This Time, Activists Can Just Sit and Watch : Women’s Network Alert to Honor Those Who Spend Their Time on Others

“I think I was born political,” Arlene Sontag said with a husky laugh. “To me, getting up in the morning and putting your feet on the floor is a political decision.”

“I don’t think about politics, feminism, things like that,” Marina Soto McLaughlin said with a shy smile. “I do what I do because I feel it in my heart. I listen to my heart.”

From such divergent philosophies spring the activist impulse.

Sontag and McLaughlin are among five Orange County women who will be honored today for their contributions to the community at the Women’s Network Alert Eighth Annual Suffrage Day luncheon at the Balboa Bay Club in Newport Beach.

More than 200 guests are expected at the light-lunch-and-short-speeches affair, a gathering of the county’s distaff activists, dedicated volunteers and a “handful” of men “who are feminists in the larger sense of the word,” said Vivian Hall, event co-chairwoman and co-founder of Women’s Network Alert.

Sontag, of Anaheim Hills, has perhaps the highest profile among this year’s honorees. In addition to her job as coordinator of the hazardous-materials office of the Orange County Fire Department--where she plans the siting for future disposal of toxic wastes--she is president of the board of directors of the South County YWCA; a board member of the Elections Committee of the County of Orange, a gay political group (Sontag is straight), and an active member of half a dozen other community groups.

Sontag, a widowed mother of four, is also a former vice chairwoman of the National Women’s Political Caucus--the primary national organization devoted to electing women.

Listing her affiliations, Sontag joked, “When I stop and listen to that stuff, I think, ‘Next life, I’m gonna be irresponsible!’ ”

In this life, she is duty-bound.

“I guess my primary interest is in helping to elect women to office,” Sontag said. “We don’t have 50% representation in government, and as soon as we have it, I’m going home and take piano lessons.”

Like Sontag, Lee Podolak channels her considerable energy into the political arena, serving as chairwoman of the Women’s Coalition of Orange County, which hosts an annual “Political Woman” seminar at Rancho Santiago College.

Podolak, who is married and has two children, traced her activism back to “the basic homeowner-type concerns, the muck-in-the-mud concerns” she took up 20 years ago. Her interests broadened when she joined the League of Women Voters in 1970, she said, and again after the “true awakening” of two unsuccessful campaigns for City Council in Orange.

This election year, Podolak is “working for ballot measures, not candidates.”

Maud Brierre-Shambrook is working toward nothing short of “international understanding among people of all different cultures.”

Brierre-Shambrook, a native of Haiti and an Orange County resident for 13 years, is a Saddleback College professor of French and Spanish, a published poet and an idealist. Five years ago, she founded a nonprofit educational organization called World International Center of Orange County to work toward her goal of cultural understanding, through such activities as an essay-writing contest for high school students and food distribution drives.

Brierre-Shambrook, who is married and has three children, said she also gives lectures at least a dozen times a year (as during the recent UC Irvine Black History Month).

“I usually take slides from the many, many countries I have been to that will help us not forget that the American culture is part of the international scene,” she said.

In Orange County, the international scene is part of the local culture--and part of Mitzi Tonai’s workday.

As coordinator of the English as a Second Language program at Stone Creek Elementary School in Irvine, Tonai worked last year with a total of 33 Mexican, Indo-Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Iranian and South American children. She also served as the school’s liaison to the Japanese community, putting to good use the second language she learned on the lap of her grandmother.

Tonai, who lives in Irvine with her husband and three children, balances her part-time job with other “child-oriented” activities through membership in local chapters of the American Assn. of University Women and the National Charity League.

Completing the list of Women’s Network Alert honorees is McLaughlin--an Irvine mother of two who has devoted her career and her spare time for a decade to the plight of the county’s migrant workers.

Although McLaughlin has worked in the migrant-education programs of three of the county school districts--currently at Oak View Elementary School in Huntington Beach--her activism for migrant workers and their families goes far beyond the duties of her job. She helps families get food, clothing, affordable housing and health care, she acts as their advocate with landlords and county agencies, and she has even taken families into her own home.

“I came here from Guatemala 20 years ago, for economic reasons, just like these people,” she said. “I see the overwhelming need, and I know what they are going through. When I see the need, I do what I can do.”