On Doing Good, Giselle Hensel-Piburn explores how mentorship turns curiosity into confidence—and connects generations through the simple act of showing up.

A siren grows louder outside Santa Fe’s Lensic theater. Paramedics rush a gurney down the aisle and onto the stage. Then a teenager takes the microphone and explains the steps to save a life.

In this episode of Doing Good, Giselle Hensel-Piburn recalls that student presentation as an example of what becomes possible when adults take young people’s ideas seriously.

As director of Monte del Sol Charter School’s mentorship program, she connects students with community members willing to share their skills, time, and enthusiasm. High school students complete two years of mentorship to graduate, exploring interests that range from photography and welding to cooking and music.

The starting point is curiosity. For students unsure what interests them, Hensel-Piburn asks questions about what they would love to learn. Her instinct is to begin with yes, then work out what is possible.

The conversation explores how much learning happens beyond the chosen activity: communicating with an adult, keeping commitments, navigating unfamiliar settings, and discovering that one’s interests deserve attention. Learning to cook for family can matter just as much as exploring a profession.

The benefits flow both ways. Speaking from her experience as a mentor, one co-host describes an unexpected connection to Santa Fe and the reward of seeing her work through a student’s eyes.

For Hensel-Piburn, the work also carries personal meaning. After losing her mother in childhood, she remembers her older sister as an important source of guidance and support.

Throughout the episode, spectacular experiences sit alongside ordinary acts of care. A student’s ambitious presentation may draw applause, but the deeper achievement is a relationship: an adult listening, encouraging, and showing up.

The invitation is simple. Sharing something you love can help a young person imagine a larger future—and give you a stronger place in your community.

https://www.montedelsolcharterschool.org/mentorship/

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Cecile Lipworth reflects on how art, intuition, and human connection turn shared experiences into lasting action.

A conversation at a Christmas Eve dinner changed Cecile Lipworth’s life. An offer to help produce The Vagina Monologues at Madison Square Garden became an invitation into years of activism. She trusted her instincts, stepped through the door, and discovered how far one connection could travel.

On this episode of Doing Good, Lipworth explores the relationship between creativity, courage, and collective action. Her work with V-Day, the movement to end violence against women and girls, showed her that a performance could become more than an evening at the theater.

Community productions raised money for local organizations. Audiences laughed, confronted realities, and began conversations they had avoided for generations. Lipworth remembers hearing from families whose mothers or grandmothers disclosed experiences of abuse after seeing the play together. Being in the same room mattered.

So did joy. Even while confronting violence, she and her colleagues made space for humor, celebration, and women’s connection to their bodies. That energy helped sustain difficult work and invited people into action.

One Billion Rising brought those ideas into the streets through dance. Organizing in Santa Fe also deepened Lipworth’s relationships with local activists and community leaders, helping redirect her global experience toward the place she called home.

That spirit carries into the feminist fiesta she describes planning to honor New Mexico’s women. Through poetry, conversation, art, and intergenerational exchange, she hopes to celebrate accomplishments while giving participants concrete ways to get involved. Older and younger women, she suggests, can build something together by sharing wisdom and listening to one another.

Throughout the conversation, Lipworth returns to intuition, collaboration, and trust. The work itself energizes her, especially when people gather around a shared purpose.

For her, inspiration carries a responsibility: leave the room ready to do something. That is how the next ripple spreads.

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Vicki Pozzebon explores how listening, living your values, and caring for the people doing the work can help nonprofits stay true to their purpose.

In Vicki Pozzebon’s childhood home, generosity was a practice. Her Italian immigrant parents welcomed people with food, while her father taught newcomers skills in his well-drilling business. That spirit of sharing knowledge and making room for others still shapes her work.

On this episode of Doing Good, Pozzebon explores how nonprofits can keep that human purpose alive amid fundraising pressures, board dynamics, and the demands of running an organization.

Her approach to strategic planning starts with the community. Rather than leaving decisions to staff and board members, she brings in the people an organization serves, its partners, and others who can help identify what is needed. Listening requires a willingness to hear uncomfortable answers. If an organization’s services are no longer needed, she argues, its existence deserves to be questioned.

She also urges founders to investigate whether another nonprofit already does the work they envision. Good intentions become more useful when they respond to a need and build on existing efforts.

Values, meanwhile, must show up in decisions. She describes a housing initiative in Silver City connecting affordable, healthy homes with construction training and sustainable materials. Its challenge is making those commitments work together in practice.

