Last Fall, bi3 increased our capacity and experience by adding two team members: Jena Bradley, Director of Community Partnerships, and Zohar Perla, Director of Evaluation and Learning.
Learn more about what drives their passion and commitment to bi3 and the work to promote health equity in our community.
What was your journey getting to bi3?
Jena: From a young age, I knew I wanted to work in a field that would allow me to connect with people, better understand systems, and how to improve them.
Initially, I thought that would lead me to a career in law or public service. Life had other plans. After graduating, I cobbled together a couple of part-time jobs that brought me into the social services field and introduced me to professional philanthropy. I haven’t looked back. Now, 10 years later and I’m still in it – learning so much, working alongside truly inspiring community leaders, and collaboratively dreaming up possibilities.
Zohar: I grew up with the value of making a positive impact on the world. After a slightly misguided but deeply educational volunteer experience abroad before college, I returned having deeply internalized the importance of having a deeper understanding of the context, culture, and history of the places one is trying to impact.
After some for-profit consulting work post-college, I got into a fellowship program that allowed me to apply my data and research skills in the education nonprofit sector. I discovered I loved using my analytic and data skills to help think about how programmatic and strategy questions could be grounded in data, as well as making data collection efforts less painful so that those doing the work could spend more time on the work and less time wrestling with databases and spreadsheets. That passion for using data to inform community impact has led me into several different spaces, most recently into professional philanthropy and now health equity!
What excites you about working at bi3?
Jena: Serving as the director of community partnerships allows me to leverage my love of relationship building in a new way, focusing on racial and health equity. During these first months, I’ve learned about the importance, impact and challenges of birth work and birth workers. This has been some of my favorite work.
bi3 occupies such an interesting space as a trust-based funder with a bias toward larger grants, a strategic partner of a large local hospital system, and a (comparatively) newer funder. I’m excited by all of the possibilities that exist within that:
- How we use our resources to amplify community solutions
- How we use our influence to promote needed change
- How we bear witness to and sit in the frustrations of systems work and do it anyway
- How we share, tell, and shape more complete narratives.
I’m here for all of it!
Zohar: I’m excited to be at an organization that identifies as an innovator and risk-taker while seeking to hold equity at its core. Philanthropy often holds itself back from trying things due to a fear of taking risks. I’ve enjoyed that the organization is willing to change its ways of doing fairly quickly, and given my role as part of the learning team, I appreciate the willingness to reflect and explore whether the way things we’ve done things in the past makes sense moving forward and then change them if the answer is no.
Health equity is a new field for me, and as a new mom and someone who loves to learn new things, I’m excited by the opportunity bi3 gives me to learn and make an impact in the fields of birth equity and youth mental health.
Which bi3 value resonates with you the most and why?
Jena: Being courageous. The work demands it.
Zohar: Building Trust. I grew up hearing that trust takes time to build and a moment to destroy. I value the opportunity to build trust with new grantee partners and the community, as well as within our new team. I’ve appreciated that bi3 recognizes that this work takes time and is committed to longer time horizons to allow the work to thrive.
