Daniel Condoluci-Smith, Director of Philanthropy for the Delaware Humane Association and Founder of the Shine Beyond Company.
Daniel: I am from Delaware, so just south of Philly. I was born and raised here and I’ve lived here my entire life. I am a graduate of University of Delaware. I think about this question a lot, about what shaped me. I mean, my family was always my mom. In particular, it was always about giving to people and caring about the community. And I didn’t grow up in a rich household by any means, so once I fell into fundraising, coming from a lower income household, I was just so fascinated by people giving their money and time. I’ve always cultivated this value of wanting to help people.
My vision for people that started the Shine Beyond Company is about kindness and connecting people. It came from little things that I and my husband had been doing in the community and realizing that kindness is contagious. People would see little things that we did, like at our Christmas party we would ask people to bring gifts for a nonprofit. And they would then go and say, “hey, I had my family do this because I saw you guys do it and it was a really good idea.” I’m fascinated by watching how there’s a tightrope of not being boastful and saying, “Oh, look at me. I did all these great things”, but also sharing kindness, so that it is contagious. Some are fascinated by seeing how it all branches out and how people are connected. So that’s what led to me wanting to do this, just that desire to spread kindness by connecting people and connecting resources together.
I keep going back to that greatest sentence in the world and mine keeps changing constantly. At the core, it continues to be around spreading kindness through connection, so connecting people together and inspiring people through positivity and gratitude. I’m about a year and a half into it, but it still feels very new and young and early. I played around with a blog for a little while and it’s actually been through a combination of COVID-19 and this class that has pushed it forward a lot. I had this mental block with it for a while and I realized that with COVID-19 and the stresses that people were going through, it was the perfect time for people to kind of focus on kindness and the person that they want to be after all of this is done and we go back to whatever the new normal is. Having the inspiration of the class and seeing all the people around me, meeting Angel, and having this huge terrible thing happening in the world around me pushed it forward quite a bit. Twice a week my venture has recharge sessions which are hosted on Zoom and it’s a group of people that typically has somewhere between six and twelve people who sign on, and it’s really just about kind of disconnecting from noise and acting together. We talk about gratitude. We talk about kindness. We’ll do some meditation, things like that. It seems to really be helping people cope with the loss of everything from the past, the life that we all knew while thinking forward.
Angel Cancino, Outreach Coordinator at the Arizona Center for After School Excellence and Founder of Higher Self Friendly.
Angel: I’m originally born and raised in Mexico, moved to the US after high school and then I did my undergrad and masters degree here in the US at the University of Texas at El Paso. My background is in communications and advertising. I found through my developing career that I felt I needed to do something more meaningful. So, I started getting involved with nonprofit organizations, utilizing my skill set in communication and advertising and PR background to work and volunteer within the nonprofit sector as well. I moved a lot between jobs, trying to find what I wanted to do. My most recent move geographically from Texas to Arizona was when I started working with the Alliance for Arizona Nonprofits with the idea that that move was going to help me land a job with a nonprofit that I would fall in love with. After being exposed to the state of Arizona’s 20,000 plus nonprofit organizations while working with the Alliance of Arizona nonprofits that year, I realized that what I really wanted to do was start my own nonprofit organization. I looked at what shaped me and what I really cared about and that came back to just thinking about my own story and in my own story, about personal growth and about spiritual growth. That is how Higher Self Friendly came about, thinking about a population that I could serve. In a way, it’s a little bit selfish because I consider myself as a beneficiary of my own organization because I still want to continue learning and growing. Higher Self Friendly not only helps me help myself but also helps other people.
The Executive Program in Social Impact Strategy has really helped me in thinking through our logic model and because at the beginning of starting my venture, it was just helping people start on their own journey of personal growth or spiritual growth of connection within. My vision is to help those who want to be helped in this area and maybe just help them a little bit to find a little bit more self awareness of who they truly are. And maybe that way they can realize their full potential and live a more fulfilled life.
Higher Self Friendly’s mission is to create community and provide support for LGBTQ+ people and other humans who are seeking to explore a deeper connection within. Through this course I was very happy to learn how to craft that the most important sentence of the world. Our goal is to create a supportive community for our members to develop their individual spirituality by providing a safe space and the various pathways to explore a deeper connection within.