Transforming Systems Through Love

When you ask Carniesha Kwashie where her story begins, she does not start with a job title or a program name. She starts at her grandparents’ kitchen table.

“I came into the world knowing I was loved,” she says. “I never doubted it. My grandparents, my parents, my aunts and uncles – they poured so much into me and my brother. That’s where my story begins. It doesn’t begin in a textbook. It begins with the people who loved directly on me.”

That love did not mean life was easy. Her family experienced struggle, disappointment, and all the friction that comes with trying to survive systems not built for them. However, it built her foundation – a lived experience of what it feels like to be seen and held in someone else’s daily decisions. Years later, when she encountered “philanthropy” and its literal meaning, love of humankind, she realized that she had been preparing for this work long before she knew what it was.

“Professionally, I just keep asking: if I’m going to spend most of my waking hours working, how can I spread that feeling?” she says. “How can I make sure people who never got that kind of love still experience being seen, being thought of, through our actions?”

The teacher who saw her – and the one who did not

School did not always mirror the love she felt at home. As a child, teachers often complained that she looked like she was paying attention but was “really spacing out.”

“You’re not talking about me or people who look like me,” she says now. “None of this interests me.”

Tracking in her elementary school was color-coded. One group of students – mostly Black – sat in the “red” group. Another, the so-called talented-and-gifted “blue” group, did not look like her. The work assignments, the expectations, the way adults interacted with each group: none of it felt neutral.

“I was looking around thinking, ‘They’re not smarter than us,’” she remembers. “So why are we in these different color codes?”

Then, in third grade, everything shifted. She met Ms. Patricia Edmondson, the first Black teacher she had ever had.

“She was hard on me,” she says, smiling. “But she paid attention to me – in a good way. She was the first teacher who ever showed me I had a skill or talent. She told me I had a gift for speech.”

Through a classroom assignment performing Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, Ms. Edmondson insisted that she push past her own disengagement. It was the first assignment she remembers truly excelling at. More importantly, it was the first time an educator named a gift in her.

“I say it all the time – she changed my life. I wish I could find her.”

Just a couple of years later, another interaction cut in the opposite direction. In fifth grade, an African American teacher who taught the talented-and-gifted students took over half of her class. Already sitting in that room, listening to the work, Carniesha  recognized that she belonged there.

“I remember saying, ‘I really think I should be in your class,’” she says. “And she told me, ‘No, you’re not academically strong  enough to be in this class.’”

The comment stung precisely because it came from someone she expected to champion her.

“She was supposed to be encouraging me,” she says. “Maybe she saw my grades at the time. Maybe the teachers talked about how “spacey” I was, But deep down, I knew I was good enough. Everybody has a gift.”

As a child, she was often called “weird.” For a while, she tried to be “normal.” That moment forced a choice.

“That was when I decided, I do not need to pay attention to what anybody is saying about me,” she recalls. “I just need to really believe that I can do it. All those corny tag lines – believe in yourself, hard work pays off – they actually started to mean something. Being told I was not good enough pushed me to prove her wrong, not out of spite, but by fully believing in me.”

A mission from the kitchen table

Middle school brought its own upheavals, including a move to California, where her aunt, a carpenter, finished raising her. There, her relationship to school shifted again.

“My perspective on education changed,” she says. “I realized I needed to use it as a tool to help me be successful as an adult.”

Even when the material did not interest her, when she did not see herself or others like her, she decided she needed to build the muscle to pay attention, to “compete.” She may not have had that language then, but her actions told the story: her grades went up; college came into view.

Her academic interests coalesced around people and power. She started college as a political science major, imagining herself on Capitol Hill advocating for people whose voices were consistently ignored. The driving force behind that ambition was not abstract.

“The thing that pushed me goes right back to my grandparents,” she says. “I sat at the kitchen table listening to their pain – racism, sexism, ageism, all the ‘isms.’”

In a family where only one uncle at that point had finished college and was a successful lawyer, her grandmother made the expectation explicit.

