Running Toward: The Life and Work of Friedhilde Milburn

By Marina Kiriakou -

Friedhilde Milburn grew up in southwestern Germany in Karlsruhe, then the capital of the state of Baden, before it became Baden-Württemberg.  Her grandparents were farming families, which guaranteed they had enough to eat even through the war years.  Her mother knew this was not true everywhere and made her daughter bring a pan of leftover potatoes one day to a neighbor who struggled to feed her 5 children.  When the neighbor opened the door, Milburn saw hunger and tears in their eyes; it left a lasting impression.

"Life," Milburn would come to understand, "is to be interpreted by the particulars of each individual's circumstance."  She has spent a lifetime acting on that understanding.

A community organizer, advocate, and pioneer in senior services, Milburn has founded or co-founded multiple organizations in New York City and Westchester County dedicated to one central idea: that older adults deserve to remain in their own homes, in their own communities, surrounded by the people and places they know.  It is a principle she has applied not just professionally, but personally — for her neighbors, for strangers, and for her own mother, across an ocean, for most of her adult life.

Almost 90, she has lived in Mamaroneck's Orienta neighborhood since 1989, when her husband Robert, a Texan with a sailor's heart, fell in love with the idea of living near the water.  She still lives there now, looking out at the Sound from her apartment.  She is still working.

Roots

To understand Friedhilde Milburn, you have to go back to Germany.

She was born into a country about to tear itself apart, and childhood arrived quickly and without ceremony.  Her father was lost on the Russian front in 1943, when she was six.  His boots came back in a wooden suitcase.  Her mother, widowed and resourceful, raised her child with a fierce pragmatism born of necessity: sewing a communion dress from parachute silk, fashioning a red dress from a Nazi flag, and adding embroidered borders to cover any identifying features.  You worked with what you had. You kept going.

An only child with 30 first cousins, Milburn absorbed an early understanding of what it meant to belong to something larger than yourself.  "We were like cats and dogs in the house," her mother used to say of the family, "but if anyone approached us from outside, we were one unit."  That was the first lesson: community is what closes ranks around you when the world turns hostile.

The war left marks that lasted.  A traumatic experience with a gas mask gave Milburn a claustrophobia she still carries.  And watching democracy collapse into authoritarianism — and then seeing her country rearm after the war — made her deeply wary of power.  She refused to vote in Germany once it re-established a military. "If you have an army," she says simply, "you're going to use it."

Crossing

It was at a Mardi Gras celebration that everything changed.  A young American from Texas named Robert was stationed in Karlsruhe.  They met.  She chose him, and chose the life that came with him, which meant crossing an ocean.

She arrived in the United States in 1961, settled in New York City, attended college, and began building a career and a family.  Two children.  A city that was vast, chaotic, and she discovered, deeply in need of what she did best: organizing people around a shared problem.

The problem she returned to again and again was the same one.  Older adults were being pushed out — out of their walk-up apartments by urban renewal, out of their neighborhoods by a lack of services, out of their independence by a system that defaulted to institutional care. "The housing and keeping people out of nursing homes," she says, "was my primary mission."

She co-founded the West Side Federation for Senior Housing, which worked to create and preserve affordable independent living for older New Yorkers.  She helped establish the West Side One Stop for Coordinated Senior Services, which brought Social Security, Medicaid, and HRA representatives to a single accessible neighborhood location.  She founded Health Advocates for Older People, navigating the labyrinth of Medicare and Medicaid on behalf of seniors who couldn't do it alone.  She served for twenty years as executive director of James Lenox House, an independent apartment building for older adults, and built Carnegie East House, the first non-profit Enriched Housing building in NYC at the time.

When her Upper West Side neighborhood grew unsafe in the 1970s, she didn't leave.  She organized.  She rallied neighbors to clean a vacant lot.  She threw a Halloween party in her building's lobby to reclaim it from disruptive teenagers.  "I'm not used to running away from problems," she says.  "I run towards somehow."

The Same Work

All the while, there was her mother, still in Germany, still fiercely herself.  She kept making the trip to the United States until she was 86, at which point she drew a line: if people wanted to see her, they would come to her.  She had earned that.

Milburn helped ensure her mother could remain at home in Germany for as long as possible — a quiet, personal practice of the same principle she was advancing professionally.  When her mother's health eventually required more support, she moved to a senior community run by people she knew, and spent her final years surrounded by familiar faces.

Milburn doesn't romanticize any of this.  She holds a clear-eyed, almost bleak view of human history — a cycle of conflict she believes is unlikely to change.  She sees troubling echoes in today's politics of the dynamics she watched consume Germany in her childhood, and she says so plainly.  But pessimism about the world has never translated, for her, into withdrawal from it.  That would be running away.  That is not what she does.

When Milburn and her husband moved to Mamaroneck, she became co-founder and development officer for At Home on the Sound, a Larchmont-Mamaroneck nonprofit that provides volunteer transportation, social programming, and service referrals to residents sixty and older — helping them stay in the community they have built, in the homes they know, for as long as possible.  It is the same work she has always done.  The scale is smaller, but the stakes are the same.

Both Friedhilde and Robert Milburn have been drivers for At Home on the Sound, and TRA (formerly WestFairRides), bringing members to appointments and errands — neighbors helping neighbors, in the most direct way possible.

She is herself a member of the community she works to support.  She knows, from the inside, what it means to want to stay.

There is a no-nonsense directness about her, softened by a ready smile and eyes that are at once keen and warm — the kind that have seen a great deal and decided, apparently, to remain open anyway.  When she talks about her life, she doesn't dwell.  She moves forward.  She has always moved forward.

"You just work with what you've got," she says.

She learned that from her mother.  She has been practicing it ever since.

At Home on the Sound serves residents of Larchmont and Mamaroneck aged 60 and older. For more information, visit athomeonthesound.org. 

TRA serves Westchester and Fairfield County residents 60 and older and vision-impaired persons 21 and older. For more information, visit www://TRA.org

Friedhilde Milburn