Arielle Brousse
"I want to show people that early reading is for everyone."
Focus Area: Education
School: University of Pennsylvania School of Social Policy and Practice & School of Arts and Sciences
Biography:
When I entered the workforce, all I knew about what I wanted to do was that I wanted to be able to give back, to work towards a net good for my community; I was lucky, then, that I got my start in the development department of The Franklin Institute, an organization whose extraordinary offerings I knew firsthand from my own childhood memories. Working on the Institute's foundation grants, government grants, capital campaign efforts, and donor communications, and moving on to become the one-woman development department at the Kelly Writers House, I've come to understand that however accidental my ending up in development might have been, I wound up on the right path. My primary interest is in using storytelling principles to help donors connect personally with a common cause, and to do my work in a way that celebrates the generosity, generativity, and creativity that philanthropy entails. In the years that I've been working, I've also completed a Master's degree in Nonprofit Leadership at the University of Pennsylvania, and a course in Principles of Fundraising offered by the Association of Fundraising Professionals. As a side project, I currently operate a blog that collects personal essays reflecting back on favorite children's books (http://sensiblenonsense.us); it has the dual goal of getting people to consider these books seriously and critically, and to show visitors to the blog that early childhood reading is important and formative, no matter who you are.