A new chapter begins

Going local, coming home to Philly

I took a leap of faith eight months ago, a week before an election that I knew would have profound consequences for our culture, our sector, and our democracy. I stood still. I breathed in and out.

As a practitioner and teacher of meditation for twenty years, I have learned that I cannot control the storms that surround me. But I can own my responses to it, my perspective, and my relationship with them. 

So, I traveled. I rested. I showed up for my family and met with people well beyond my usual crowd. I got creative and entrepreneurial, and co-founded SmarterWealth Coach. I hosted workshops for fellow social changemakers to clear space for themselves in the middle of the chaos. Along the way, I got perspective. And I discovered that as challenging as life is for so many people, enormous strength comes to us from joy, peace, creativity and balance. 

From that place, I am beginning my next chapter. 

This week, I’m stepping into a new role as President of Samuel Fels Fund. 

Samuel Fels Fund is a place-based fund investing in grassroots movement-building in Philadelphia. To quote Samuel Fels: 

Our job, the job of mankind, is to organize our world so that we can live together without fears and without hatred of each other.

I am honored to step in as the next President, rooted in the Fund’s legacy and conviction that powerful change comes when we honor and support the brilliance and resilience of people in Philadelphia communities.  The Fund invests in leaders and organizations who ground their work in love, joy and solidarity, and strengthens movement builders’ leadership skills and wellbeing so they can sustain their work.

Going Local 

After nearly a decade investing national philanthropic resources into community-rooted leaders and movements, I’m coming back into closer rhythm with the grassroots - here, where I live.

We are watching civil rights protections being systematically dismantled - from the purging of DEI efforts, to efforts to reshape public education, to sweeping actions that make it harder for people to vote or have their votes counted. Immigrants are being dehumanized and ripped away from their families. Federal oversight is being stripped from institutions that once offered at least some accountability. Public support for the very programs that sustain communities - housing, education, resettlement - is being stripped away. The national narrative is being actively rewritten to make belonging and civic participation feel more precarious, not less.  

But when I look into local spaces, into neighborhood networks and grassroots initiatives, I see everyday people are meeting, standing up for each other, struggling with each other, building and creating and making sense of things that make a difference to them in real life - in the face of it all.

Here is where I see renewal, hope, and possibility. 

I have found that at the national level, especially from within philanthropy, it can be so difficult to see the tangible results of our actions. This is particularly true in times of volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity.  Systems thinking can help us understand how we got here - but the pace of collapse often outstrips our ability to make sense of it, let alone do something about it. We can become paralyzed by our own habits of analysis and control. And the longer we look at our screens and stay in our heads, the more inevitably doomed our fate appears. Envisioning alternative futures seems naive. 

When things are changing faster than we can count, when structures and policies and norms we assumed would last forever are smashed apart - how can we know we’re making a difference? 

When we hold ourselves accountable to everyone in general and no one in particular, how can we get the signals of what’s working for whom, where we need to course correct? 

Resilience, trust, and ingenuity grow in context. They grow at the pace and scale of humans who are walking through life together, who are working together on what matters most to them - things like better healthcare for their families, quality schools, affordable homes and dignified jobs. Durable progress takes the shape of human relationships, which are neither linear nor logical. Visions are rooted in realities that specific, situated, and personal, and are woven together over time. We cannot shortcut that process - even if we want it all to go faster and be more efficient because the threats are urgent and the stakes feel existential. 

Local action and grassroots movement-building isn’t a practice scrimmage for the later-stage, bigger, more important national game. It is the game.

I am eager to invest in people who have skin in the game because their cause isn’t about someone else’s life over there. It is about their own freedom and dignity and that of their own neighbors. It is about honoring what their own ancestors fought for - whether they escaped here from a Southern plantation, emigrated from another country, preserved their land and heritage, or ensured we all had the right to vote. It is about the stories of what used to be better, and what we’d rather not go back to. It is about dreaming of and building the bright future that our great grandchildren will want to inherit. 

Coming home to Philly

Philadelphia holds the memory of a living experiment we’re actively participating in. This is where the Declaration of Independence was signed, where the Constitution was drafted, and where the ideals of equality, liberty and self-governance were put to paper. 

And from the very beginning, we all knew that promise wasn’t meant for everyone. But it could be.

Liberty Bell Center, Philadelphia

Philly makes the contradictions visible in ways that are hard to look away from. Walk fifteen minutes from James Madison’s house in Society Hill, and you’ll see the Mother Bethel AME Church, the oldest parcel of land continuously owned by African Americans, a site of spiritual refuge, abolitionist organizing, and Black liberation activism. It’s a passageway between the ideals codified by America’s founders and the Black-led movements that have fought to expand and realize them. Visit Kensington, and you see the depth of crisis - public health, housing, violence. But you will also see a fierce response in people doing real civic and cultural labor: tireless local staff offering harm reduction and housing support in the middle of a storm; community journalists making sure stories are told by the people living them; youth organizers pushing back on disinvestment in their schools and neighborhoods; artists and neighbors remembering those lost to the overdose crisis through murals, vigils, and street-level care. 

Village of Arts & Humanities, Philadelphia

This is a gritty city that holds centuries of ruptures, and has grown calluses over them without getting numb. Philly is still fighting and still dreaming. It echoes with abolitionist struggle, Quaker pacifists, mutual aid societies and organizers caring fiercely across generations. It resounds with the reclaimed voices of immigrants and working-class communities who have served this city, who have fought to be seen, to live with dignity, who have shaped this city with their hands and voices. It is founded upon public institutions that have both harmed and held people, a patchwork of civic trust that has frayed and rewoven itself again and again. 

All the block captains and organizers and healers, the entrepreneurs and artists and elders who remember what was tried, what failed, what still might work - they hold democracy’s promise. Even if this country wasn’t built with them in mind, they continue to organize, imagine, and build anyway. And this is what makes the promise of a free and equal society persist. 

I am here for them.

I am here for deeply rooted, slow, steady relationship-building. I believe in brave inclusion of vastly different perspectives and self-interests, with all the moral complexity, patience, and “it’s complicated” it requires. History and struggle and societal transformation and human relationships are beautiful messy things that can never be captured in a strident tweet or single statistic.

Here is where resilience and resistance live, where courage is accountable and imagination sparks. Here is where the stamina that democracy requires is being built for the long-haul. 

While I’m going local to invest in movement-builders in Philly, I’m eager to learn from and partner with my national friends and friends in other places in this journey. So - let’s learn together.