OutGrowth

Danielle Staton is the Executive Director of Jeremiah Program’s Baltimore campus. She has spent her professional career dedicated to expanding equity and access to underserved communities in educational spaces.

Over the last 15 years, she has served in several capacities that align with the two-generation model of Jeremiah Program, including Head Start and early childhood education programming, family and community engagement, college access, and workforce development.

She most recently served as the founding Senior Director of Programs with iMentor Baltimore, leading the strategy and implementation of iMentor’s school-based programming in the organization’s newest region.

Our Q+A with the inspiring Danielle is in this month’s blog feature! ➡️ https://www.outgrowthtoday.org/post/how-community-transforms

This season of spring is all about emerging from hibernation and beginning to reconnect with the outside world in meaningful ways. As we get into full swing, I’ve designed our spring issues of En Root to cover topics that can ignite our curiosity and spark our purpose, as we re-awaken interests and connections that may have remained dormant during the winter months. Specifically, I focus on topics around community and reconnection.

In March, we covered the topic of Community-Led Futures, with the help of the inspiring Amalia Deloney. I discussed how, at our core, believes in fully committing to doing the work that impacts our world by starting at the ground level, where the most core stakeholders and the greatest champions for good reside. Now, taking this one step further, how can we as individual stakeholders begin to activate our own communities?

How can we, as Danielle Staton states, see community as a verb, where we are intentionally and actively showing up and extending support, regularly? I am thrilled to feature Danielle’s story this month, along with some great resources that can get us building and re-investing in our communities, all through small, manageable moments of connection.

🌱Read the April issue ⤵️

https://tinyurl.com/5xpktvfr

highly values community. We believe in creating important cross-sector collaborations in order to elevate teams’ skill development, reimagine futures, and break free from traditional silos/ways of operating. We believe in fully committing to doing the work that impacts our world by starting at the ground level, where the most core stakeholders and the greatest champions for good reside. Community is deeply engrained in everything we are, from our philosophy to our curriculum structure. None of us can do it alone, and what would it look like to start with community, and build the future from there?

This month, to highlight community and the people doing the amazing work, I spotlighted the topic of building community-led futures. Here to showcase this topic is the talented and inspiring Amalia Deloney, Founder of Point A Studio and leader of Seed & Signal.

Read more from the March issue ➡️

https://shorturl.at/vGXWA ⭐️

No matter where we look, we are constantly surrounded by internal and external pressures to move in a particular direction, to make a certain selection of choices, and be bound to the expectations that we have for ourselves and that others have for us. Remaining true to ourselves, especially in a society that pushes us to drive toward a standard definition of career success, can feel almost impossible. That line between what feels right for us and what feels expected, necessary and even inevitable gets blurred.

When I started in 2017, I wanted to create an organization that would challenge the conventional pathway. I wanted to showcase how tapping into our purpose would guide us to career paths that would be nonlinear and messy, but meaningful. Most of all, I wanted to highlight that this process of discovery couldn't come from staying inside of our own brains, and that we needed to immerse ourselves in new, collaborative, and at times uncomfortable experiences in order to discover ourselves, build cutting-edge competencies that could lead to success in any field and perhaps most importantly, zoom out from our narrow lens of what the future can hold.

That mindset was a product of my five years of travel around the world in my 20's, and I had discovered on my own how immersive experiences that were messy, novel and challenging were actually incubators for tremendous personal and professional growth. But rather than just get on a soap box and encourage others to seek out their own immersive experiences, in 2017, I set out to build tangible (and accessible) programs, curricula and moments/days/months where students and professionals could "attend" these experiences that would not only help them to dedicated time to asking, "what now?" and "why not me," building the creative confidence we all need to reach our true purpose and potential, but would also arm them with specific soft skills that would help them to propel their careers and teams forward.

So my final word: Each of us has the power to explore, question and carve our own futures. If remaining true to ourselves and our own unique, messy path was easy, everyone would do it. But what better time than a fresh new year to start? Here's to a year of discovery.

Happy 2026 and enjoy our January issue of En Root featuring the incredible Amanda Eby of Give Them Tomorrow!

https://shorturl.at/N0sHr