April 19, 2007 Issue                                       

©2007 The Chestnut Hill Local

NIM retains a hard-working Fellow
by KRISTIN PAZULSKI

Anna Guarneri, who came to Neighborhood Interfaith Movement as a Philly Fellow, will remain on staff when her fellowship is over in July. Guarneri is at least one example that the fellowship, designed to keep graduates of Philly colleges in the city, works. (Photo by Kristin Pazulski)

Anna Guarneri wanted to see the world and explore living outside of her California hometown of Oakland in the San Francisco Bay area. Not that she disliked it, she said, but “it tends to be a bit of a bubble.”

As an escape, Guarneri chose to attend college at the University of Pennsylvania, but after four years she discovered that instead of seeing the world, she had moved into another bubble, only this one was colder and more than 2,000 miles away from the first.

“I didn’t know Philadelphia while I was at Penn,” she said. Most of her time was spent in University City or Center City.

When a friend took her to Northern Liberties in the summer between her sophomore and junior years, she was excited to discover another, unique neighborhood — one in which she now lives.

“I thought, ‘oh, there are other neighborhoods that have night life,’” she said. “Northern Liberties has character, even more so than Center City.”

Now, with almost a year of post-college living in Philadelphia under her belt, Guarneri has gotten to know the city and is ready for the city to know her.

Guarneri is a member of the first class of Philly Fellows, a program designed to retain some of Philadelphia’s brightest college graduates by providing them with innovative jobs, plus housing and benefits for a year. The stipend isn’t great, Guarneri admits, but with the housing and the chance to stay in the city, the fellowship is worth it.

In July, the first class of the Fellow’s program comes to an end, and the question weighing on each Fellow’s mind is whether to head to greener pastures or make Philly their new home.

Fortunately for Philly and Mt. Airy, Guarneri is hanging around.

In her fellowship year, she is working at Neighborhood Interfaith Movement, a nonprofit, non-sectarian organization in Mt. Airy that supports children, families and older adults. Part of NIM’s mission is to bring congregations together, but that has been sidetracked over the past few years by other projects — that is, until Guarneri arrived.

The position she was given, council coordinator, a long-dormant position NIM resurrected for this fellowship, was open-ended. All she knew was she had to start bringing congregations together.

“It takes a lot of initiative,” she said, to create a position from the ground up. “It takes a certain person to thrive in that kind of setting,” and thrive she did.

During the Local’s hour-long interview with Guarneri, she spoke more enthusiastically about the projects she has helped initiate at NIM than about herself and the fellowship.

Throughout her one-year tenure (or rather, nine-month tenure at the time of the interview), Guarneri has helped initiate youth programs, a peace summit, a peace walk and a resource guide for the city’s congregations to advocate for peace.

The resource guide is attracting attention from congregations throughout the city — a good resource in a city dealing with a hurtful war across the sea and a gun war within its own borders. The 65-page (and ever-growing) guide provides religious leaders with sample sermons, reflections and prayers from numerous religions to share with congregations, as well as links and sources to programs in the city that provide volunteer services for everything from peace making to working in the city’s public schools.

Guarneri said she sees working with the public schools as an important part of stalling the city’s violence. “I’m not sure people understand how much the schools need help,” she said.

Initially, Guarneri’s plan was to search for a guide like this to distribute to local congregations, but she could not find one.

“You’d think someone would have done this before,” said Guarneri during the interview. She said there were guides on other subjects, and added, “but I never found an local anti-violence tool kit.”

Knowing about the guide, the Rev. Kent Matthies, minister of the Unitarian Society of Germantown, extended Guarneri an invitation to the Mayor’s Office of Faith-Based Initiatives, which “assists in the development of practical expressions of Government/Faith Community cooperative programming,” according to its Web site.

George Stern, NIM’s executive director, went in her stead as the director of NIM, and learned that the office’s task force of religious leaders from around the city was thrilled with the guide. The Mayor’s office has promised to print the document for distribution citywide. A copy of the guide is available on NIM’s Web site, www.nim-phila.org.

The Mayor’s office also liked the title of NIM’s planned youth summit on May 12, which is “Increase the Peace,” Guarneri said. The name, she noted, is meant to emphasize the positive aspect of the anti-violence movement. Organizers chose the phrase “increase the peace” because it suggested upward movement, rather than the more negative term “anti-violence,” she said.

Guarneri said the summit, at First Presbyterian Church of Germantown, would introduce young people to conflict resolution and peace through drama and the arts. She said these efforts are meant not only to promote peace today, but also to promote a lasting effort to keep peace moving forward.

“Anti-violence is not just a one-time, make-a-splash publicity event,” she said, pointing out that those are important too. But she said events should encourage “each person to be working on peace everyday.”

The youth programs NIM has worked on — a summer program, a service/learning project, a future potential basketball league — encourage more than interfaith collaboration. Guarneri said the programs are also for community youth not affiliated with a congregation.

“We wanted to involve kids that wouldn’t necessarily be interacting with each other without these programs,” Guarneri said.

From November to May, 20 students from eight congregations worked together at the family shelter, Stenton Family Manor, where they held a drumming workshop with the children, made no-sew blankets with the mothers and helped the teens make crafts for the holiday, to name just a few activities.

After the service, the group members reflected on their actions through art projects. They had a poetry workshop and made collages and held conversation on their faiths. The children were from two mosques, two synagogues and four local churches, though Guarneri reiterated that faith associations are not a requirement for being involved.

The eight-week summer program, which begins in June, is a collaboration between NIM and Build a Bridge International in Germantown. The program is “loosely faith based,” Guarneri said, and is really about making connections and exploring social issues with art.

She also hopes NIM will develop a basketball program for local youth, not only to provide after-school activities, she said, but to provide mentors in the form of coaches for children.

Come July, when her fellowship is over, Guarneri fortunately will remain to see more of her projects enacted. NIM has arranged to hire her full time, retaining her as council coordinator, and she’ll oversee the next Fellow who NIM hopes will come in and help expand the youth program even further.

“We’re very pleased with her, and we crafted a fellowship for her that has really moved us ahead in our efforts to serve our congregations and community,” Stern said. “Retaining her creates continuity in the program and in our work that could really make a difference in our faith based community.”

Guarneri said her job was one she couldn’t have obtained without the fellowship. “The [Philly Fellow] positions are dynamic, interesting, and they give lots of responsibility,” she said, something that would be difficult to find in an entry-level position. “It’s really interesting to talk to the Fellows about it.”

Guarneri said she’s lucky that NIM had the capacity to keep her onboard full time once the fellowship ceases. Some of the other Fellows in Guarneri’s class are not choosing to stay, either because they accepted positions in other cities or decided to head home.

Tim Ifill, co-founder of Philly Fellows, said he is collecting information from the Fellows on who is officially staying in the city and who will be leaving.

The year after college is “definitely a transition period,” Guarneri said, and though she did not want to return home come graduation day last year, she isn’t sure she would have stayed in Philadelphia without Philly Fellows.

“My loving this job has transitioned into me staying here,” she said. “I think Philly Fellows has done its job.”

Once the guide is out, religious leaders from around the city will be appreciative of Philly Fellows for getting her to stay.

Contact staff writer Kristin Pazulski at 215-248-8819 or kristin@chestnuthilllocal.com.