Bringing It #44: Meet Our Team Members

Dear friends,

It’s been nearly a month since our last number of Bringing It. We hope that you’ve stayed safe and well. This has been a tumultuous summer, as educators grapple with the implications of the racial reckoning for our work, the economic suffering caused by the pandemic, and the bad choices that we and our institutions face as the COVID-19 Fall Term begins. In future issues of Bringing It, we want to speak to these crises and hear your responses to them.

We paused because we were getting organized here at Elon: learning the ropes of a new home, getting email (and COVID-19 tests), meeting faculty, staff, and administrative colleagues (who have been wonderfully generous and friendly). And most importantly, welcoming new staff colleagues. Last month, we celebrated Caitlin Salins and Mercedes Yanora’s contributions to the work of BT2P as they began their own next chapters. Here we want to introduce you to our new colleagues–Lily Fandel and Todd Rosendahl–and reintroduce you to Kate Griffin as she takes on new responsibilities.

Meet Our Team

Lily Fandel
Lily is thrilled to serve as the new communications and public outreach coordinator for Bringing Theory to Practice at Elon University. She graduated from NC State University with a bachelor of arts in English, driven by a love for writing and communication and an unwavering desire to learn. After interning in a communications department at NC State, she realized her passion for higher education and the people it serves. She cares deeply about empowering students and educators and contributing to system-wide solutions in higher education. As a recent undergraduate, she can attest to the value of transformative and holistic education. She says her undergraduate experience not only exposed her to new interests and prepared her for a professional career, but helped her grow into her most authentic self. She looks forward to supporting this journey in others and helping to foster accessible, equitable and vibrant learning communities with BT2P.

Todd Rosendahl
Todd joins Bringing Theory to Practice after working for nearly a decade in community-based advocacy non-profit organizations at the local, state, and national levels. His work focused on supporting LGBTQ+ students, faculty, staff, and families in K-12 schools and colleges/universities through staff professional development and policy writing and implementation. Most recently he was the national director of programs for Point Source Youth, a non-profit working to end youth and young adult homelessness by partnering with local organizations and universities to create new housing programs that center the needs of the most marginalized students and young adults. He was appointed by Governor Roy Cooper to the North Carolina State Youth Advisory Council in 2018, and reappointed in 2020.

Todd is thrilled to be joining the BT2P team as Program Coordinator and Elon University, where his husband is a faculty member in the psychology department. Todd holds a Bachelor of Music degree (Percussion Performance & K-12 Education) from the University of Iowa and a Master’s and Ph.D. in Musicology from Florida State University.

Kate Griffin
Kate is Bringing Theory to Practice’s Community and Network Builder. As the Project Coordinator for the PLACE Collaboratory, Kate works with university and community partners in four cities to create humanities-based civic engagement strategies. Kate’s background includes experience with academic-community partnerships, public humanities, community-based arts, and social impact. She is both a skilled organizational and project manager and an experienced community-builder. Kate has a doctorate in American Studies and has held leadership roles in community development, social entrepreneurship, and social services organizations for fifteen years. She designed “San Francisco Seniors Remember,” an oral history project in partnership with the University of San Francisco and StoryCorps, and in 2015 she co-founded the Storefront Institute, a Bay Area grassroots public humanities center. Kate is based in New Hampshire, where she also leads rural cultural strategy projects. Kate is on the steering committee for the New Hampshire Creative Communities Network, was a New England 2018 National Arts Strategies Creative Communities Fellow, and is a trained coach who works with cultural, academic, and social change leaders.

The BT2P community (and most of all David) are incredibly fortunate to have these new colleagues and leaders. You will enjoy getting to know them and working with them.

Share Your Creative Response

We noted above our aim of lifting up responses to the crises that higher education–and American society–are facing. Here’s an important one: a call from our friends at Imagining America, with a looming deadline:

Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life calls for participation in a Collective Creative Engagement — Through Tumultuous Times: Reimagining And Rebuilding ‘America’. This year, in place of an in-person IA National Gathering, IA invites creative responses that offer opportunities for community reflection, healing, and the creation of spaces and places for a radical reimagining of the world in which we live. The submission deadline is Friday, August 28, 2020.

Presenting Our New Logo

We want to close by showing you one more change for BT2P this summer: our new logo, which you’ll find below at our signature. The move to Elon presented the opportunity (actually the necessity) to redesign our website; we’ll be releasing it in September, so stay tuned. The process began with this logo. We think it captures some core aspects of BT2P’s mission and values: our commitment to education that is both holistic and transformative, animated by small and large communities of change-makers. Our thanks to Claudia Fulshaw and Carol Thomson for translating our aspirations into visual form. We hope you like it.

With thanks for the work you do,
Lily, Kate, Todd and David