My Double Life and the Good Beyond

Though I write mostly about literature and life on this blog, I am off much of the day running a boutique marketing communications firm. Sometimes this means that I'm strategizing with executives about corporate culture and intra-office dialogue. Sometimes it means I'm writing corporate magazines, annual reports, histories. Often I'm collaborating with my husband-partner, he being the designer, the artist, the one who knows the magic tricks that convert digital files into type-glossed, image-varnished paper.

My job requires acting, but it also requires listening, and lately, on behalf of St. Christopher's Foundation for Children, a truly wonderful organization, I've been listening to the leaders of North Philadelphia initiatives such as SquashSmarts and Centro Nuevo Creacion talk about the work they are doing, child by child, to make my city a stronger one, and to make the world a better place. I've learned about teens from difficult neighborhoods who have so dedicated themselves to learning and to athletics that they've gone on to such prestigious schools as Haverford College. I've learned about young North Philadelphia kids who have picked up a camera and become true artists—documenting their world, finding the color between the cracks.

http://www.scfchildren.org/

http://www.centronueva.org/

http://www.squashsmarts.org/

I write about this today on my blog, for sometimes we all need a reminder that, in the midst of a mud-slinging campaign and uncontrollable weather, in the midst of terrible losses, there are those out there who go to work each day with the ambition, the intention, of making something right. Of letting bright red seeds fall where they may.