Brenda Anibarro, far left, with the entire learning and community engagement team posing for the camera in Spokane last year. From left, after Brenda: Hayley Burgin, Emma Noyes, Bárbara Guzmán, Grace Rooney, Rosa Gimson, and Gabriela Ramos.
As vice president of learning and community engagement, Brenda Anibarro says the most exciting and rewarding thing about the past five years has been watching her team grow and flourish. An events department, a research and evaluation division, and an expanded community engagement team all have incredible leaders at the helm. Brenda says, “It’s been tremendous to have more capacity and more team members out in our state deepening relationships.”
In her time at Inatai, Brenda has traveled to all 39 counties multiple times. She can’t pick a favorite, having found beauty and strength across all the Washington landscapes and communities she’s gotten to know. She looks back on those early travel days and remembers when she dreamt about the team as it is today—a team big enough to spend concentrated time in communities supporting organizations as they work to build power, especially in places that have been overlooked and underinvested in by philanthropy.
“We knew one day we would be here: with enough capacity to look at how we support the research needs of communities, how we meaningfully convene and gather the people and organizations we fund, and how we deepen our learning through relationships,” Brenda says. “And we finally are thanks to Emma, Grace, Rosa, Hayley, Bárbara, and Gabriela, who bring their wealth of experience and expertise to the learning and community engagement team.”
After years of steady effort, she says it is gratifying to see the pieces falling into place. “All these amazing organizations and people all around the state are doing important work. There’s something very unifying and fortifying in knowing that. Even after five years, I feel incredibly inspired about what I’ve learned. I understand more than ever that there are brilliant people and organizations building power in every corner of our state.”
Before joining Inatai, Brenda was a leader with the City of Seattle’s Office of Civil Rights, where she worked up close on local issues, and she spent the first few years at the foundation also working closely with individual leaders and organizations. She says the biggest change she’s experienced as the foundation and her team have grown is shifting her role from being the sole point of contact for new organizations to leading a team of people who are all doing engagement in different ways. Still, she says she loves that this role allows her to connect with people one-on-one to learn about their values and visions for the future.
The community learning and engagement team sits at the center of much of the foundation’s other work, including grantmaking and policy and advocacy. When asked what sits at the center of the community learning and engagement team’s efforts, Brenda immediately responds, “relationships.” Their goal, as she sees it, is to synchronize all aspects of how Inatai nurtures relationships, responds to feedback, and maximizes the foundation’s overall impact in service to communities. As she puts it, “We steward these funds, but they belong to communities.”
She’s quick to acknowledge that the team is still figuring out how to create that synchronicity and that the work of learning will never be complete. “Early on, you visit places and think, ‘Wow, I learned so much!’ And then you visit again and realize you didn’t know as much as you thought you did. There’s still so much for us to learn about Washington. It is our ‘forever work.’”
