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.”

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.

[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.

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.

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.

Sylvester Mobley is the founder and CEO of Coded by Kids, an educational non-profit which prepares underrepresented youth in Philadelphia to succeed as leaders in technology and innovation fields. 

As software dependence continues to increase throughout our society, the biases of a computer programming industry that has historically excluded women, African Americans, and Latinx communities become more entrenched and detrimental. 

“Because of the role that software plays in our lives,” Mobley points out, “not having diverse technologists that are building the software, not having people on the teams that can look at the impact that software has in people’s lives, to me, it’s a civil rights issue that most people don’t understand.”

Coded by Kids offers software development, digital design, computer science, and tech startup-focused entrepreneurship education programs to help underrepresented youth, between the ages of 8 and 18, achieve leadership positions in technology fields. 

In this episode, Mobely discusses the systemic scale of inequity in technology fields, what steps Coded by Kids is taking to address the issue, and what more the community of Philadelphia can do to nurture its young talent.

As the Director of Strategic Design for the City of Philadelphia, Liana Dragoman leads a team of designers working to help make municipal government services more accessible, human, and just.

The Service Design Studio that she leads describes itself as a team of designers that takes the concept of “government of the people, for the people, and by the people” to heart. They employ a human-centered design approach to improve the efficacy of municipal programs and service delivery.

While various departments across local government are focused on making improvements in specific areas of policy like tax code, health services, neighborhood development and emergency relief, the Service Design Studio works alongside these agencies to help improve the delivery of the policies and programs they implement.

“Good policy, which really understands what’s happening on the ground, which really understands lived experience, can enable good on the ground service experiences,” Dragoman points out, “Policy which is removed from lived experience, based on assumption or politics, can create chaos on the ground in a service environment.”

In this conversation, Dragoman talks specifically about how service designers are helping decision-makers inside City Hall think through the eyes of Philadelphia residents and how this approach may help generate deeper collaboration across silos than typically exists at the local government level.

Bruce Katz is a Distinguished Fellow at the Lindy Institute for Urban Innovation and the Director of the Nowak Metro Finance Lab at Drexel University. The lab was founded in 2018 to help cities develop innovative strategies to leverage public assets and fund infrastructure for public benefit — with a focus on supporting inclusive and equitable growth.

Prior to his work at Drexel University, Katz was the inaugural Centennial Scholar at the Brookings Institution. He served as Chief of Staff to Henry Cisneros, U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, from 1993 to 1996. In 2008, he was a senior advisor to Shaun Donovan, the first Secretary of Housing and Urban Development under the Obama Administration.

In the recent book, The New Localism: How Cities Can Thrive in the Age of Populism, Katz and the late Jeremy Nowak focus on the rise of cities and urban networks as the world’s change-makers of the 21st century.

Katz and Nowak argue that addressing the social, economic, and environmental challenges of this century will require a bottom-up approach. The two urban experts call for a shift of power downward from national and state governments to cities and metropolitan communities.

In this conversation, Katz expands on the ideas of New Localism, discusses why urban areas are centers of innovation, and explains how Philadelphia can strengthen its innovation ecosystem around a commitment to inclusion, equity and sustainable growth.

The creative energy of Eppchez! escapes the walls of definition. Eir interdisciplinary work leaps across the boundaries of writing, performance, art, music and design in an endless quest of self-discovery and self-actualization.

In 2012, Eppchez! created Alma's Engine, a production company to develop eir work across a variety of performance genres. Alma’s Engine has since produced six works in the past six years, including Training: A One Troll Show and Publik Private.

Recently, Eppchez! was named a Leeway Foundation Artist-in-Residence at the Philadelphia makerspace NextFab. At NextFab, ey are working on a non-binary design project called Darb Garb that applies the use of creative technology to design gender-affirming wearables that help non-binary people claim and honor themselves. Eppchez considers the work part of eir vocation as a gender doula, helping individuals discover their authentic selves.

At the Center for Inclusive Competitiveness at Temple University, Dr. Jamie Bracey-Green is determined to improve the performance of underrepresented young Americans in local, national and global innovation economies.

In this conversation, she discusses the personal experiences that drove her to become an active leader in this effort, how the center is working to achieve its goal and the steps that Philadelphia can take to cultivate the brilliance that she sees "hidden in plain sight."