That same scrutiny belongs inside nonprofits. Pozzebon calls for better pay, benefits, and working conditions, challenging expectations that people doing meaningful work should accept exhaustion or financial insecurity. She wants funders to take chances on emerging organizations and support the infrastructure they need to succeed.

Her approach is grounded in a framework linking the individual, the group, and the work itself. Transformation can begin with asking for support, caring for oneself, or relating differently to colleagues.

For Pozzebon, goodness grows through people who pay attention to one another and act with care. Sustaining it means building organizations whose daily choices reflect the communities they exist to serve.

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Porter Swentzell shares how a decade of community-led education is helping Santa Clara Pueblo carry its Native language into the future.

For Porter Swentzell, the future of Tewa is something he hopes to hear: children, parents, and neighbors speaking their language freely and joyfully throughout Santa Clara Pueblo.

On this episode of Doing Good, Swentzell describes the decade of work behind that vision at Kha’p’o Community School. In 2016, the community took control of its federally operated school with a mission: education in both Tewa and English.

The stakes reach beyond vocabulary. Language carries a people’s worldview, relationships, and understanding of what it means to be human. For Swentzell, passing it forward honors generations who sustained their culture through extraordinary challenges.

Building the program has meant rethinking how school works. When classroom arrangements failed to challenge students at different language levels, the team started over. Drawing on the community’s agricultural traditions, they organized proficiency levels around a corn plant's growth. A block schedule brings children of different ages and grades together by ability.

Learning and assessment reflect an oral tradition. Teachers gauge understanding through conversation and everyday requests, listening for the difference between comprehension, a simple response, and more complex expression. Swentzell credits Tewa director Darrin Rock and his team with developing this approach.

The effort now reaches beyond elementary classrooms to parents, adults, staff, and high school students. A ten-year plan coordinates leadership, funding, and responsibilities around creating proficient speakers.

For families where parents no longer speak Tewa, expecting children to learn it at home is insufficient. The school’s ambition is to help return the language there.

Swentzell’s education began with family, farming, animals, and the changing seasons. Those experiences inform his conviction that education belongs to a community.

He hopes for hundreds more speakers and an immersion setting for young children. Success means Tewa living wherever people gather, carrying an inheritance into another generation.

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The Santa Fe psychiatrist explores how attachment, empathy, and belonging shape our capacity for kindness—and why understanding begins with asking what happened.

Are people innately good? For Santa Fe psychiatrist Dr. Zane Maroney, the most honest answer is also the most human: it depends.

In this episode of *Doing Good*, Dr. Maroney challenges the tidy division between “good people” and “bad people.” Human beings, he argues, are shaped by temperament, childhood, culture, security, trauma, and the relationships that teach us who we are. The moral compass begins forming early, when children absorb not only what caregivers say, but what they model. Labels that seem harmless—good, bad, lazy, clumsy—can become part of a child’s identity.

Dr. Maroney’s own path to psychiatry joined science with the humanities. Inspired by his father’s work at the Santa Fe Indian Hospital and his own experience at Albuquerque’s Casa de Salud, he came to see medicine as a universal language—and healing as an art grounded in people’s stories.

That understanding guides his work today. Therapy, he says, begins by walking “shoulder to shoulder” with another person, building trust and bearing witness to experiences often hidden by guilt or shame. “It’s the relationship that heals.”

The same principle reaches beyond the therapy room. Beneath anger, he often finds fear. Beneath harmful behavior, there may be injury, deprivation, or an unmet need. Asking “What happened to you?” instead of “What’s wrong with you?” does not erase accountability; it opens a path toward empathy, forgiveness, and change.

Kindness, in this view, is rooted in connection. People need skills, biological support, and—most importantly—other people. An act of care reminds both giver and receiver: I belong here. I can affect another life.

Perhaps goodness is not perfection at all. Sometimes it is helping a stranger. Sometimes it is reducing harm. And sometimes it is simply refusing to pass our hurt on to someone else.

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The Diné farmer, artist, and co-founder of Bidii Baby Foods draws from the same palette in his farming and sand painting: the earth itself.

For Zach Ben, farming and art are inseparable expressions of culture. A sixth-generation farmer and accomplished sand painter, Zach learned both practices from his father. Whether gathering natural pigments for a painting or planting heritage seeds, he works with the same essential material—the earth. Both practices carry memory, tell stories, and connect one generation to the next.

