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.

For more information, or to tell the story of someone you know who's doing good, go to doinggood.fm

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.

For more information, or to tell the story of someone you know who's doing good, go to doinggood.fm

Jill Dixon’s work begins with a promise. When she was 18, her 15-year-old brother, Keith, died suddenly. As he was dying, she promised to carry them both forward. She has asked herself whether she is living fully enough to honor the life he did not get to live.

Food insecurity was already woven into her family’s story. As an ill infant, Dixon required expensive formula, while her parents survived on inexpensive food so she could have what she needed. Years later, as a classroom teacher, she watched hungry children rush toward breakfast and saw how an empty stomach shaped learning, relationships and a child’s participation in the world.

Today, as executive director of The Food Depot, Dixon helps lead Northern New Mexico’s regional food bank. The organization moves millions and millions of pounds of food through communities, partner organizations and its own programs. Yet Dixon insists that distribution alone is not enough. The Food Depot also works upstream, challenging the policies and conditions that cause hunger. Her message is direct: hunger is a policy choice.

That conviction is balanced by a belief in abundance. Dixon sees donors, volunteers, staff members and neighbors choosing generosity every day. During the pandemic, she stood before headlights circling an abandoned mall, uncertain whether there would be enough food for every family. The team stayed for hours. They did not run out.

For Dixon, doing good is not reserved for people with resources. A five-dollar bill can provide meals. Two volunteer hours can move food. One conversation can influence public policy. Each act invites another person into a movement.

Seeing goodness, Dixon says, is itself a choice. When people share what they have—money, time, knowledge or connection—their generosity becomes contagious. Thousands of small acts begin moving together, carrying families, communities and hope forward.

For more information, or to tell the story of someone you know who's doing good, go to doinggood.fm

Civil rights attorney, mediator, and Ubuntuworks founder Eric Sirotkin believes justice begins by recognizing the humanity we share.

Eric Sirotkin entered the legal profession prepared to fight—and to win. But experiences representing sanctuary workers and witnessing conflict resolution in South Africa gradually changed his understanding of what the law could accomplish. Instead of deepening divisions, he began to see it as a potential healing practice.

That transformation came into focus through his involvement with South Africa’s transition from apartheid and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. There, he encountered ubuntu: the understanding that our humanity exists through our relationships with others. As Archbishop Desmond Tutu explained to him, what we do to another person, we also do to ourselves.

One small exchange with Tutu stayed with Eric. Arriving with his recorder and questions, he was ready to begin an interview. Tutu placed his hand over Eric’s and said, “Yes, but first, let’s say hi.” In that moment, professional roles fell away and two people met on equal ground.

Eric carried that lesson into his legal and mediation work. Clients often arrive hurt, frightened, and eager to defeat the person who harmed them. His role is not to erase accountability, but to help people listen, recognize one another’s humanity, and seek resolutions that do more than declare a winner.

Through the Ubuntuworks Project and Common Ground 101, Eric now invites people to name ten things all human beings share. The answers often include good health, clean air, peaceful moments, thriving children, and the desire to be heard and cared for.

His message is especially urgent in a culture shaped by “us versus them.” Doing good, he reminds us, does not always require changing the entire world at once. Small acts of courage, practiced every day, build the strength needed when larger moments arrive—and, together, can begin to dismantle even the mightiest walls.

For more information, or to tell the story of someone you know who's doing good, go to doinggood.fm

Giving anonymously, moving with “ferocious velocity” and trusting people to turn early support into lasting change.

For the philanthropist known here as Mr. A, giving is not about recognition, naming rights, or checks. It is about moving “with ferocious velocity”—finding people, trusting their character, and providing the first money that allows an idea to become real.

That instinct became urgent during COVID-19. After learning that Diné families in communities lacked water for sanitation, Mr. A made calls and wrote checks. Within 72 hours, a delivery system was carrying water onto the Navajo Nation; local organizers soon expanded it to include firewood and coal. The response reflects his preferred role: not necessarily writing the largest check, but writing the catalytic one that helps others raise more.

His approach resembles what the nonprofit world now calls trust-based philanthropy. Instead of demanding lengthy applications and annual reports, he invests in people, relationships, and three-year commitments. A fundraiser, he argues, is not begging. They are inviting a donor to fulfill a dream they lack the time or talent to accomplish alone.

Mr. A also offers what he calls shared experience, not advice. Decades of successes, failures, and hard lessons allow him to support nonprofit leaders facing decisions they cannot always discuss with their boards. The exchange runs both ways: their knowledge keeps him connected to the community and sharpens his understanding.

Anonymity is central to the practice. He has no interest in seeing his name on a hospital wing. He would rather fund the early, uncertain stage when timely support can ignite a program, protect threatened services, or give young people room to exceed expectations.

His guiding test is concise: have fun, make money, and do right—with “do right” carrying the greatest weight. His challenge to donors and organizations is equally direct: do nothing small. Act, accept that failures will come, learn from them, and keep moving forward.

For more information, or to tell the story of someone you know who's doing good, go to doinggood.fm

From feeding unhoused neighbors to co-founding Comunidad de Colores, Winfield shows how one determined organizer can invite an entire community into “good trouble.”

Christine Winfield jokes that volunteering keeps her “out of trouble”—or, as her friends put it, in good trouble. But beneath the humor is a philosophy: caring for one another is not a promise for later. It is work to be done here and now.

A humanist, organizer, and self-described rabble-rouser, Winfield has spent years turning empathy into action across Santa Fe. At Pete’s Place emergency shelter, she cooked meals, recruited friends and relatives, and built a community around neighbors too often reduced to assumptions. Her secret is deceptively simple: ask. People may want to help, she says, but someone has to give them the opportunity.

Winfield’s empathy is rooted in experience. Having known poverty, housing insecurity, abuse, and assault, she recognizes how quickly one setback can push a person through society’s cracks. When asked how she keeps her heart from breaking, her answer is unguarded: she doesn’t. She lets it break a little, then keeps going.

That persistence now fuels Comunidad de Colores, the free Santa Fe clinic she co-founded with three healthcare professionals. Created for uninsured New Mexicans, the clinic plans to offer adult primary care, substance-use treatment, mental-health services, family planning, and gender-affirming care without making patients prove they are worthy of help. Its grassroots model rejects federal funding restrictions and places shared power, equity, and community needs at the center.

For Winfield, healthcare is not a commodity but a human right, alongside food and a safe place to sleep. Her work challenges the idea that doing good requires wealth, sainthood or an institution. Sometimes it begins with noticing who is being left out, refusing to look away, and sending a text: Can you bring water? Can you serve dinner? Can you help?

Anybody can, Winfield insists. The difference is that someone asks—and someone says yes.

For more information, or to tell the story of someone you know who's doing good, go to doinggood.fm