When Gisele Barreto Fetterman, wife of Pennsylvania Senate hopeful John Fetterman, asks me to meet her at the Hollander Project—the women’s co-working space in Braddock that she helped found in 2018—on a chilly weekday in early October, I’m instinctively uneasy. Memories of the intensely professional atmosphere at The Wing (RIP) surface, and I almost get up the nerve to ask her if we can meet somewhere a little more personal.
As it turns out, I needn’t have worried. The Hollander Project—which functions as a kind of incubator for female-owned businesses and counts among its on-site members a social-work office, a nonprofit devoted to helping sexual-assault survivors heal, a highly in-demand eyelash-extension technician, and a tattoo-removal artist who specializes in helping women get rid of gang tattoos at affordable rates—has as much in common with the glossy, high-powered Wing as a cozy, family-owned indie coffee shop might with a Starbucks in Times Square.
When it comes to getting a sense of who Gisele Fetterman is, there is, perhaps, nowhere better to encounter her. As we sit down in an unused office during a rare break in Gisele’s schedule, with about 40 minutes to go before she’s due to pick up her three kids at school (something she’s graciously delayed on my behalf), I’m struck by the clear pride that she takes in the Hollander space: “The work that people do here is very complementary and noncompetitive.”
A politician’s wife with a humanitarian cause is nothing new, whether it’s Laura Bush helping to recruit and train school librarians or Michelle Obama exhorting kids to get active, but it’s rare to encounter someone—in politics or outside of it—whose personal ethos seems so profoundly guided by the notion of service. There is Hollander, but also her food-insecurity nonprofit, 412 Food Rescue, or the volunteer-run Free Store that Fetterman helped found, where she and her family spend so much time that it’s earned a prime place in their family lore: She went into labor with her youngest child there. “My water broke at the Free Store,” she says, laughing. (Charmingly enough, Fetterman is also a member in good standing of Lasagna Love, an organization that helps self-described lasagna mamas get home-cooked meals to families in need in their own communities.)
After John Fetterman and now Pennsylvania governor Tom Wolf were elected in 2018, the Fetterman family made headlines for declining to move into the lieutenant governor’s mansion, choosing instead to remain in their own home (a renovated loft in a former car dealership in Braddock) and dedicate the lavish residence for use in veterans programs. While Gisele Fetterman doesn’t imply that giving up the mansion was particularly hard for her—“Why should my kids be raised in a mansion?” she asks—she admits to feeling a pang when she realized they’d miss out on swimming in the pool that came with it. Undaunted, Gisele created what she calls “the People’s Pool,” allowing kids from all over Allegheny County to enjoy the water while also attempting to address the startling racial disparity in child drowning rates. As Gisele Fetterman tweeted upon the pool’s reopening last summer: “If I can’t bring you with me, I’m not going.”
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