Speaker: Willie Jones, Senior Program Officer, Danville Regional Foundation
Introduce yourself by sharing your name, organization, and title.
Willie Jones: Good morning. My name is Willie Jones. I'm a senior program officer at the Danville Regional Foundation.
Why did you engage Tracey and Indigo Innovation Group, and what were the critical areas that I helped you focus on?
Willie Jones: We chose to utilize Tracey's services because we were looking at doing some more community development work and we really want to make sure that conversations that we were having were intentional, and that we were really allowing ourselves the opportunity to learn and to grow as we were having this conversation with community members, and we want to make sure that we were not exerting our power in those conversations and building a table of equity. The reason why we use Tracey was because I've worked with her in previous settings and I felt that she was the perfect advocate for not only the community, but also was able to provide a philanthropic approach to the work.
What expertise did I bring, and what was unique about working with me?
Willie Jones: Yeah, as I noted before, Tracey has had a plethora experience working with community members, but also the philanthropic setting having been in the philanthropic sector herself, and one thing that's amazing about Tracey is she's very personable, and so I think you can say she's never been in a room where she didn't know someone and she wasn't able to connect with someone, which was great because when you're working with the philanthropic space, and you're also working with communities, you have people of different decree and you need to be able to meet them where they are and to be able to translate what needs to be done in a way that is challenging, firm, but also respectful. And I think Tracey has done an amazing job doing that, and these are skills that she's gained from just years of being in the field and just having thousands of conversations with community members.
Highlight specific achievements, challenges overcome, and our collaboration's value to you and your organization.
Willie Jones: So, I would say the greatest thing that Tracey has assisted us with was really checking our power and really helping us realize and visualize how that power shows up when we have conversations in the community. It can get very easy for us to forget that generally, we are and can be seen as the drivers in the community, and at the Danville Regional Foundation, we have been trying our best to be conveners. And so with Tracey, it gave us the correct tools to understand how to successfully convene these individuals and build a table that they felt equitable at and allow us to sit back in a corner and listen and just jump in whenever they need our expertise, and so, it was a great experience. We've learned how to be more of guides along this process.
Provide inspirational words you would like to share to invite others to work with me and Indigo Innovation Group.
Willie Jones: I would encourage anyone that would like to really make a big impact in our community and learn how to be more collaborative in thought and also in practice to invite Tracey to the table. Even if it's just having a 5, 10 minute conversation, I think in that time you'll realize that she has a skill set that a lot of us aren't aware of, and I think she'll also show you in that time that you too, in your organization is able to develop that skill set, and so I think it's very important for us to continue to look for thought leaders like Tracey and especially when we're trying to do this philanthropic work from a equitable way, and as we're trying to continue to build collaborations throughout the system.
