my non-traditional education through professional fellowships (and beyond)

I was fortunate enough to grow up in well-funded, suburban Chicago public school as a “gifted” student who was enrolled in accelerated, honors and AP classes throughout my K-12 education. That privileged upbringing granted me admission to a reputable, private liberal arts school, where 50% of my peers typically went on to pursue advanced degrees. I was set to follow along that trajectory, when I was accepted to an Ivy League graduate program at age 24, but ultimately, I turned down the opportunity.

That decision was informed by the added debt load that I would be willingly taking on, the fact that my admissions counselors couldn’t justify any expected return-on-investment from that debt, and that I was already on-the-ground in communities where I aspired to make a positive, tangible difference; I couldn’t wrap my mind around leaving them to go learn about them in a physically-removed academic setting.

After making that decision in early 2015, I doubled-down on seeking out nearly every single non-traditional learning opportunity that I could discover and participate in. These of have consisted of varied professional development and skill-building workshops, a collection of online courses, and nine different professional fellowships, which I have detailed below:

  • Focus: Justice, Equity, Dignity, Inclusion, Democracy Reform, Social Bridge-Building

    The Bridge Alliance JEDI Fellowship brings together leaders across the democracy reform, bridge building, news media and activism space to explore “JEDI” themes as a peer cohort.

  • Focus: Human-Centered Design, Leadership Development, Future of Work, Social Innovation, Social Justice, Environmental Sustainability

    StartingBloc is a global community of over 3,100 existing and emerging leaders who are shifting the paradigm of work and leadership to create a more just, sustainable, and thriving planet by sharing best practices and offering resources and support to one another in a wholistic way.

  • Focus: Qualitative Research, Community Outreach & Engagement, Qualitative Data Analysis

    The simple mission of the American Voices Project is to listen to people from across the country to find out how they’re doing. It’s not a standard survey, but a commitment to listen. In my role as a Research Fellow, I was responsible for conducting grassroots outreach & engagement to communities in the southeastern United States where we were conducting our research.

  • Focus: Social Entrepreneurship, Human-Centered Design, Business Model Development, Value Proposition, Collaboration

    The Global Social Impact House (GSIH) is a seven-day residential program that provides fellows with the tools, community support, and training they need to advance their ventures. Workshops are customized to the needs of fellows and explore advanced concepts in business models, design thinking, and leadership. The program is also designed to help fellows build meaningful, global connections while living together in an inspirational host location.

  • Focus: Grassroots Community Outreach, Engagement and Organizing, Network Development, Social Innovation, Human-Centered Design, Storytelling, Product and Service Development

    TimeBanks USA hosted a six-month fellowship that funded me to travel to communities across 35 states engaging communities that practiced and expressed interest in timebanking along the way. The explicit purpose of the fellowship was to immerse and gain novel perspectives on timebanking as an alternative economic model, to organize, develop and mobilize a community of timebanking leaders, better tell the story of timebanking, and develop a experiential and educational program that could catalyze the practice of timebanking in local communities.

  • Focus: Tactical Urbanism, Placemaking, Human-Centered Design, Community Engagement

    Funded by the 2016 Knight Cities’ Challenge grant, the People First Project was a localized community fellowship elevating ideas that help people better connect with public space, while promoting collaboration among the city’s creatives and urban innovators in Detroit’s Corktown neighborhood. Alongside artist Caroline Kane, I developed The Living Lot, a pop-up living room concept that took place on vacant lots, which invited community members to contribute public art towards developing a shared vision for the future use of that space.

  • Focus: Urbanism, Youth Organization & Inclusion, Human-Centered Design

    Youthful Cities is on a mission to make cities around the world better places for young people to live, work and play. In 2015, they convened 50 emerging youth leaders from the top 50 cities at the Youthful Cities Global Summit in Toronto around their Youthful Cities Global Index to brainstorm and collaborate towards solving common problems held by young people in urban settings.

  • Focus: Urban Revitalization, Human-Centered Design, Community Economic Development, Nonprofit Consulting

    Challenge Detroit cultivates diverse, innovative, community-minded leaders from the city and across the country, fostering their talents to support local initiatives that move Detroit forward.

    While they spend four days a week accelerating their professional careers with our Host Companies, each Friday Fellows take a day out of the office to bring social impact challenge projects to life in collaboration with our local nonprofit partners. They work in multi-disciplinary teams, bringing their vision, creative muscles, and entrepreneurial spirits to address some of Detroit’s greatest challenges and opportunities.

    Following my fellowship year, I served as an inaugural Senior Fellow, supporting the onboarding and integration of Year 4 Fellows. I later co-designed and founded our Alumni of Challenge Detroit (AOCD) Association as well.

    Alumni profiles can be found here.

  • Focus: Youth Inclusion & Organizing, Civic Engagement & Participation

    With more than one-third of Boston's population between the ages of 20-34, Boston is the home to the highest proportion of young adults out of any major city in America. Recognizing the importance of this demographic, the City launched ONEin3 in 2004 to connect Boston’s young adult population with resources related to: housing, professional development, financial health, entrepreneurship and civic engagement.

    My role on the council was to emerge youth priorities, and plan and organize opportunities to engage young people around those priorities during my service term.

  • Focus: Community Outreach & Engagement, Leadership Development, Facilitation, Social Justice

    The Campus Compact AmeriCorps VISTA Program seeks to activate higher education institutions and their partners to work together to make an impact on poverty in their local community. Our host sites’ VISTA projects are developed in accordance with AmeriCorps VISTA’s core principles: an antipoverty focus, community empowerment, sustainable solutions, and capacity building. Campus Compact AmeriCorps members serving with the VISTA program build capacity for high impact programs, organizational approaches, and collective impact efforts focused on low-income individuals in one of the following areas: education, healthy futures, economic opportunity, and Veterans/military families.