A Force for Good

For Leola Lapides, a life of service in Santa Cruz County started with a flyer in her mailbox. It was sometime in the mid-1980s, and Leola and her husband Bob Katz were running a successful law practice with offices in San Jose and Capitola, living in Aptos, and raising their two young children. The flyer was from an organization called Women’s Crisis Support (now Monarch Services) and Leola was stunned to find out how prevalent domestic violence was in Santa Cruz County.

In her law practice, she’d fielded occasional calls from women who had asked her for help. “They were always so scared, telling me they couldn’t leave their homes. I never knew what to do or how to counsel them. I think I told them to go to the hospital.”

Getting the flyer was a sign for her to learn more, so she and Bob set up an appointment to visit the Women’s Crisis Support office. Within a few days, Leola was on the Board of Directors. She then recruited several high-level people in the legal community to join the Board, including the District Attorney and a superior court judge.

Leola reflects, “I came from a very humble background. With a house, kids, and a good career, I felt so privileged. I feel like everyone should have that. Everything starts at home. Having a healthy family where everyone is safe, fed, loved, and protected. It sets a basis for society.”

Education of an Advocate

Leola was born in 1953 in Nagoya, Japan to a Japanese Buddhist mother and a Jewish American father, a career military officer who was stationed in Japan after the end of World War II. Leola, her parents, and her brother moved to Okinawa, then Denver, Colorado for a brief time, and then back to Tokyo where she went to high school at a Department of Defense school. All her schooling and home life was in English. Leola notes that unfortunately, her mother didn’t encourage her children to be bilingual so that her children would be raised, “100% American.”

After she graduated from UC Berkeley in 1975, Leola contemplated her next move which she knew would include higher education, she just didn’t know in what field. “I felt alone in the world. My brother was in San Diego, my parents were in Japan, and I had no other family. I was very petite, very young-looking, and a mixed-race Asian woman. It felt like people didn’t take me seriously at all.”

Leola realized that she had to figure out how to protect herself. “I needed to know what my rights were, so I decided to go to law school and learn what the laws are.” When she got to Santa Clara University’s law program, she saw that a law degree was a powerful tool to advocate for others as well. She immediately joined the Asian Law Alliance as well as the campus chapter of the ACLU, and a group advocating to abolish South African apartheid.

Finding Home

Leola and Bob met the first week of law school and have been together ever since. They started coming to Santa Cruz while they were still law students, visiting a shared mentor who had moved to a nursing home here.

They had an old Toyota then, one that barely made it over the hill on Highway 17, which back in those days, didn’t yet have the center divider. The drive was often harrowing, Leola admits, but she and Bob fell in love with the county.

Leola says, “We knew it was a great place to raise kids. It’s beautiful, with clean air, clean water, open spaces, the sand, the sea, and the trees.”

For the first several years they lived in Santa Cruz County, Bob and Leola commuted to San Jose to run their practice which grew to a large firm of 10 attorneys. But soon, their kids were born—Monica in 1984 and Colby in 1986—and it quickly became clear to Leola that she couldn’t continue the pace of driving every day.

One day, during a weekend stroll in Capitola, they saw a “for sale” sign in a law office where one of the partners wanted to sell. They bought into the building and eventually downsized, moving their whole practice to this side of 17.

A Turning Point

Bob and Leola’s law practice specialized in civil litigation, taking cases on everything from personal injury to contracts and real estate litigation.

But Leola admits, “I never liked going to court. And I did it for years!” She laughs, “I would have to stand in front of a judge with a smile on my face and frankly, it wasn’t my personality. I'm a consensus builder not an arguer. I just want to help people.”

Eventually, Leola decided to retire from law and get more involved in community projects. “Back then,” she recognizes, “it was sustainable for one person to work and support the family. It’s almost impossible to do that financially today and I’m very grateful for the opportunity I had.”

Leola dove headlong into community service and is still deep in it today over 40 years later. From serving on her first boards at ACLU and Women’s Crisis Support, Leola has worked in service to support children and youth, seniors and people experiencing homelessness, the LGBTQ+ community, environmental causes, and the performing arts. Her board service and volunteerism has taken her to the Children’s Theater, CASA, Pajaro Valley Unified School District, Life Lab, Temple Beth El, Cabrillo College, the Japanese Cultural Fair, the Community Foundation, and more.

Rolling Up Her Sleeves

Leola enthusiastically explains that she is a lifelong learner. “When I decide to join an organization, I go all in. I learn everything I can about the nonprofit, the staff, the mission, and how they do their work. I volunteer, I donate money, I help with fundraising, and of course, serve on Boards.”

Over the years, Leola has learned how best she can contribute. She helps with legal expertise, contract review, and consensus building. She mentors leaders, especially in board development, and helps board members be as effective as possible.

Ever the advocate, Leola also helps people build negotiation skills, not just for salary negotiations, but around conditions at work. “At the places I volunteer, I get to know the folks that work there and learn about their personal struggles. Are they living with some dysfunction in the family? Do they have illness in the family? Do they have cancer themselves? I will talk to people and just encourage them. Bob and I both share this. We both feel that when you support an organization, you're actually supporting the people doing the work.”

Values into Action

Although Leola was raised American, her mother Yuriko, ingrained in her the very Japanese values of mutual respect, collective responsibility, and social harmony. These were the values that Yuriko embodied throughout her long life. She was a community mediator in Japan, helping facilitate dialogue between arguing neighbors. Then towards of the end of her life, she served San Jose’s Japantown as a volunteer librarian.

From her father Harry, Leola learned the Jewish value of Tikkun Olam, a central principle of Judaism which means repairing the world. Leola laughs, “I got it from both sides! Through my parents I came to believe and practice the importance of giving back.”

A Natural Fit

In the 1990s, Georgia Brauer was serving as president of the Community Foundation’s Board of Trustees. It was Georgia, a dear friend of Leola and Bob’s, that first invited them to open a Donor-Advised Fund (DAF) at the Foundation as a centralized place to do their charitable giving. Leola says, “The idea of joining the Community Foundation family came very naturally to me.” And then, in true Leola fashion, she joined the Board and served for nine years from 2006 – 2014. In that time, she was on every possible committee including the scholarship committee, the grantmaking committee, and the executive committee.

Bob and Leola have had their DAF for over 30 years now. She says, “At the time we opened it, my kids were young, and as they grew, it gave us the wonderful opportunity to teach them the importance of giving time, giving effort, and giving money as much as you can to causes you believe in.”

Leola and Bob also established a Memorandum of Charitable Intent (MOCI) at the Foundation to ensure that they can help support the causes they care about even after they are gone. The MOCI is a simple document that the Community Foundation uses to help donors create and direct gifts from their estate, whether through a will, living trust, or beneficiary designation.

Leola says, “The MOCI is the vehicle that streamlines our giving while enabling us a holistic approach to community philanthropy.”

Keeping the Ball Rolling

Right now, Leola isn’t serving on any Boards of Directors, but you can be sure she is working behind the scenes on many projects, fundraising, mentoring, and recruiting folks into board service.

Her deepest wish for everyone in Santa Cruz County is that people experience ease, safety, and wellbeing.

She says, “We have a small enough county where we can really help each other. I truly feel that together, we can move this ball forward to make Santa Cruz County a better place.”