Gaieski Brings a Blend of Talents to Borough Council
Jill Gaieski
Jill Gaieski has worked for the state attorney’s office in Broward County, Florida, and collected DNA from Bermudians. She has started an organization to fight gun violence, served (almost) two terms on the board of the Swarthmore Co-op, and earned her advanced sommelier certificate at the Wine School of Philadelphia.
Since a swearing-in ceremony on Monday, January 6, she is now a Swarthmore Borough Council member as well.
“I’ve always had a lot of interests,” Gaieski says. “When it came time to choose a path, I wasn’t ready to make that decision. But the clock was ticking.” She majored in journalism at the University of Florida, went to law school, then practiced law, first in Florida and later in Philadelphia. But the fit was never great.
She had kids and moved out of the city to Swarthmore. Her husband David, a doctor, would bounce up out of bed in the morning, eager to get to work, and Gaieski wanted to find something she would feel the same way about.
A New Start
So she started taking classes at the University of Pennsylvania. Having always been interested in people’s backgrounds — their stories and their culture — she steered toward a master’s program in anthropology at Penn and loved it. She ended up staying on for her Ph.D. “It opened my eyes to all kinds of migration stories from groups around the world,” she says.
In graduate school, Gaieski got interested in genetic anthropology, which was then an emerging field. She wrote her dissertation on the historic and biological connection between people living in a part of Bermuda and some American Indian groups in New England. Her first job out of school involved going to powwows, collecting DNA samples, and documenting cultural practices, in order to reconstruct migration patterns. But when the funding for the program was cut, she had to figure out what she was going to do all over again.
“I didn’t want to move away [from Swarthmore],” Gaieski says. “I had kids, family, connections.” She ended up back at Penn designing cancer studies, but the work — circumscribed and office-bound — was hard to be passionate about.
Gaieski got into wine as a way of discovering something fun. She liked learning, and she liked the wine, and she liked the stories that came with it: “Why is [this wine] different, who are the people, what are their histories?” Pretty soon she approached Lori Knauer, then a lawyer at Corteva who also lives in Swarthmore, about opening a wine bar together, and Knauer said yes.
Serving the Community in Swarthmore
“If it wasn’t going to be in Swarthmore, we didn’t want to do it,” Gaieski says. “I want to serve my community: to serve, and also to serve.” She and Knauer, who both have been involved in social-justice causes, share a vision of the wine bar, which will be called Village Vine, as a kind of public square, or a 17th-century coffee house, where people come together and exchange ideas.
Bringing it all Together
Gaieski brings all of these experiences, professional and personal, to her new position on Swarthmore Borough Council. She’s curious about the way people live and what the town can offer them. “I’m interested in the building of this town,” she says. “The sensible development — the very sensible development.”
Having served for seven years on the board of the Swarthmore Co-op, the grocery store’s future is a significant concern for Gaieski. “They don’t get a lot of foot traffic,” she says. “I would like Swarthmore to be more of a destination with options for eating, drinking, and entertainment — within the scope of who we are.” She says people like her parents, now in their 80s, might like to move to town if there were more amenities and more vibrancy. “I think we’re on the right path,” she adds.
Gaieski is also interested in ways Swarthmore can connect with Chester. While on the Co-op board, she worked to help a Philabundance-funded non-profit grocery store in that city find its footing, a project that ultimately failed. “There’s so much to be done,” she says.
For the immediate future, however, her focus will be on serving Swarthmore and getting ready to her open her business. She has been to a county-wide training for new council members, acquired a liquor license, learned about women sake makers, and talked to constituents and council colleagues. “I’m a sponge,” she says. “For a while I’m going to be soaking it all up.”
