Help Susan Peters in her Recovery from Gravity!

Susan Peters needs help in recovering from her battle with gravity!

Susan Peters is a dynamic, multi-talented person who is facing mounting personal and medical bills and, temporarily, no income. She is a Building Substitute Teacher at School #76, the Herman Badillo Bilingual Academy, working with young children, and weaving music and original poetry into her teaching practice whenever practical. She sings alto with the Chopin Singing Society, and sits on the board of directors of this 125-year-old cultural organization. She is also a vocalist, fronting the Susan Peters jazz band, backed up by some of WNY’s finest musicians, and privileged to play at Duende once a month.

A green thumb extraordinaire, Susan is the Garden Coordinator at her school, growing organic vegetables for students, staff, and the community, with help from a partnership with People, Inc’s Young Adult Life Transitions Program at Canisius College. This alliance provides Interns who may be differently-abled, who come to the garden to work and learn and share in the harvest. The garden beds also feature annuals and perennials, including native plants, to nourish and nurture a variety of pollinators. If you pass the garden, on the corner of Elmwood and Tupper, look at the new Girasole/Sunflower Garden, in full bloom. It was a lot of work, but the young people who helped make it possible are as delighted with the results as the migrating birds who will find the flowers.

Susan also is graced with beautiful gardens in the yard of her modest Allentown apartment. Both spaces are especially vibrant with intentional and volunteer sunflowers, to the delight of the little seed-eating birds that brighten up her lovely slice of the planet. This year there has been a stunning Praying Mantis molting and growing and eating up all the crickets in the Tiger Lily bed, what fun to watch him/her/they (?) in action…

Susan is currently working on the seventh (!) draft of her one-act play, Blood Child, and hopes to schedule a staged reading before the end of the year. This play concerns a woman and a younger man, bound by blood and music, who must discover who they actually are to one another before they can reconcile and both continue to live.

Susan took a fall in her driveway one rainy Sunday in August, breaking a wrist and hip. She required an emergency hip replacement and has a cast on her arm. She is using a cane to get around and is not quite ready to get back to school. She has had physical therapy to get back on her feet, and will need it again once the cast comes off her wrist. She has also required some home modifications. Once the hip heals, (after the first of the year), she has been approved for a knee replacement but plans to return to work in between. Of course, her first paycheck will come after a two week lag, while co-pays and medical expenses keep adding up.

Susan did not receive a summer gardening stipend this year due to circumstances beyond her control. Not yet able to return to school, she hasn’t been paid since June. As a Sub, she receives no benefits- no paid time off, no unemployment, no health insurance aside from Medicare, and has been living off her meager savings, which is running out. Without getting into a rant about how horribly teachers, especially Subs, are paid…Can you show some support for a hard-working, creative woman?