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About Jill


Jill Miller Zimon

Although many readers of Writes Like She Talks may only know Jill because of WLST, it represents just one of many ways in which she’s pursued a lifelong interest in civic engagement.

Jill has lived in Northeastern Ohio for more than 20 years and in the eastern suburb of Pepper Pike since 1999, but she grew up outside New Haven, Connecticut.  She graduated from Amity Regional Senior High School, where one of her academic highlights was conducting an independent research project on juvenile recidivism.  She entered Georgetown University’s School of Language and Linguistics as a Chinese major. However, after witnessing her sociology professor, a Dominican priest, throw his collar on the ground like a gauntlet before G-d, stomp on it and cigarette-squish it into the linoleum to make a point about the power and limitation of symbols, she transferred into the College of Arts and Sciences and earned a double major in government and sociology.

While a student in Washington, D.C., Jill worked for nearly two years in the United States Department of Justice (headed then by Attorney General William French Smith).  She was the first intern in the Office of Public Affairs’ Speakers Bureau and eventually helped create and supervise the Bureau’s intern program.  Her primary responsibility was to track the media appearances of DOJ officials, such as Ken Starr and Rudolph Giuliani, as they sought to support then-President Ronald Reagan’s immigration initiative, the Simpson-Mazzoli Bill. Jill followed this work with a summer internship on Capitol Hill for her congressman, Bruce A. Morrison.

Based on the positive experiences Jill had during two stints of Spring Break volunteer work in Red Bird Mission, Kentucky, she decided to participate in an Israel-based work program after college graduation.  While there, she lived or worked on a moshav, also known as a farming community, in a development town and on a kibbutz.  She also traveled, often alone, in Egypt and several countries in Europe.

Jill returned to New Haven in 1985 and was hired by the Yale University Office of Development as a researcher in its Major Gifts Department. Within eighteen months, she became Director of Research for Corporate and Foundation Relations.  She was the first development office manager to get approval for buying and using a Macintosh computer.  At that time, it was the only computer equipped to create the graphic displays of foundations’ programming priorities that Jill had designed for presentation to the Yale Corporation. On weekends, Jill taught Pre-Kindergarten and Kindergarten at the synagogue in which she was raised, Temple Emanuel.

Jill moved to Cleveland, Ohio in 1988 to pursue a joint degree in law and social work at Case Western Reserve University. Her work and field placements during four years of graduate school included:

Additionally, while still in school, Jill wrote an application for and received a $7,500 grant from the Bruening Foundation. Her project was conducted at the request of the University Hospitals’ Chief of Pediatric Residents. It provided the first-ever training manual and workshops to help health care professionals identify, assess and intervene on behalf of  domestic violence victims who present in a pediatric setting.

Just prior to completing her degrees in 1992, Jill accepted the newly created job of Ombudsman at Bellefaire JCB, a private nonprofit mental health agency for families and children. She began her eight-year affiliation with Bellefaire shortly after she took and later passed both the Ohio Bar exam and Ohio’s exam for a social worker license.  Jill’s responsibilities included complaint resolution for agency stakeholders, in-service training on topics such as duty to protect, testifying in court and legal liability, contract negotiations on behalf of the 40-plus member child care agency alliance to which Bellefaire belonged, and legal research and writing.

Jill worked several permutations of schedules at Bellefaire in order to accommodate the pregnancies and birth of her three children, as well as the demands of the agency. Eventually, she became its first Director of Risk Management and overhauled its disaggregated intake services into a centralized intake system. She later telecommuted as an independent consultant on a case by case basis. She’s extremely proud to know that three staff whom she hired in the late 1990s continue to work and help run Bellefaire.

By 2001, Jill began a career in freelance writing after being encouraged by award-winning former editor and current reporter for The Plain Dealer, Margaret Bernstein. Jill’s first published and paid for writing was an opinion column in The Plain Dealer (it analogized the federal government’s duty to warn, in light of the knowledge it possessed prior to September 11, 2001, to the mental health profession’s risk assessment and duty to warn protocols). Her Cleveland Family column, “Mommy Matters,” won three national awards in four years in addition to numerous other awards and recognitions for writing published internationally, in print and online. As a result of her writing, she is a frequent political and new media commentator for broadcast media. You can watch, listen and read some of her work here.

Over the years, Jill also has acted on her commitment to community-based activity outside of paid employment. In college and law school, she worked with inner-city big brother/big sister-styled projects in both Washington, D.C. and Cleveland.  During her time in law and social work school, she was a member and officer of the Student Public Interest Law Fellowship organization, a group dedicated to helping underserved and unserved populations that also helped establish loan forgiveness for graduates who enter public interest law.

In Jill’s current community, where all three of her children attend the Orange public schools, she serves on the board of the Orange Schools Foundation, an entity which raises funds to provide invaluable materials and in-service training for teachers and area residents.  Jill completed the IRS process that helped the Orange Parents Education Network achieve 501(c)(3) status for its work in providing parents of children with special education and/or gifted education needs information.  Jill served on OPEN’s board for several years. She has been a room mother and volunteer for her childrens’ classrooms multiple times, as well as a Motor Mom (helping Kindergarten through third grade classrooms sharpen childrens’ motor skills) and a committee member of the Reflections program, an annual district-wide arts and culture competition.

Although Jill’s most well-known city-wide achievement to date involved the easing of Pepper Pike restrictions on the number of political yard signs allowed in each resident’s yard prior to election day (an accomplishment for which the Sun Newspapers named her 2008 Most Influential Person in Pepper Pike), she became involved in Pepper Pike matters not long after she and her family moved to the city over ten years ago.  First, she was invited onto the citizen’s committee, originally formed at the suggestion of Mayor Bruce Akers, to examine the possibility of creating recreational paths. Since then, she’s served on the city’s Ice Cream Social organizing committee and has attended city meetings. She’s held the role of Secretary for the Landerwood Estates neighborhood and is proud that she planned and pulled off several successful fall clambakes for Landerwood.

Jill attributes her ability to devote herself to family, community, career and multidisciplinary interests to the tremendous support she receives from her  children and husband of nearly 18 years, Jeff.  She is and always will be grateful for their love and humor as together they continue their lives in Ohio.

If you want to see a more formal version of Jill’s experience and education, please check her portfolio which links to early and often not online material, and her resumé. She loves to receive and send mail, so if you still have questions or comments, let her know. Although it might not provide the tactile experience of wood pulp, it delivers the sentiments just as well.

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