Music for this podcast is produced by Kilamanzego.

Parallax

Alan Greenberger: Community connection in the "Village of Philadelphia"

Shannon Morales: Providing equitable job access for Philly's underrepresented tech talent

Kiera Smalls made the exciting announcement this past week that she’ll be transitioning from her current role as the Executive Director of Philly Startup Leaders (PSL) to take on a leadership position with Bloc Delivery — a new e-bike service that makes it easier and faster for local businesses to deliver online orders to customers, without using cars. Smalls has been a community-builder and advocate for equity, entrepreneurship, and wellness in Philadelphia for quite some time now. Since March of 2018, she has served as the Executive Director of PSL, working to provide local founders with the educational tools, financial resources, and networking connections necessary to take their startups to the next level. Although she is stepping away from her Executive Director position, Smalls will continue to serve as a board member for the organization and help advise the Founded in Philly accelerator that she helped establish. Prior to joining PSL, Smalls co-founded City Fit Girls, a health and wellness community for women, alongside Takia McClendon. She also worked at Bicycle Transit Systems — the team that kick-started Philly’s Indego bike share campaign and is currently supporting the development of Bloc Delivery. While with Bicycle Transit Systems, she was instrumental in setting their industry leading practice standards in equitable marketing and outreach for bike share programming. We spoke with Smalls a few weeks back — prior to her announcement — to discuss her work at both Philly Startup Leaders and City Fit Girls, the importance of self care in the midst of COVID-19, how she’s keeping active and staying positive during these challenging times, and her continuous work to help build a more inclusive and equitable startup ecosystem in Philadelphia.

Kiera Smalls: Community-building and collaboration to support the growth of local startups

Omar Woodard: GreenLight Fund Philadelphia's venture capital approach to addressing poverty-related challenges

James Johnson-Piett is the Principal and CEO of Urbane Development, a development initiative which cultivates innovative solutions and hyper-local analytics to build dynamic neighborhoods and positively impact underserved communities. Urbane places focus on deep local knowledge as the lever to generate real, lasting change. For Johnson-Piett and his team, the revitalization process begins with identifying community anchor institutions, small businesses and meeting places where people convene, trust is key, and informal transactions take place — like bodegas. “The bodega owner is way more than just giving you food,” Johnson-Piett points out, “When you walk in the door everyday, you’re establishing a credit relationship with that owner.” If invested in, and supported, these anchor institutions can become hubs for local development, enabling micro-scale changes to occur within a community, and larger-scale transformation to happen over time. Additionally, a network of these businesses can provide a significant data set of informal and formal market information, layered with demographic, ethnographic, and cultural data. This kind of deep community profile is not available to financial institutions at present, but can be a game changer. “If we could understand the dynamics of a neighborhood and the various data points that come from it ,” says Johnson-Piett, “ we could show what the future of investment, analytics, and place-making could all look like and scale.” These data sets start at the micro scale, with deeply personal relationships, but add up to systemic knowledge, through which opportunities for neighborhood growth can attract investment. In this conversation, Johnson-Piett talks about Urbane Development's approach in further depth, his deep Philly roots, and how COVID-19 has increased insecurity for many Philadelphians, but possibly opened new opportunities for local innovation.

James Johnson-Piett: Leveraging local knowledge to generate lasting impact

Music in this episode was produced by Kilamanzego.

Tina Wahl: Innovation that inspires change & strengthens community

For more information on the GPHCC visit www.philahispanicchamber.org.Music in this episode was produced by Kilamanzego.

Jennifer Rodríguez: Philly's Latinx entrepreneurs teach us the meaning of 'Resolver'

Music for this podcast is produced by Kilamanzego.For more information about the Community Design Collaborative, visit cdesignc.org.

Jenn Richards: Community design in the era of social distancing

Brian Murray is CEO and co-founder of SHIFT Capital, a social impact urban real estate group and Certified B-­Corp, headquartered in the Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia. Prior to starting SHIFT, Murray spent much of his career outside of the real estate industry, starting at Pricewaterhouse-Coopers as an auditor. He then moved into the technology space and helped found two start-ups, before joining the Peace Corps, and receiving an MBA from the Yale School of Management. SHIFT invests in neighborhoods and creates projects that the community has a real say in — with access to the process and equity in its outcomes. The real estate group uses mission-oriented capital, collaborative resources, and inclusive strategies to work towards solutions at the intersection of society’s most difficult urban challenges — inter-generational poverty, revitalization, access to opportunity, and community displacement. “Our theory of change,” Murray points out, “is to invest in catalytic projects in underserved communities and then to invest all around that real estate in a holistic, at-scale way in which we feel like we can tip the scales of community wealth building and community development.” In this conversation, Murray discusses SHIFT's comprehensive approach to neighborhood development. He also talks about how impacts of COVID-19 are being felt by Kensington’s small business community and what can be done to help those businesses pull through the economic turmoil of this epidemic.

Brian Murray: A 'Whole Neighborhood' approach to community wealth building

Sharon Gallagher is the co-founder of Sage Communications, a social impact communications firm here in Philadelphia. Sage is dedicated to helping nonprofits, foundations, public agencies, and other socially responsible businesses in the city amplify what they do to create positive change and meaningful impact. Gallagher and her co-Founder, Barbara Beck, leverage their experience in nonprofit, philanthropy, journalism, marketing, and public affairs to help the organizations they work with build creative messaging strategies. In our conversation, Gallagher talks about how COVID-19 is impacting philanthropy in Philadelphia and the importance of an effective communications strategy for nonprofits and social enterprises to find support in these turbulent times. In the midst of a crisis like this one, Gallagher emphasizes, “you just want to make sure you’re credible, honest, and consistent.”