In this episode of Doing Good, Zach explains how becoming a father gave that connection a new purpose. He and his wife, Mary, founded Bidii Baby Foods after the birth of their first child in 2021. They planted two acres by hand, growing heritage varieties of corn, squash, and melon. Their son’s first food was corn they had raised themselves and steamed underground using a traditional process. What began as nourishment for one child grew into a mission to make culturally meaningful, healthy food accessible to children across the Navajo Nation.

The pandemic had exposed the vulnerability of national food systems, while local farmers continued feeding their communities. Zach saw an opportunity to rebuild something grounded in local land, knowledge, and relationships.

Bidii’s shelf-stable foods reflect the realities of families who may live far from grocery stores or without reliable electricity. The company primarily serves childcare centers, schools, and food banks, with plans to expand traditional food production from its new farm and facility near Aztec, New Mexico. Through the Ben Initiative, Zach also helps young people reconnect with farming and create livelihoods of their own.

Asked what seed he would place in the hands of the next generation, Zach chooses corn. It represents nourishment, ceremony, connection, and ancestral inheritance. Like his sand paintings, it emerges from the earth carrying a story—and the possibility of healing.

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At Moving Arts Española, creativity helps young people discover their gifts, carry their culture forward, and guide the next generation.

Roger Montoya’s life changed during the HIV/AIDS crisis. Returning to northern New Mexico after dancing in Los Angeles and New York, he expected his future to be short. Instead, loss clarified his purpose. He walked into Velarde Elementary School, asked how he could help, and began with a mural.

That offering grew into an arts-in-the-schools program and Moving Arts Española, the organization Montoya co-founded with Salvador Ruiz-Esquivel. For two decades, Moving Arts has given young people a place to dance, paint, cook, make films, play music, explore technology and discover abilities they hadn’t imagined.

Its belief is simple: art is medicine. Montoya inherited the phrase from his mother and grandmother, who understood creativity, community and love as forms of healing. He sees it in children moving from uncertainty to confidence, teenagers discovering their voice onstage, and students returning as teachers and mentors for those following behind them.

The organization’s impact reaches beyond expression. In a region shaped by cultural richness, economic hardship, addiction and generational loss, Moving Arts reconnects young people with language, land and tradition. Its production, El Agua es Vida, used theater, music, and dance to explore northern New Mexico’s acequia culture and the responsibility of carrying water knowledge forward. The goal is not to keep children home, but to ensure they know who they are wherever they go.

Moving Arts also gives young people responsibility. Alumni make up its staff, while teenagers earn wages as interns and assist younger students. Teaching becomes another form of self-discovery.

Montoya’s advice for anyone hoping to help is modest: begin by asking what you can offer. A mural can become a district-wide program. An abandoned building can become a vessel of love. One creative opportunity can ripple through a community—and into the next generation.

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Juliana Ciano’s willingness to follow momentum transformed one recycling experiment into a community where waste becomes soil, soil becomes food, and people become partners.

Reunity Resources began with an experiment: could used cooking oil become biodiesel instead of waste? For co-founder Juliana Ciano, that question opened doors—into composting, farming, education, food access, and a community that could participate in its own solutions.

The journey was not straightforward. When Ciano and her husband, Tejinder, proposed collecting restaurant food scraps, they discovered that Santa Fe legally classified those scraps as city-owned trash. After two years of meetings and paperwork, Reunity received permission to begin. Then no restaurants signed up.

Progress arrived through relationships. Six restaurant owners agreed to try the system, creating proof that separating food waste was not more work, only different work. One pilot became a collection network. One school cafeteria became every Santa Fe public school cafeteria. Scraps became compost, compost regenerated soil, and that soil produced food for families, institutions, and hunger-relief partners.

The same pattern created Reunity’s community refrigerator. People sent Ciano stories about free fridges. A donor offered startup money. Other organizations could not manage one, so Reunity placed a refrigerator outside its farm, available around the clock with no questions asked. Neighbors began stocking, cleaning and using it. The appliance became a place where gardeners, restaurants, caterers, volunteers and families could care for one another.

Ciano describes this work as listening for momentum. An idea appears, people gather around it, and Reunity builds the structure that allows participation. Not every attempt succeeds, but its failures have produced principles: test before investing, fail forward, and choose progress over perfection.

Her axiom is an invitation: you don’t know if you don’t go. Good ideas rarely arrive fully formed. They emerge when people leave home, enter conversations, notice connections and risk saying yes. A handful of scraps, one willing partner or a secondhand refrigerator may be enough to begin.

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