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May 2004 People
Mainstream Yogi "I like to think of myself as a mainstream person," says Sandra Uyterhoeven, who in 1996 founded Yoga for Mainstream People, a small yoga school in Cambridge, Mass. Besides giving private lessons, Uyterhoeven teaches yoga at such mainstream institutions as the Harvard Divinity School and Boston's Berklee College of Music, where she is also trustee emerita and cochair of the school's gender equity and diversity committee. At Newton-Wellesley Hospital, Uyterhoeven works with a team of health professionals to help postsurgery cardiac patients modify their lifestyles. And one morning a week she teaches a group of elderly people at an assisted-living facility. "I find that really satisfying," she says. "They love it, and I think it's just wonderful keeping these people moving. I think it makes a real difference in their lives." Uyterhoeven wasn't always a yoga teacher. An employee of the Massachusetts Environmental Affairs Department, she returned from the Sloan Program in 1984 just as the state was creating a new water resources authority to clean up Boston Harbor. Uyterhoeven was assigned to the 16-person startup team. It was an exciting time, she says. They did everything: set water and sewer budgets, planned insurance, inventoried property, created a human resources department to handle an influx of 750 people the first year, and arranged "everything you do for revenue bonds the first time." A debilitating three-year bout with ulcerative colitis led Uyterhoeven to retire in 1995. She is well now. A subsequent nine-month treatment with herbs, acupuncture, and yoga cured where traditional medicine had failed. Much as she misses her colleagues and the challenges of her work, she likes the direction her life has taken. "It's good for me at this time," she says. Certified as a teacher of Viniyoga, a style she describes as gentle and therapeutic, Uyterhoeven has begun an extensive course in yoga therapy. "I'm taking a very serious anatomy and physiology class now, and I am already using yoga with people who have back pain, shoulder pain, any stress-related illness. "I don't think yoga can cure everything," she says, "but it can certainly change your life." JANET ZICH |
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Gaming Referee Indian gaming is big business. It brought in $14.5 billion in 2002, the last year for which figures are available—more than commercial gambling in Las Vegas and New Jersey combined. To oversee this business and protect it from outside interests, Congress in 1988 established the National Indian Gaming Commission (NIGC), an independent regulatory agency with the power to audit gaming operations, enforce regulations, and close down casinos if necessary. Last September, Gary Pechota was named chief of staff of the commission.
Pechota serves directly under three appointed commissioners and is responsible for the areas of audits, contracts, enforcement, congressional and public affairs, and administration. He brings two decades as a chief executive to his new public-sector position. After taking his Stanford MBA to Minneapolis, where he was a certified public accountant for Ernst & Whinney, Pechota ran Dakota Cement for 10 years and then Giant Cement Holding, a Pennsylvania company, for another decade. He stayed with Giant Cement for two years after it was sold to Cementos Portland of Spain, then consulted in the waste management and cement industries. "I was happy consulting, but in the back of my mind I thought I should be contributing more," Pechota says. "I wanted something that was business related, but I was also looking for something to do with Native American issues. I'm an enrolled member of the Rosebud Sioux tribe. I benefited from a lot of scholarship programs and I wanted to give something back." Gaming has helped some 200 tribes in 28 states, Pechota says. "When you look at the tribal history of economic development, it has been just phenomenal for the Indian people." And he points out that even where Indian gaming is not all that financially successful, it provides sorely needed jobs. Pechota's work at NIGC is a temporary commitment; one day he hopes to return to his native South Dakota. If he had to say what his goal is now, he says, "We are severely understaffed and underfunded. When they write my obituary, if we can say we did things smarter and a lot better and made the most of the resources we have to make some kind of an impact on Indian gaming, then that's really what I'm after." JANET ZICH
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