This past summer, I had the opportunity to work for FamilyAid, a non-profit organization which provides assistance for families facing housing instability and homelessness in Boston. I was placed there through the Forest Foundation Fellowship, an umbrella organization that matches students at Greater-Boston nonprofits for summer roles to build new talent pipelines in the sector. A separate Paideia summer internship grant supported my housing for the summer, without which moving to a new city for the summer would not have been possible.
One aspect of my fellowship experience that I particularly enjoyed was our final project. It gave us the opportunity to work directly with a Boston-area nonprofit and advocate for its work through a grant proposal and presentation. My team chose Queer History Boston, and before writing anything, we visited their archives and met with their Executive Director to understand what the funding would actually go toward: an archive migration project and a podcast series meant to bring their collection to a wider audience.
As I sat in the room, watching presentation after presentation, I began to realize how difficult it was going to be to “sell” why my nonprofit uniquely deserved the funding as compared to the others. My peers argued for organizations that refurbished old computers for those in need, empowered low-income immigrant women, or worked to preserve connections among siblings separated by foster care. Each team told a similar story: our organization has proven itself to do great work, and in turn proven that the work is needed and valuable. But the chaos paralyzing the government has jeopardized its usual grant income.
“How,” I wondered, “am I going to prove that my organization deserves this funding more than the others?” I felt scattered, conflicted, and deeply empathetic to the trustees tasked with deciding who would get funding and how much. The feeling was familiar: February 2025, my eyes aching as my phone illuminated with videos of families being driven apart by ICE crackdowns. I read dozens of DP articles about federal government threats against Penn and watched the President’s Department of Government Efficiency gut government arms that had shaped my life and upbringing since childhood, among them the Department of Education.
Much like that anxiety, I quickly realized in Boston that my bandwidth was not infinite. Fighting for every cause that tugged at my heart did not improve outcomes for those causes, it only heightened my own anxiety. In a world, and at an institution, that seems to glorify knowing and caring about everything at once, that realization wasn’t easy to accept.
The question I kept turning over in that room assumed deservingness was a contest with a single winner. It isn’t. Every team in that room was right that their cause mattered; the trustees simply didn’t have infinite funding, the same way I didn’t have infinite bandwidth. Advocating for a handful of causes does not mean condemning the rest. I believe we as humans must, at some point, catalogue and prioritize the things we hold nearest to ourselves, so as not to fall short at everything. This isn’t to dismiss exploration, or even a liberal arts education, but if the goal of exploring the world is to better understand yourself, shouldn’t you also discover, and emphasize the passions that make you feel most alive? Isn’t that the actual goal?
My work at FamilyAid is what let me see this clearly in the first place. FamilyAid wasn’t attempting to solve homelessness, poverty, healthcare access, and educational inequity all at once. It was one organization, dedicated to one task, and its effectiveness came directly from that narrowness. Advocating for Queer History Boston, I realized I was making the same case for them that FamilyAid made for itself: not that their mission mattered more than every adjacent cause, but that doing one thing with undivided attention is the most effective approach to any social issue.
This is the version of myself I will continue to develop as a Paideia Fellow. Dialogue and exploration ask us to hold as many lenses as possible, but a lens is only useful if used to its full extent, rather than being divided among twenty others. I want to keep exploring widely. I also want to keep choosing, deliberately and without guilt, which causes receive my full attention, trusting that someone else is doing the same for the ones I set down.
Queer History Boston received $6,000 in funding that day, and we all got funded, meaning the question of who deserved the funding wasn’t a zero-sum game. But the number isn’t the lesson I left with. The lesson was this: much like nonprofit organizations, we all have missions; the prioritization of your own is not a diminishing of others, but an act of faith that someone else cares about every issue, subject, and idea that sets you on fire, just as much as you do. Explore, prioritize, and most importantly, have faith.
Owen Phillips (C’28) is an SNF Paideia Fellow majoring in Sociology and French.
