Community service

So it's kept me here.

So community work.

And one of the things that motivated this whole effort was I was in leadership Metro Richmond back in 2020.

And I felt like I was drinking from a fire hose, learning about the poverty rate in the city and a lot of the systemic issues that have been that way for a long time.

It was never going to be a podcast or a radio show.

It was just going to be an ideas board and kind of this place that we could all, you know, talk about it.

And, you know, I think that the reality of it for me is my experience is rooted in community work.

And there's something about – There's a big difference between being involved in community and just living in a city.

That's an award named after David Boone, a member of the five in a row Grey Cup champions in the late 70s and early 80s.

And it is for community service.

And the winner this year is Royce Mechier, the Elks' safety and defensive back.

Mechier spends countless hours working in minor football and in the community and other aspects.

A teenage mistake sentenced Lydie Gutfeld to 75 hours of community service.

She had no idea those hours would launch a 35-year career devoted to serving communities.

Lidi is the community services director for the city of Placentia, California, and has spent her career working in parks and recreation for communities including Beverly Hills, Irvine, Mission Viejo, and San Bernardino.

In this conversation, we talk about that unlikely beginning, why leadership and title are two very different things, and how she's learned to lead with transparency, humor, energy, and absolutely no interest [laughs] in pretending to be someone she isn't.

Lidi also shares why great leaders adapt to the communities and people they serve, how her mistakes have become some of her best teaching material, and why speaking from difficult experiences has become an important part of her leadership.

... she actually grew up with my grandma in the Mojave Desert.

Um, and so I just immediately landed and got focused on community work.

So I had this kind of two-track education here.

Mm-hmm.

So I encourage all your listeners, if they're ever looking for a way to give back, D.C. Central Kitchen is a great way to do it.

Most people, yeah, you say, you care about community service, you want to give back, and people say, yeah, yeah, sure.

And then they go, ah, I didn't sign up.

I didn't think about doing this.

And as you said, they started doing a lot of work with communities, especially because, like most cities that have this really rapid process of industrialization in Mexico, They basically started with having some problems with organized crime itself.

And Los Hijos de la Marmelada started to actively become involved in community work, as you said.

Of course, a lot of promotional sports and a lot of promotion with helping people getting out of drug problems.

Yeah, of course, organization is resistance, isn't it? And with such a massive growth as well in industrialization, this new wave of industrialization, of course, organized crime follows that because organized crime is interested in financial profit wherever it is that it is to be found.

Joanna graduated from the University of Guelph's International Development Studies Program in 2018.

While here, she was the recipient of multiple awards and honors, including the International Development Studies Prize for Academic Exc- Excellence and Community Service, the Richard and Sophia Hungerford Undergraduate Travel Scholarship, and she was on the Dean's Honor List from 2016 to 2018.

And if you didn't already feel a little unaccomplished, her undergrad also took her around the world as she participated in field schools in Finland, India, and the Netherlands.

Today, Joanna works at The Nature Conservancy of Canada as a coordinator of federal funding programs.

So here in Chicago, we're involved in almost any, every not-for-profit that we could get our hands off, not donated money, but other resources, manpower resources.

ideas, whatever we need to.

So we're always involved in the philanthropic kind of space here, wherever, wherever we touch, we like to get into the community services because that's who we are as people.

First of all, it's one of our core values.

And the other one is a great way to get involved with the community, which if you take care of the community, they're not going to let you fail.