Making Space for Those in Need

It's not surprising that Stephanie Jennings '96 spends her days in Washington, D.C., finding ways to increase the supply of afford-able housing to low-income families across the nation. As Community Senate President at Guilford during her senior year, she worked hard to build consensus and create opportunities for humanitarian dialogue. And she chose Guilford for her undergraduate work because of its intimate classes and orientation towards public service.

These days, as a program manager at the Fannie Mae Foundation, Jennings is at the forefront of a national movement to create an intersection between afford-able housing, sustainable development and land stewardship. She recently led the University Community Partnership, a pilot program that helped 14 universities network with their local communities around development issues. Because many universities are located in depressed or inner city neighborhoods, they are inadvertently drawn into the issues of poverty and affordable housing that surround them. The pilot partner-ship seeks to assist neighborhoods by leveraging a university's resources, including using graduate coursework to develop a future vision for the area.

Jennings began working with Fannie Mae in June 1999. The foundation was established in 1979 by Fannie Mae Corporation, a Fortune 500 stockholder-owned company that evolved from a federal affordable housing program.

At Fannie Mae, Jennings uses many of the consensus-building skills she first cultivated at Guilford. Her decisions affect how the foundation awards grants, including the $33.9 million given in 1999 to more than 1,000 organizations across the country. Because the foundation receives many more requests for money than it can fund, difficult decisions must be made.

In deciding which grant will have the greatest impact on a community, Jennings and her counterparts must consider the amount of money that will be leveraged by their grant, the organizational capacity of the nonprofit applicant, and other effectiveness issues.

"There is always a focus on consensus-building rather than a majority rule; you have to move beyond the surface issues to get to the true places of disagreement," she said. "I think I learned that by sitting on the president's administrative council. I learned the need for tolerant discussions and finding ways to move beyond disagreements. There are always going to be issues raised and conflicts; it's all about how you move toward resolution."

Jennings' interest in community building was cultivated at Guilford, especially a senior year seminar on homelessness and several working trips to a low-income island in South Carolina to repair and construct homes. So did her tenure leading the Community Senate.

"As Senate President, I learned what leadership and hard work could create, and it really inspired me to move towards the goals I had set out," she said.

During that time, 1995-96, Guilford was engaged in a search for a new president, which coincided with intense debate about the institutional mission and how to position the college with its ties to the Quaker faith. Jennings and other members of the Community Senate talked with alumni, students and faculty about what they loved most about Guilford.

"There were some rather heated public meetings, with some students having very strong feelings about the connection to the Quaker faith," she said. "Working through the process of revising the mission statement and presenting it to the Strategic and Long Range Planning Committee and then seeing some of our language wind up in the mission statement was very empowering."

After completing studies at Guilford, Jennings received a master's of public administration and a master's of regional planning at the UNC Chapel Hill, graduating in 1999. She lives in Takoma Park, Md., with her husband, Robert Inerfeld.

"Guilford is a fantastic place for learning and growing and becoming what you want to be. The focus on discussion, having a familiar relation-ship with your professor in small classes that concentrate on writing are both things that certainly helped me grow as a person. To be in an environment where you are encouraged to formulate arguments built confidence in my ability to appropriately and intelligently talk about issues. I don't think I would have been able to fully develop that part of myself in a large school."

For more information about the Fannie Mae Foundation, log on to www.fanniemaefoundation.org.