If you’ve ever wondered, “Is it too late for me to...” the answer’s NO and The Uplifters are about to show you why. This space is for purpose-driven women who want to do big, brave things in the second half of their lives. I’m your host, Aransas Savas, and I’ve spent the last 20 years at the intersection of behavior change research and coaching.
This month, in honor of Women’s History month, we’re featuring midlife women who are making history in big and small ways.
This week you’ll hear from Corinne van der Borch and Edwina White whose documentary subject, Miss T, a Brooklyn crossing guard teaches us how tiny moments can have deep and lasting impact
Then, you’ll meet
Rebecca Wells and Carolyn Broullon who ran against each other for mayor in a tiny New Jersey town. They’ll show us how proximity and face-to-face engagement can reconnect communities - and why your backyard is the place to start making change.
Kerri Kennedy who has spent two decades challenging authoritarianism worldwide. She’ll teach us the specific actions ordinary people (especially midlife women) can take right now to protect democracy - no political experience required.
And finally you’ll meet Deborah Koenigsberger, a former model, who started Hearts of Gold, which has helped over 45,000 homeless mothers and children since 1994.
There’s a corner in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, where something pretty extraordinary happens every single morning.
A woman in a bright vest, with a neon yellow hat like a highlighter tip, steps out in whatever weather the day has thrown at her — rain, hail, slush, smog or sweltering heat — and brings the same presence and joy every time. She greets each child by name. She hands them cards on their birthdays. She throws parties to bring them all together.
Her name is Miss T and she has been the crossing guard at the same corner for over 22 years.
Award-winning documentary filmmaker Corinne van der Borch and artist-animator Edwina White met in their local dog park, became friends, collaborated on a Sesame Street project, and eventually found themselves standing on Miss T’s corner with cameras, watching the whole neighborhood gravitate toward this one woman. Their upcoming short documentary, I Got You, is a love letter to her, full of life lessons for all of us.
Edwina was navigating a divorce and squatters in her home as they began filming. Corinne had just lost her mother. The corner where Miss T stood every day became, in Corinne’s words, the place where the heaviness just kind of disappeared.
This episode is about what happens when we connect with the people we pass each day and create a community.
What the research tells us about community is striking, especially for women navigating midlife: social isolation is a genuine health risk, and yet the antidote doesn’t always require grand gestures. The research on “loose ties” — the acquaintances, the regular faces, the person you nod to every morning — suggests that these relationships contribute meaningfully to our sense of belonging and even our resilience. Miss T has converted every loose tie in her orbit into something that looks and feels like family.
Their Courage Practices
Edwina said that during some of the hardest months of her life — when her home felt unsafe, when she was “performing calm” for her daughter while everything was falling apart — the corner was where she could be real. Outside. In the cold. With Miss T and the cameras and the parents and the kids.
And Miss T’s own practice? She is radically selective about where she puts her energy. She is open, warm, enormously generous with her love — and when someone does her wrong, she doesn’t carry the anger. She just quietly closes that door. She wishes them well and moves on. No bitterness. Just: that chapter is done, and here is where my love goes instead.
There’s a real lesson in there for those of us who burn through our courage capital holding onto what drains us, instead of putting it all into what lifts us up.
5 Ways Corinne, Edwina, and Miss T Show Us How to Build Our Courage Capital:
Start hyperlocally. Miss T didn’t set out to transform a neighborhood. She showed up on one corner, for one job, with her whole self. Corinne and Edwina didn’t chase a global story — they turned their cameras on the person twenty feet from the school gate. The most lasting impact so often begins one block from where we’re standing.
Do the work visibly. The moment Corinne and Edwina started filming on the corner, neighbors walked up and offered to help — a DP who shoots gorgeous commercial work, a parent who helped navigate grant applications, a friend who brought a drone and caught the sunrise. Visibility invites collaboration. You cannot receive help you haven’t let anyone see you need.
Turn loose ties into strong ones. Miss T’s birthday cards, her twice-yearly dinner parties, her daily emoji check-ins — these aren’t accidents. They’re a practice. She converts every fleeting connection into something that lasts. We can all do this. It just requires showing up, remembering names, and meaning it.
Accept help in kind. “In kind is pretty much how we’ve rolled,” Edwina said. Skills, time, cameras, expertise — the whole project has been built by people who believed in it and offered what they had. Releasing the need to fund everything and control everything creates the conditions for a genuine community to form around your work.
Close the doors that drain you — with grace. Miss T doesn’t do lingering resentment. When a relationship stops being good for her, she closes it, quietly and without rancor, and pours that freed-up energy back into the people who light her up. This is not coldness. It is extraordinarily good emotional stewardship.
Lift Miss T, Corinne, and Edwina Up
Corinne and Edwina need a little from a lot of people to bring I Got You to completion — finishing funds for animation, color correction, music composition, and the legal and technical polish that will take Miss T to film festivals and, they hope, to audiences in Brooklyn, and around the world. You can contribute at their GoFundMe — even the cost of an expensive coffee moves them further down the road. And if you have professional skills in film finishing, color grading, or music composition, they’d love to hear from you.
If you loved this story...
Miss T’s gift is connection — and we’ve talked to so many women who are doing that exact work in their own corners of the world. You might love Gina Hamadey’s episode on writing thank-you notes to the everyday people who make our lives better (the guy at the deli, the crossing guard), or to really see the power of starting in your own backyard, listen to my interview with Helen Arteaga Landaverde, the Deputy Mayor of Health & Human Services for NYC.
Can We Talk About This Episode?
Who is the Miss T in your neighborhood — the person whose presence makes the hard days lighter? And have you told them?