“She said, ‘When you get that education, you come back, and you make sure you resource our community with what you know.’ I took that to heart,” she says. “I went to college on a mission to gain knowledge to give back. Not just to the neighborhood I came from—wherever I’d be living, wherever I’d call home.”

Finding home – and a path – in Philadelphia

After a year at an all-women’s college, she transferred to Temple University, after visiting with a friend. The city of murals, where history, complexity, and opportunity collided on every block, called to her, and it felt like “home.”

She entered as a psychology major, then took an Introduction to African American Studies course.

“My life was changed again,” she says. “That’s where my deconstruction of systems begins.”

African American Studies gave her the vocabulary and historical context for what she had sensed since those color-coded classrooms: people’s lives were shaped by systems – economic, educational, legal, spatial – not by individual merit alone.

“You study American systems in African American Studies because you need to understand how those systems have impacted where we were, where we are and where we’re going,” she explains. “Government, nonprofit, philanthropy can’t create equity on their own. But if you can figure out how the systems work, you can play your part in lifting barriers so they become more fair.”

The learning was not confined to the classroom. Temple’s campus, then less polished than it is today, sat in stark proximity to North Philadelphia’s disinvestment.

“I come from very humble beginnings,” she says. “But I remember standing on campus and asking, ‘How do people survive here?’ I couldn’t just walk to a decent grocery store for an apple. There were all these dilapidated buildings. Meanwhile, I had all this access to opportunity right there as a student.”

She also began to understand the legacies beneath her feet. Street names like Cecil B. Moore and buildings like the Leon H. Sullivan Human Services Center became more than landmarks.

“You’re literally standing in a bubble of legacy you don’t even realize,” she says. “What they did is why you’re here. There are so many people who stood on the right side of history—they just happen to have buildings and streets named after them.”

Seeing both the opportunity she had and the absence of basic assets around her made something click.

“There’s a community surrounding this campus,” she says. “If I’ve decided I want to make a life here, I have to figure out a way to help those community members in the best way I can.”

Teaching: discovering access as mental and physical space

Her first full-time job out of Temple made those questions tangible. A friend told her about a new school looking for teachers. She applied and became a ninth-grade language arts teacher in West Oak Lane.

She was only seven years older than her students. Some still call her “Miss Fenwick” today. At the time, they did not see her as a friend.

“We didn’t like you back then,” they now tell her, laughing. “But we understand now that you cared.”

That first teaching year clarified her calling around access and imagination.

Many of her students, she learned, had never been downtown. Budget constraints meant field trips were rare, and for her students, Center City existed in their minds as a place “for the white people,” not for them.

“One of my students literally said downtown was ‘for the white people,’” she recalls. “I asked, ‘Who told you that?’ It was not a specific person – it was just what he saw. He’d never been there, but he believed it wasn’t for him.”

A lack of money did not stop her. She organized what she calls a “Free99 field trip” to the Free Library branch in the school’s neighborhood.

“Many of them lived near libraries but had never been inside,” she says. “We walked. We talked to a librarian about what a library is for. They saw rows and rows of books. They realized there were computers they could use.”

At the school, textbooks arrived late. So she photocopied pages of James Baldwin’s *The Fire Next Time* and read aloud.

In hindsight, she realized, “I probably wasn’t supposed to do that,” she laughs. “But I thought, if we don’t have books, we’re still going to read something that reflects their lives and history.”

In that classroom, she began to see the pattern that would define her career.

“This was about access,” she says. “Mental access – what you think is for you – and physical access. I realized I had to demonstrate through my actions that everything is for them. That’s where my journey begins, of breaking through barriers and creating access.”

The work was emotionally intense. One of her most challenging students later messaged her as an adult to say, “You were the best teacher I ever had.” She cried reading it.

“I refused to see him as ‘the troubled kid,’” she says. “I decided to be his Ms. Edmondson – to see past the behavior and press for the goodness in him.”

At the same time, the job took a toll. She began having nightmares about her students – a common early-career experience for teachers, though she did not know that then.

