Fallow

Meet four seemingly ordinary members of our community who have taken extraordinary paths in their lives, including Carol, a writer who helps victims of sexual slavery, and Michaelanne, a visual artist who directs Community Arts at the Ayuda Community Center in Philadelphia. These inspiring leaders will discuss how they switched from a more traditional life journey to something radically different and deeply meaningful. Producer for Arts Discovery Wendy Bable will moderate.

ABOUT THE PANELISTS:

Michaelanne Harriman graduated from Messiah College in 1999 with a B.A. in Technical Theatre and began a career as a scenic artist painting at a variety of theaters around the country, including Utah Shakespeare Festival, Glimmerglass Opera, Syracuse Stage, and Harrisburg Opera. In 2003 she chose to settle down in Philadelphia as the Scenic Charge Artist at People's Light & Theatre and began attending Spirit & Truth Fellowship Church in the neighborhood of Hunting Park in North Philadelphia. She became inspired by the people she met there who were working for the betterment of their community. In 2006 she moved into Hunting Park and began working at the community center doing art projects with her neighbors. These projects developed into Orange Korner Arts, an art center in Hunting Park which teaches youth art courses to teenagers, hosts monthly art enrichment workshops, and coordinates the creation and installation of art projects in the neighborhood. Michaelanne is currently the Community Arts Director for Orange Korner Arts at the Ayuda Community Center.

Aldo E. Magazzeni was born in Abruzzo, Italy in 1949 and immigrated to Philadelphia with his parents when he was five-years-old. He received a B. S. in Business and Humanities from Penn State University. Upon graduating, he began working for the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas, Family Division, but left by 1980 to begin purchasing and developing real estate projects and small businesses. In 1990 Aldo, with partners, founded Champion Fasteners, Inc., a company that has grown into a successful operation with fifty employees and recently celebrated its 22nd anniversary. Aldo also began performing volunteer service in the US and abroad, working with communities in Italy, Jamaica, Haiti, Mexico, South America, Bhutan, Nepal, Afghanistan, Kenya, Ethiopia and others. In 2007 Aldo founded and became Director of Traveling Mercies, a non-profit foundation dedicated to helping others, while creating a vehicle to remove barriers between cultures so that individuals can share their strengths, assets and blessings with each other.

Carol Metzker is a writer, frequent speaker and coauthor of the book, Appreciative Intelligence: Seeing the Mighty Oak in the Acorn. Writing assignments about large companies and information technology led her to India, where in 2003 she met an 11-year-old girl rescued from slavery. The encounter led to her journey into the dark world of human trafficking, forced sex trade and child slavery locally and overseas. It sparked her quest and subsequent projects to aid survivors of modern-slavery.

Tricia Neale is from Baltimore, Maryland and received an undergraduate degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Virginia in 1993, then a Master’s degree in Biomedical Engineering at the University of Texas at Arlington/Southwestern Medical Center in 1995. Her first employment was at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota as a project engineer, manager, then supervisor in the Orthopedic Biomechanics laboratory. After seven years, she left Mayo in 2003 and moved to Philadelphia to seek a Master's in Divinity at the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia. During her time in seminary, she was drawn to work in social services. Since 2007, she has been dually employed as the Associate Pastor at St. John’s Evangelical Lutheran Church in Philadelphia and as the Executive Director of Feast of Justice, a non-profit social service agency.