Marc Mares
During his fellowship year Marc built a community to provide fitness, structure, and support to youth. Through experimentation and iteration, Marc developed a simple and surprisingly low cost community that increases the physical condition, enhances the emotional wellbeing, and improves the educational outcomes of its participants. Through teaching values like grit, confidence, and empathy, Marc has created a bonded group. What if the youth of every community felt supported to reach their full potential? What if they all saw a future for themselves? Come learn more about The Huddle, a simple and effective way to build strong communities from the ground up. More
A Coast Guard officer and middle school/high school distance running coach, Marc Mares believes fitness can do more than just improve health. It can serve as the backbone to strengthen adolescent communities.
For the past year Marc has been running a fitness group in Oakland, CA for adolescents of all athletic abilities. This year Marc will create and test a plan to scale his wildly successful model to adolescent communities across the country. Marc believes that even with very limited resources these communities can move forward and unite around the values of hard work, courage, and humility.
Susie Wise
During her fellowship year Susie explored Design for Belonging. We’ve all heard of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI); and while well-intentioned it is a land of quotas and metrics. It skips over the most important aspect of bringing diverse groups together -- solving problems. Every race, gender, and culture knows what it feels like to belong. Susie has created a tool kit to Design for Belonging that helps us notice the world around us and provides a framework for finding solutions for everything from group dynamics to product design. Equality begins when we’re all working towards the same goal. Belonging is what we’ve all been looking for.
Susie Wise is liberatory design faculty at the National Equity Project and an adjunct professor at the Stanford d.school where she founded the K12 Lab. Susie believes we can create more belonging and less othering in our communities through design. We live within systems where important outcomes -- maternal health, life expectancy, time spent in prison, and educational achievement -- are all influenced by race. It doesn't have to be that way.
Susie will spend the year researching and defining Design for Belonging. What are the elements in a city or a building or a group that create belonging? She believes designing for belonging can eliminate numerous downstream troubles; inequities in schools, mental health stigmas, communal indecision on housing or climate change. If we design for belonging we can build a world where everyone is honored.
Betty Ray
During her fellowship year Betty explored the power and simplicity of ritual. During these difficult times it’s often hard to find any order in the chaos. But in fact we’ve had the solution for thousands of years. Humans have used ritual to make sense of their surroundings and find intention and purpose when life provides none. Every religion and every culture since the beginning of time has put forward rituals. Betty has found the common language of these rituals and modernized the process of creating them. With Betty’s toolkit anyone can create a unique ritual for their own life and begin finding a way out of the chaos and into a more intentional life.
After a decade at the George Lucas Educational Foundation, Betty Ray was plagued by a question: Why are young people suffering with depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicide at such soaring rates?
At Teachers College, Columbia University - Betty landed on rites of passage as a long-forgotten approach to preparing young people for life in an uncertain future. This year she wants to design and create a set of modern rites of passage so all youth feel grounded and supported through the turbulent challenges of adolescence
Travis Ning
During his fellowship year Travis worked to change the harmful power dynamic present in international philanthropy and has created the Awareness Accord. Most philanthropic engagement follows the classic drama triangle, hero, victim, villain. This dynamic creates huge inefficiencies in the philanthropic process. The hero (donor) is always right. The victims must be happy for any assistance they are given. And there must always be a villain. In his 20 years of development experience Travis has seen countless resources wasted supporting this dynamic rather than solving the problems at hand. The Awareness Accord gives everyone a chance to change the interpersonal dynamic. Intentions are aligned and respect is given to all parties throughout the engagement process.
For 20 years, Travis Ning has worked in international development around the world. He knows that human connection is an essential part of finding solutions, but that the design of these experiences can produce a negative "hero-victim" result. With the world more connected every day, there is an opportunity to revisit and reframe the way we "do good."
This year Travis will explore and test alternatives to The Drama Triangle (hero, victim, and villain) in Guatemala with MAIA, a program serving Mayan girls in rural Guatemala. Travis will explore and test ways to turn good intentions/actions into mutually-empowering experiences for all stakeholders and hopefully begin to change our frame on philanthropy.