Cynthia Hecker became a social worker as her fourth career, after working as an attorney for Great Society community legal services programs in the 1970’s, as a mother in her adoptive family with Peter Hecker and two daughters, and as a nearly full-time school volunteer, with roles ranging from school management support at the small private Windrush School, to classroom support at Berkeley Unified School District’s King Middle and Berkeley High schools.
Her formal education consisted of public school in Collingswood, NJ (a small town near Philadelphia, PA), Wellesley College, Harvard Law School and UC Berkeley’s School of Social Work, where she earned an MSW with a concentration in Children and Families and a Pupil Personnel School Services certificate. She worked for 8 years in a school based mental health program run by Seneca Center in Bay Point, CA, retiring in 2014.
Since retiring she has taken up quilting and, during the Pandemic, mask-making (over 150 and still counting). She has traveled internationally with her sister to bird watch and with husband Peter, especially to visit their daughter who created a family in Israel. She still volunteers in Berkeley schools as a writing coach with the Writer Coach Connection.