’s a side of me that made me feel angry,” Sims says, “when I would see someone have the courage to call the police and then law enforcement not treating that person accordingly or not assisting them.”

Sims started by making a move back to California in 2002 and studying political science at Golden Gate University, which opened up the opportunity to work in the domestic violence unit of the San Francisco Police Department. While garnering first-hand experience in advocacy alongside officers, Sims was secretly fighting a battle of her own—she was in an abusive relationship from ages 19 to 21.

“It was hard,” Sims says of working on domestic violence cases while simultaneously experiencing personal abuse. “[It was] shameful, terrifying. I was pretty isolated from my family. I think that it’s the perfect example that anyone can go through an abusive relationship because looking from the outside in, I had an education, I was working and I think that sometimes when people have a lot at stake it makes that abuse feel even more profound.”

But Sims, a survivor of the abuse, never let her experience define her. She continued her education at Sonoma State University, focusing on interdisciplinary studies—a blend between public administration and women’s and gender studies.

It was at the end of 2009 when Sims founded WMA, which she says initially started as “very grassroots.”

“When I came back to Marin, and because of the work I did in San Francisco, friends would call me if they needed a restraining order,” Sims says, “or people would call me if they tried to make a police report and hadn’t been assisted in an appropriate way.”

Sims cites geography as a leading motivation for starting her agency. “A lot of people were not getting the services that they were entitled to because of geography,” she says. “You know we have county agencies, and a lot of them are centered in San Rafael, and for folks who live over the hill or in West Marin, it’s just geographically difficult to get to those agencies.”

West Marin Advocacy, Sims says, receives about four to five calls per week—the most common of which come from domestic violence or sexual assault survivors looking for housing or shelter.

“I like to provide services for people who are homeless as well and let them know that they can still live with dignity—that you can not have an address and still be a vital part of our community,” Sims says. “Being a service provider in the community [is to] recognize someone for their value, not for their socioeconomic status—that’s really important to me.”

But it was her thesis, “Social Service and Law Enforcement Responses to Human Trafficking,” that would end up sparking a blaze in Marin’s community agency circuit.

“I was interested in looking at what our county was doing to address human trafficking,” Sims says. “It was a really hot-button issue for other counties in the Bay Area and it was a little head-scratching why people weren’t looking at it in Marin County.”

During her research, Sims says, she spoke to members from the County of Marin Probation Department to the District Attorney’s Office to the Human Rights Commission to further explore human trafficking’s presence in Marin.

“[The agencies] did a Google search and the only thing that came up was my thesis,” she says. “So we started working together to try and get more awareness to the general public that this is an issue that is happening here. When I kind of identified that there was a need for community awareness, there was a huge response from law enforcement and community agencies.”

That response formed the Marin County Human Trafficking Task Force, a collaboration of agencies that includes the DA’s office, the Dominican Sisters of San Rafael and Health and Human Services. From April to October of this year alone, the task force has identified and provided referrals to 27 human trafficking survivors countywide.

Sims is quick to add that human trafficking doesn’t just mean “a mass amount of people moving huge distances.” It’s force-, fear- and coercion-based, she says. “It’s not just people being brought into the country hidden or tucked away. It could be someone who is from Marin County who is being forced to work against [his or her] will.”

With the increased involvement of Marin’s agencies in the task force, Sims is able to shift her focus back on WMA, her friends and family.

“My role models are my peers,” Sims says, speaking matter-of-factly about her close-knit network. “Working moms and people who manage to work and care for their kids without the ability to pay for full-time child care. Pretty much all of the women that I grew up with—they are the people that when I want to stay in bed, I think of them and it’s sort of like a really positive peer pressure.”

Hero FYI

• What does Sims do for fun? “Clean the house when I’m not working!” she says with a laugh.
• When asked about her most rewarding accomplishment, without hesitation Sims says, “My daughters.”
• In October, WMA and the Marin County Human Trafficking Task Force started a campaign around the county for human trafficking. Images of labor trafficking were provided by a federal campaign and appeared at 40 bus stops.