Transcript
What inspires you from WFSU Public Media? Here's this week's Voices That Inspire. My name is Heather Mitchell, and I have two titles. I am the Vice President of Institutional Advancement at Tallahassee Community College, and I'm also the Executive Director of the Tallahassee Community College Foundation. The jump to TCC really was a continuation of what my work had been at United Way. So I worked at United Way for almost 10 years and two different positions. United Way, which I love, works really hard to get people to a place, a stable place where they can think about what they want to do with their life. And to me, TCC represented that springboard of what you got to that stable place of where you could go with it. I feel like my job is to create joy. I see what the need is of where I am, and I see those who want to make impact on that, and I simply connect those together. People always say you're a fundraiser, and I always say I'm not a fundraiser, I'm a joymaker. Fundraisers, what you put on the official title of a checklist, but for me, I really see, here's a need. Here's someone who clearly wants to impact that, I just make the connection happen. So what really inspires me and what I do is the result, and it's a student, had a student who I've been working with, mentoring some pieces up for the last year, came into my office, and I said, how are your classes this semester? And he said, well, I'd drop one. I said, why? He said, I didn't have resources to buy a laptop. I could take care of that for you. So he could now register in our spring sessions that are a little shorter of what he had to drop, because now he has the resources to do what he needed to do. And that, to me, is making a big impact on someone's life that I'm going to get to see walk across the stage as they move forward to their next. And so that's really what inspires me is the result of what the work is, and I get to see that up close and personal every single day. Heather Mitchell, vice president of institutional advancement at TCC, Joymaker. You're listening to voices that inspire.