Civic Story: Danielle Bender
Danielle Bender is a Tacoma native through and through. Both sides of her family are from the area; in fact, she’s a fourth generation Wilson High alum. “My background with Tacoma is very blue collar, hard workers. I love that about Tacoma.” Danielle is from a family of entrepreneurs. Her grandpa and his siblings worked in the auto industry, her uncle owns Dawon’s in the South End, her mom owns Over The Moon Cafe on Opera Alley.
She grew up with stories about the good old days. “My grandpa worked downtown at Walker Chevrolet. I talk about going to Hank’s on Taco Tuesday, and he tells me the whole back story like why it was named Hank’s. I barely remember all the things that he’s telling me. He’s a recovering alcoholic, so his stories are pretty insane. Walker Chevrolet is now Rhein Haus, so that was kinda sad for me to see that go because it was a car dealership and auto parts place for forever.” Identifying strongly with the city brings a special, personal connection to the neighborhoods. “I feel at home when I’m driving down South Tacoma Way and I’m like, ‘My dad’s friend works there, my dad’s friend works there…’ It’s all these people who make an honest living. I really like that and appreciate that.”
Waitressing at her mom’s upscale but affordable restaurant, Danielle’s perspective of the city has been couched in an experience of a family-owned business. “I’m super passionate about supporting the local businesses, people who are from Tacoma.” Long before the newer businesses moved in, local chefs and restauranteurs were at work, and Danielle draws a distinction between Tacoma-owned businesses and those owned by folks outside the city. “This is such a stupid example, but [years ago] we had duck breast on our menu, and people were so freaked out about duck. [People said,] ‘What is that? Why are you guys trying to be fancy and serve that?’” Danielle says plenty of local restaurants and community members have been educating the community and growing the food scene. Now, since more Seattle businesses have been expanding into Tacoma, Danielle says it’s been difficult to see people get excited about restaurants imported from outside Tacoma in contrast to the many long-standing businesses already in the city. “We’ve been here doing this,” she says. “There’s people who are part of the community who have been tilling the soil, getting people ready.”
The food industry gives a unique perspective on the community’s kindness too, says Danielle. “It’s totally Grit City. You see that with how generous people are as consumers in Tacoma. People who love Tacoma and want to support local businesses — maybe they don’t have the income to be super generous, but they are generous. The most generous people that I know are blue collar people in Tacoma. And that covers different races, different cultural backgrounds, it’s not limited to like white working class men in Tacoma. That’s another crazy thing from working in the restaurant: people have so many stereotypes about the kind of diners there are. And they just don’t exist. That’s not what we see. So all of that beautifully makes up Tacoma. The community is great there.”
Having history in a place gave Danielle a unique view of the city; at the University of Puget Sound, she noted the juxtaposition of being a Tacoma local versus how others saw Tacoma as the incidental landscape behind their college experience.
“I thought it was super weird when I went to college, and they were like, ‘We’re going to do an urban dive in downtown Tacoma. Look at all the homeless people.’ And I’m like, that’s Jeffrey. People know him and talk to him.”
As a resident of Tacoma and as a family-owned business in the neighborhood, your stake in the game is different from people coming in to provide solutions from outside the city. For one, your “homelessness issue” has a first name.
“You don’t build relationships in one-off volunteer opportunities. The dichotomy is just that. You want to create impact, but I believe impact happens in relationships. I’m embarrassingly [fanatic about being] from Tacoma, but I do also have deep roots and deep relationships here, and that’s what I value.
“One of the things I love about Tacoma is people making honest livings.” In addition to her mom being a restaurant owner, her dad is a cement deliverer, so Danielle grew up respecting manual labor. “I sat in this debrief,” she says, about a college service day at Point Defiance, “and these people are talking about how hard it was to rake beauty bark for a couple hours. They’re like, ‘I can’t believe people do this, it just gives me so much respect. I want to smile at them when I walk past them and see people working.’ And I’m like, ‘Are you serious?!’”
At the same time, going to college gave her perspective and bigger ideas for her future, something she hadn’t considered growing up. “When you’re surrounded by people who are just living to pay the bills, you don't have room for imagination and dream-chasing and stuff like that. That opened up that world for me. I gained so much from it.”
In regards to her hopes and dreams of the city, Danielle says, “I do wish that our community was a little bit more educated on what’s going on. The parts of the city can be really fragmented, and different socioeconomic classes living amongst each other can be really separated. I feel like Tacoma has a lot of pride, especially in my generation, but I feel like people could see how easy it is to help sustain the city, and to give more to local businesses than Walmart. A lot of that is poverty and stuff that don’t allow it, but it could be cool if we could a little bit less about making money and a little more about how we can do that.”
“We were at Infinite Soups and somebody didn’t have cash, and they were like, ‘It’s okay.’ Just people like that. They’ve been there for years. So they’re people where I’m like, yeah you guys get it. I wish we could continue educating and building relationships with one another.”
The change Danielle hopes for isn’t just micro, interpersonally, but also macro, policies.
“When McMenamin’s [Elks Temple] came in, there’s all these businesses by McMenamin’s. And the City of Tacoma did not make them put a parking garage in, so we already had a couple businesses move out of the neighborhood because their patrons just can’t come in. That’s kind of a bummer.” Historic businesses who had been in that area had to move, says Danielle, “so that was really hard to see a lot of our neighbors go.”
These days, Danielle is grateful and encouraging her peers to pass it on. Many of the folks she grew up with came from single-parent households, were first-generation college students, or had adversity in their childhoods. “I think contributing to your community is not forgetting where you come from and where your peers come from, even if you do achieve this success or stability or comfortable lifestyle. Even if these people were just willing to talk about what they had come from, I feel like that would make people not feel so lonely with the stuff that they come from.”
“I have a greater appreciation of where I came from, and why that kind of life is also okay, and honorable, and respectful. I’m a big community person. I have so many generous people in my life, friendships, friends that care well for me and make it easy to care for them.”
If you’d like to support Danielle’s families restaurant, Over the Moon Cafe during this time, they're taking orders for curbside pickup!
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED MAY 18, 2020