“It was the first time I experienced burnout,” she says. “I made myself a promise: going forward, I would never let another employer make me feel that way.”

A System by Another Name

Burned out but still committed to changing the conditions that shaped her students’ lives, she pivoted. Graduate school at Drexel offered a new perspective: interior architecture and design.

“People are impacted by what they see,” she says. “Space and design shape how we think and feel about ourselves and each other.”

For her, this was not about high-end commercial work. She wanted to understand how to design schools and community spaces that made young people feel welcome and capable, that expanded rather than constrained their imaginations.

Then the Great Recession hit. The design industry was gutted. High-end clients argued over the exact hue of a $9,000 herringbone floor while firms laid off staff. The dissonance was jarring.

“I remember thinking, ‘I can’t build a career on this,’” she says.

Even in grad school, her systems thinking showed up. She started a recycling program for the mountain of material samples piling up Robert Allen Beacon Hill to Drexel’s design center, so her classmates could have access to diverse materials needed for projects instead of letting things go to waste.

“I’ve always been like, ‘We have to do something about this,’” she says. “I can’t just walk past the mess.”

When she graduated, jobs in design were scarce. So she went where so many people in transition go: Idealist.org.

The power and limits of public funding

Scrolling through postings, one title jumped out: Green Jobs Industry Liaison at OIC of America, a national workforce development organization founded by Rev. Dr. Leon Sullivan.

“I cared about sustainability. I cared about recycling,” she says. “The role was about connecting employers and nonprofit agencies to help people get jobs. I like helping people. So I clicked.”

What looked like a pivot became a calling.

She had already studied educational systems and building systems. At OIC, she went to work on the workforce system, helping administer federal stimulus dollars from President Obama’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) to connect people to so-called “green jobs.”

“That’s why I know policy can change lives,” she says. “I was on the front lines helping administer a grant that gave people a real shot at training and work. It gave me my start in workforce development, which I hadn’t even considered before.”

The full-circle nature of the job did not hit her right away. OIC’s headquarters is in the Leon H. Sullivan Human Services Center – the same place she had walked past as a Temple student, unaware of what was happening inside.

“They had a health care facility, a school, the Campaign for Working Families’ tax site,” she recalls. “All these human services in one building. I’d passed by a million times and had no idea. Then I learned who Leon Sullivan was. I thought, ‘I can get down with helping people help themselves.’”

She fell in love with workforce development. But as she dug deeper, the same pattern she had seen in the classroom reappeared: systems helping and failing at the same time.

“You can offer a great training program,” she says, “but if someone can’t send their child to daycare, doesn’t have reliable transportation, and has unstable housing, they often can’t complete it.”

She remembers one young man in a program she oversaw. He finished his coursework at a community college in North Carolina but could not get his certificate – not because of his performance, but because his criminal background violated the institution’s policy.

“He was unhoused, unstable, but full of resilience and grit,” she says. “And a policy on paper stood between him and his credential.”

Everywhere she turned, the same barriers surfaced: transportation, childcare, housing, and criminal records. Workforce programs tried to fix employment without addressing the scaffold of inequalities around it.

“That’s what pushed me to ask, ‘What other systems are creating these barriers?’” she says. “Transportation kept coming up. So I thought: let me go into that system. Let me understand how people in transportation think. Why is it so hard to get people to work? Why are we cutting Job Access Reverse Commute funding when people need those routes?”

Her curiosity – and her refusal to accept “that’s just how it is”— led her to the next chapter.

“I thought, ‘What is bike share, anyway?’” she says. “DC has it. Philly’s trying to start one. Maybe that’s my gateway into understanding transportation – and into dismantling another system that keeps people from opportunity.”

In Part 2 of your 2026 PHLanthropist of the Year feature, we follow Carniesha  into city government and the launch of Indego, where she began testing what it means to build a transportation system with equity at the center – and where she first stepped directly into the world of philanthropy.

Join is in November as we celebrate Carniesha and her impact in the region.