Francis Pina

I was an econ major. I wanted to work at the Boston Federal Reserve and go to the London School of Economics. But I graduated in 2009, and there were no jobs available, due to the housing crisis and Great…

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Dana Guenterberg

In school, I was the quiet kid. My silence and my kindness were perceived as intelligence, and I just never stood out. I never really felt seen — and I needed to feel seen. I was pretty close with my…

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Tamika Fluker

I was working at The Bridge Home at St. Mary's Women and Children's Center. It’s a shelter for infants to 12-year-olds. If the Department of Child and Family Services pulled a kid from their home, we housed and counseled them.…

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Dan Shutes

My junior year of high school, the varsity team had to coach a youth basketball team. It was a couple of practices a week and a couple of games throughout the month in wintertime. I remember how fun it was…

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Ashley Kannan

I grew up in Oak Park in the 1980s. People were all about the melting pot. The idea was that everyone is the same and nobody looks different — we're all part of this collective homogenous blob. One of the…

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Amy Traynor

Early on in my career, I was more afraid of talking to parents. But I had a principal who said, ‘If you're not calling them first with a positive, then when you call them with a negative, it's going to…

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Pam Gresser

Teaching runs in my family. The bell was my grandma’s. She was the last teacher at a one room schoolhouse in Cold Spring, Wisconsin. Because she was the last teacher, they gave that bell to her. She wrote on that…

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Benjamin Grignon

I was full-on ready to be a full-time artist. And then I was invited to be a teacher at a summer institute in Denver, through the Native American Youth Outreach Program. I think it was seeing those kids connect to…

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Elliott Hile

I was the kid who was under the table with a fireman's helmet on, covering his ears because he didn't understand what people were saying. I would get frustrated all the time because I didn't understand multiple syllable words. So…

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