Going PLACES: Pride, gratitude and Hope in El Paso

By Denise Herrera, PhD, Senior Capacity Building Officer, St. David’s Foundation and PLACES 2019 Fellow Going PLACES is an occasional blog series featuring the voices and experiences of TFN’s PLACES Fellows. For more information on the fellowship, and to read past blog posts from our fellows, visit here. I grew up three and a half hours north of El Paso, so I was excited to…

Going PLACES: Generational Trauma Across Indigenous Communities

By Jonathan Cunningham, Program Officer, Seattle Foundation Going PLACES is an occasional blog series featuring the voices and experiences of TFN’s PLACES Fellows. For more information on the fellowship, and to read past blog posts from our fellows, visit here. Growing up and reading about the atrocities the United States government committed against Native American tribes in the past,…

Going PLACES: Rise Above

By Steven Higashide, TransitCenter Going PLACES is an occasional blog series featuring the voices and experiences of TFN’s PLACES Fellows. For more information on the fellowship, and to read past blog posts from our fellows, visit here. Our first order of business when we arrive in North Dakota for our most recent site visit as PLACES fellows, a red state and the 50th most travelled to…

Going PLACES: A Moment In Your Day

By Michelle Morris, Director of Community Philanthropy, Duluth Superior Area Community Foundation Take a moment from the demands of your beckoning calendar to consider this with me: Visualize yourself with your family and friends enjoying the places you feel most connected with and doing the things that make you happy and fulfilled. Pause while the sights, sounds and smells bring you a…

Going PLACES: What the Newark Rebellion can teach us about Philanthropy

By Grace Chung, PLACES Fellow and Senior Community Development Officer, LISC New York City Going PLACES is an occasional blog series featuring the voices and experiences of TFN’s PLACES Fellows. For more information on the fellowship, and to read past blog posts from our fellows, visit here. When I got off the PATH station at Harrison, a suburb of Newark, I arrived in an almost…

Going PLACES: The tools we use and the truths we seek

By Dominic Braham, PLACES Fellow and Assistant Program Officer for LISC Phoenix Going PLACES is an occasional blog series featuring the voices and experiences of TFN's PLACES Fellows. For more information on the fellowship, and to read past blog posts from our fellows, visit here. The inequities in workplace, community development and philanthropy are very real to many, including…

Going PLACES: Becoming A Change Agent

By Andrea Hulighan Director, Community Grants Coordinator and Youth Grantmakers in Action, The Winston-Salem Foundation Arriving in Vancouver. Photo credit: Andrea Hulighan I don’t know why but it took flying outside of the country to the city of Vancouver in British Columbia, Canada for it to sink in that the PLACES fellowship is so much more than a typical professional development…

Going PLACES: Redefining the problems with segregation

By Joanna Trotter, Senior Program Officer, The Chicago Community Trust   As a Chicagoan visiting Buffalo, N.Y. for my first time with my amazing PLACES colleagues, I was surprised at how familiar this smaller urban city felt to me. Despite the size difference, it in many ways felt like home. Was it the shared Great Lakes identity? Or was it the similar migration history? Was it the common…

Going PLACES: The Process of Thinking, Feeling, and Acting

By Rebecca Chan, Program Officer for Creative Learning, LISC PLACES Fellows at the Freedom Wall, Buffalo, NY. Photo Credit: Rebecca Chan As I landed in Buffalo for the second PLACES site visit of 2018, I felt a sense of excitement and trepidation. I was eager to reconnect with my PLACES cohort and to get to know a new-to-me community and place, yet I also knew that the days ahead…

Going PLACES: In service to the ‘Arc of Justice’

A mural in downtown Wichita urging immigrants to know their rights. Photo credit: Martha Cecilia Ovadia By Natalia Swanson, Program Director for Healthy Eating and Active Living, Mary Black Foundation Back in July of 2017, as I was gathering my luggage from the conveyor belt at the airport, a good friend of mine sent me a text. “Do you know of an immigration lawyer? A friend was…