Sharon Gallagher: The importance of strategic communications in the turbulence of COVID-19

In celebration of Earth Day, we’re excited to bring you a conversation with Philadelphia-based artist, photographer, and environmental activist Diane Burko. Burko works at the intersection of art, science and the environment. As a painter, she has always been fascinated with landscapes as a geological phenomenon. Throughout her career, she has spent time researching and photographing a range of locations across the globe — from the Wissahickon Valley in Philadelphia to volcanoes in Alaska and Costa Rica.In 2006, her fascination with landscapes became a commitment to addressing the consequential impacts of global warming. In the time since, she has traveled to locations like the Norwegian islands of Svalbard, the glaciers of Greenland, and the Antarctic Peninsula to capture the catastrophic effects of global warming firsthand. Most recently, her work has looked at coral bleaching and the effects of climate change on oceanic ecosystems.In this conversation, Burko discusses her landscape art,  climate activism, and the importance of maintaining an optimistic perspective.

Diane Burko: A landscape artist and environmental activist

[NOTE: This conversation is the first in a series of Parallax episodes covering the COVID-19 outbreak in Philadelphia. In these conversations, we’ll learn how local civic innovators are responding to the epidemic and how the city will recover.] Maari Porter is the Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy & Strategic Initiatives in the Mayor’s Office of Philadelphia. That means she’s charged with aligning and advancing Mayor Jim Kenney’s priority policy objectives and working across City government to direct, coordinate and support City departments in the delivery of those goals. Porter’s career began in New Zealand, where she worked in Auckland’s Regional Council. She later moved to the United Kingdom, where she became a policy advisor in the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister. In 2010, she arrived in Philadelphia and became Deputy Director of Finance for Recovery under Mayor Michael Nutter. With experience in city, regional, and national (federal) government, Porter believes that cities are the place where innovation happens most. City governments have close interactions with their constituencies, and have the ability—and the obligation—to respond immediately, make tough decisions, and problem-solve quickly. This makes them particularly suited to act on the front lines of a crisis like COVID-19 that affects not just the immediate health of a community, but will have deep, complex, and lasting consequences. Porter discusses her perspectives on city government in more depth in this interview. She also talks about what the City is doing to respond to the COVID-19 crisis, the collaborative efforts it is leading to protect the health and safety of Philadelphia residents, and how the City is taking a bottom-up approach to innovation at a moment when the federal government has hesitated to take a lead in dealing with this crisis. If you are in need of any assistance or would like to provide support locally, visit phila.gov/COVID-19 for the latest updates and information on the City’s response.

Maari Porter: City Hall's response to the COVID-19 crisis

Nick Torres has led and founded numerous for-profit and non-profit social ventures in his career. He currently serves as Executive Director of The Network: Towards Unity for Health, a Philadelphia-based affiliate of the World Health Organization that fosters equitable community-oriented health services, education and research, globally. He is also the co-founder of Social Innovations Partners, alongside Tine Hansen-Turton, which produces the Social Innovation Journal, Institute, and Lab. Additionally, Torres teaches Non-profit Leadership, Social Policy, and Social Entrepreneurship at the University of Pennsylvania and served as the President of Congresso de Latinos Unidos from 2000-2010. In this conversation, Torres discusses a networked approach to social innovation, which brings stakeholders from various sectors, disciplines, and geopolitical communities together to tackle complex challenges. He also talks about taking an entrepreneurial approach to non-profit work, re-examining the incentives behind current philanthropic funding models, and more.

Nick Torres: Generating a culture of social innovation in Philadelphia

The Dornsife Center for Neighborhood Partnerships at Drexel University is a community-based resource center which positions itself as the front porch connecting Drexel to its neighbors. The center fosters connection between the Drexel community and residents of Mantua and Powelton Village to enhance dialogue, strengthen collaboration, and provide residents access to health services and educational resources. Kevin Williams is a business specialist at the Dornsife Center. He helps manage the KEYSPOT computer lab and leads the B Smart Workshop. In this week’s episode, he provides a detailed overview of the resources available at the Dornsife Center and discusses the development the B Smart Workshop. He also lends insight into what more Philadelphia can do to build a more inclusive and equitable innovation economy.

Kevin Williams: Strengthening community at the Dornsife Center for Neighborhood Partnerships

Sylvester Mobley is the founder and CEO of Coded by Kids, an educational non-profit which prepares underrepresented youth in Philadelphia to succeed as tech and innovation leaders. As technology becomes more and more ingrained in every aspect of our society and economy, he believes a fundamental understanding of coding and the role that software plays throughout our lives is essential for each and every young person to know. In this episode, Mobely discusses inequity in technology from a systemic viewpoint, explains how Coded by Kids is working to address the issue through education, and speaks on what more we can do as a community in Philadelphia to help nurture young talent.

Sylvester Mobley: Fighting inequity through technology education

On the Parallax podcast, host Liz Brown speaks with local perspectives to better understand the steps Philadelphia must take to generate a more inclusive, equitable and advanced innovation economy.

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