Experience

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  Berkshire Healthcare Systems (now rebranded as Integritus)

  • Pittsfield, Massachusetts, United States

  • Human Resources Assistant

    • May 2014 - Jun 2021
    • Pittsfield, Massachusetts, United States

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  Berkshires Business Services

  • Berkshire County, MA and Columbia County, NY

  • Owner and Principal

    • Jan 2014 - Jan 2016
    • Berkshire County, MA and Columbia County, NY

    Contractor on long- or short-range projects or for permanent employment in roles as diverse as bookkeeping and payroll; administrative/executive support; writing, editing and document design; research, technical and general support services. I work increasingly on web-based platforms, relying on Internet capabilities to literally work from anywhere -- in airports or moving cars if necessary.Administrative/Executive Support: Office and practice management and client services. As the "first face" of the company, I am experienced in answering and routing incoming calls, calendaring appointments and composing routine and executive correspondence. Also develop and implement customer outreach programs and resolve client needs at basic and paraprofessional levels. Bookkeeping and Financial Services - QuickBooks experience reconciling bank and credit card accounts, billing, and AR/AP, timekeeping and expense-tracking. Have administered payroll for clients with 3 - 40 employees on the major platforms (ADP, Paychex, Intuit).Writing, Editing and Document Design – Extensive writing with an emphasis on editing, graphic design, and proofreading. Have developed introductory and advanced training materials on the use and maintenance of a customized document management system; proofread, edited, and performed destination research and description for a high-end travel catalogue; written a monthly newsletter for a community action group; typeset and done light editing on a variety of university-produced books and publications.Research – Have surveyed and reported on topics of special interest to clientele including: Characterizing sites offering free educational content; researched and charted organizational behavior to explore whether there were some common, codifiable practices to implement to mitigate the effects of a recession; researched, analyzed and reported on Federal funding opportunities for a technology startup.

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  Tidepool Pottery

  • Master Potter, Owner and Principal

    • Feb 1997 - Jan 2014

    My ceramic work, influenced deeply by Japanese tea wares and the modern ceramic work of Hans Coper and Lucie Rie, is both modern and timeless, and fits readily into a wide variety of home and life styles. Throughout, as today, I was as enlivened by the question "what if?" as the first time I touched clay. The same two clay bodies and six glazes I started presented an infinite world of possibilities for shape and color. My customers continually expanded those possibilities by their requests for pieces specific to their lives' needs and styles.As a studio artist I created all my inventory by hand, developed and produced all my own collateral, including a web site, and performed all support activities such as inventorying and ordering supplies, bookkeeping, marketing and order fulfillment. A natural materials and process engineer, I managed ware through a complex process requiring critical judgements on a daily basis to complete and fire a 30 cu. ft. kilnload – every four to six weeks in the first decade as full-time artisan – and have developed and mix all my own glazes from raw materials.

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  Tidepool Enterprises

  • San Francisco Bay Area,

  • Contract Bookkeeping and Payroll, Administrative and Executive Support, Research, Writing and Design

    • Dec 2000 - Dec 2013
    • San Francisco Bay Area,

    Consultant/contractor on a variety of long- and short-range projects in bookkeeping, writing, editing and document design, research, technical and general executive support services: I work increasingly on web-based platforms, relying on Internet capabilities to literally work from anywhere -- in airports or moving cars if necessary.Administrative/Executive Support: Office and practice management and client services. As the "first face" of the company, I am experienced in answering and routing incoming calls, calendaring appointments and composing routine and executive correspondence. Also develop and implement customer outreach programs and resolve client needs at basic and paraprofessional levels. Bookkeeping and Financial Services - QuickBooks experience reconciling bank and credit card accounts, billing, and AR/AP, timekeeping and expense-tracking. Have administered payroll for clients with 3 - 40 employees on the major platforms (ADP, Paychex, Intuit).Writing, Editing and Document Design – Extensive writing with an emphasis on editing, graphic design, and proofreading. Projects have included development of introductory and advanced training materials on the use and maintenance of a customized document management system; proofreading, light editing, destination research and description for a high-end travel catalogue; writing, editing and producing a monthly newsletter for a community action group; typesetting and light editing for a variety of university-produced books and publications.Research – Have surveyed and reported on topics of special interest to clientele including: Characterizing sites offering free educational content; using annual reports, financials and media reports to chart organizational behavior and explore whether there were some common, codifiable practices to implement to mitigate the effects of a recession; researched, analyzed and reported on Federal funding opportunities for a technology startup.

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  Howes Complete Tax and Bookkeeping

  • San Francisco Bay Area

  • Tax Administrator

    • Aug 2011 - Sep 2012
    • San Francisco Bay Area

    Provided administrative support to tax, bookkeeping and payroll clients by emailing reminders of materials due. Worked with tax preparers and bookkeeping manager to address client questions and prepare for audits. Assisted with bookkeeping data entry and reconciliations and preparing sales and payroll tax filings. Scanned tax documents and assembled tax returns. Ran payrolls for 30 clients ranging in size from 2 to 30 employees. Also brought practice management system into full implementation and documented its use and trained coworkers.

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  Genesis Underwriting Management Company

  • Underwriting Assistant

    • Feb 1990 - Aug 1994

    From my initial position as Departmental Secretary supporting four, then six, and eventually eight underwriters, two underwriting assistants, the underwriting manager and Regional Vice President, I was promoted to Underwriting Assistant. As Departmental Secretary I produced correspondence as needed, kept the client files, and produced monthly expense reports. Produced RVP's correspondence and speeches from dictation, contributing light editing and feedback about communication. Also picked up overflow underwriting correspondence from the underwriting assistants and assisted claims department secretaries as time allowed. As an UA I automated much of our routine correspondence using macros, and developed a computer-based account rating system that resulted in greater efficiencies for the UAs who adopted it while continuing in the primary support position for the regional vice president.

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  Related Experience - Publishing

  • Various

  • Writing, editing, typesetting, design, technology

    • 1970 - 1990
    • Various

    While completing my BFA, I worked at an alternative community newspaper and later joined a small press review as a typesetter and sometimes editor. My activities at the paper were varied, including photographing events and writing concert reviews, page layout and pasteup and ad composition. I started typesetting when, on a Sunday evening with a Wednesday evening deadline, we had no galleys --the typesetter had failed to show up all week. Working practically around the clock for four days, we delivered the sheets to the printer around 2:00 a.m. Thursday; the issue made it to the streets that evening. And I was keying 90 wpm by touch.I put myself through graduate school primarily by working in the University Publications Department, where I started as a pasteup artist. Always in the typesetting department begging for galleys we needed to push projects along, I was looking over the typesetters' shoulders at the beginnings of the digital world in publishing, and I wanted in. My first tasks were to manually remove the double spaces typists in that day inserted after periods, hyphenate words for better line breaks, and proofread. The department was developing a communication protocol to import documents from the university’s Wang network to the computer typesetting equipment; I helped by developing translation tables for kerning and hyphenation that automatically deleted those double spaces and also adjusted letter- and punctuation- spacings for variable-width fonts and went on to develop a system for running these programs sequentially on multiple workstations to produce typeset-ready files from word processing documents with maximum efficiency. During that time I trained to use the Quadex 5000, one of the earliest computer typesetting and layout systems.Post graduate school I continued to work in publishing as a typesetter, graphic designer and writer, first as an in-house art department for a rare coin brokerage, then as a freelance graphic designer.