Date of Birth
May 1996
Date of Death
August 12, 2023
Location
Washington, DC
Who She Was
Her Story
Ginger Maclean Mandel died Saturday, August 12, 2023 from complications during childbirth. Ginger is survived by her son, Harry Mandel, sister Salli Mandel, her mother Thorne Rankin, her father Jack Mandel and her stepmother Tina Eck, along with many cousins, uncles, aunts and grandfather, with whom Ginger remained very close throughout her life.
Ginger had a deep and joyful connection to the natural world; she described herself as happiest in the mountains – she hiked Boone Mountain in North Carolina and the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia. First in the water, last out, her cousins dubbed her “Queen of the Ocean” at Bethany Beach, and she relished sailing and paddling with cousins, swimming in the Cacapon River in West Virginia and picking blueberries with her grandmother in the Berkshires.
As an alumna of the Guilford College Sustainable Food Systems Program, Ginger combined her love of children and years of youth gardening experience to lead children in the Fox Run Elementary School in Norwalk Connecticut, creating vegetable and meditation gardens and making a loving and nurturing community there. Locally, Ginger was an enthusiastic contributor in the DC Natives program, building pollinator gardens throughout the city.
Ginger lived by a strong and abiding ethos of treating people with respect and kindness and she maintained strong bonds with childhood friends from the Edmund Burke and Lowell Schools as well as Guilford College. Ginger only accepted positivity and inclusivity; she lived her life surrounded by warm, loving, giving friends and family because she was the most powerful attractant for goodness and decency.