Standing Up
Through courage, creativity, and authenticity, these Philadelphia women inspire others to live boldly.
by Leigh Ann Stuart and Bill Donahue

Above all things, Philly respects authenticity. 
 
“Realness,” or the wherewithal to live life in a manner consistent with a person’s heart and mind, is a rarity in this world of filters, AI, and doctored images.
 
Truthfulness begets trust, and in nurturing trust we build communities that are strong, resilient, and kind. The women featured in this story not only know this, but work actively to uphold and protect such ideals. We highlight just three of the fearless and wise women living throughout Philadelphia who work to protect, uplift, and serve others, both in the city and farther afield.
 
Their courage in the face of loss, persecution, and unfulfilled promises should inspire others to conquer obstacles and do great things, today and every day going forward.

 

Raising Voices
Helen Ubiñas takes action to empower the next generation of Latina journalists.

 
“When we’re committed to truly telling the stories of the communities around us, of the marginalized people, the stories that really, really matter, that people need to hear, it all begins and ends with getting out into the communities, sitting down with people, and meeting them face to face.”
 
So says Helen Ubiñas, founder of The Ñ Fund for Latinas in Journalism, which connects aspiring journalists with newsroom opportunities. 
 
“You don’t build community from afar, without getting your hands dirty,” she says. “It’s not easy, but it’s necessary.”
 
The Ñ Fund is “an initiative to increase Latina representation in newsrooms by providing grants, through nonprofits and educational institutions, for internships, professional development, and programs that support aspiring Latina journalists,” Ubiñas explains. “We don’t offer internships; we partner with nonprofits and schools to fund them. Donations are managed through the Philadelphia Foundation.”
 
Ubiñas, a native of The Bronx, New York, was always interested in journalism even before she actually knew what that meant. “My dad was always coming and going with newspapers, so newspapers have always sort of been part of my life,” she says.
 
A first-generation college student, Ubiñas took a circuitous route to her career in journalism. She decided to pursue the field after time spent working at a community college newspaper.
 
“The pivot right now is really all about my lived experience being either among the only or the only Latina in newsrooms and the reality that not much had changed in 30-plus years,” she shares. “When I talk about building community and building trust, building trust really has a lot to do with what’s going on inside newsrooms and who’s making the decisions and who’s getting the opportunity and whose stories are being promoted and who is given the resources. In a lot of ways, it’s been an uphill battle.”
 
The Ñ Fund invests directly in mentorships and internships that offer career journalism experience to young people from groups including first-generation college students and people from low-income backgrounds. The Ñ Fund has funded one intern per year since 2023 via Voces Internship of Idaho for young people, as the mission states, “whose voices deserve to be heard on larger platforms.”
 
“Latina storytellers are so necessary,” says Ubiñas. “Latinos are being targeted and terrorized in every single community. The reality is, this is not going away. This is going to affect all of us.” 
 
Ubiñas has shared her frustration with a system stuck in traction. She’s spoken out about representation for a long time, including in a 2017 column for The Philadelphia Inquirer, where she spent more than a decade as a reporter and columnist.
 
“Lately, I’ve noticed that talk of newsroom diversity is ratcheting up again, and with it an odd expectation of acknowledgment and appreciation for these long-overdue efforts,” she wrote, explaining that it is actions, not words, that result in real evolution. 
Gaps in representation are not limited to the people who are covering the news; Ubiñas believes the coverage itself, including underserved people and neighborhoods, is a problem as well.
 
“I’ve written about gun violence my whole career because it’s an incredibly important topic to me,” she says. “It’s another community that people are able to close their doors to and go, ‘Oh, that’s not me. Those are not mine. I don’t have to worry about that.’ In reality, it affects all of us, all of our families, all of our friends, all of our communities.
 
“It’s the same thing when we’re talking about immigration and immigrants,” she continues. “A lot of people feel like they could just turn their heads and it doesn’t affect them, but it does. It affects every single part of our lives. When we are missing the stories … we are losing credibility.” —Leigh Ann Stuart

 

Safety and Self Worth
Victoria Sirois curates a safe space for LGBTQIA+ asylum seekers. 

 
Victoria Sirois founded Asylum Pride House (APH) to offer support and services to individuals looking to lead unencumbered lives as their authentic selves in Philadelphia.
 
“I think anybody who works in the immigrant space knows the value of the immigrant community,” says Sirois, a Massachusetts native who grew up in Cape Cod. “We don’t realize how much this city relies on the immigrant community, and that it makes all our lives better to have our city be a place where people can feel protected in their spaces.” 
 
When she moved to Philadelphia with her girlfriend, a medical resident, around 2021, Sirois saw a need for housing and support services for LGBTQIA+ asylum seekers. With more than 10 years of professional experience in immigration services, and a master’s degree in international migration, she transformed that conviction into APH in 2022. APH welcomed its first round of occupants to its five-bedroom space in West Philadelphia the next year.
 
“You rarely see housing and case management combined,” she notes, “and we immediately filled the house.”
 
APH works exclusively with LGBTQIA+ asylum seekers.
 
“Maybe a person is also an advocate in their home country, and they’re being targeted by their government,” she says. “There’s not usually one path. People come to us for a lot of reasons that can be mixed with economics and political unrest.”
 
At present, APH rents its space, but acquisition of a new permanent space is on the horizon. 
 
“I think there’s a lot of rhetoric about working with the immigrant community, that a lot of institutions are quoted as saying things aren’t legal,” she says, “but it is very legal for someone to come to the U.S. to seek asylum.” 
 
In spite of fears, “people are showing up.” 
 
“The intersection we work with is one of the most marginalized communities—immigrants, combined with the queer community,” Sirois adds. “We have a lot of community members to support us and show that we don’t all have the same terrible feelings towards immigrant and queer communities.
 
“I think a lot of times, it’s easy to say something is someone else’s problem, that ‘This doesn’t affect me,’” she continues. “I think the catch about working with the immigrant community and the queer community is that when people start getting targeted, it starts with marginalized people and bleeds. I think if we’re targeting our most vulnerable, what’s next? It’s truly an indicator of the wellness of our society and our communities.”
 
In terms of operations, the organization relies solely on funding from private sources. 
 
“I couldn’t see myself doing anything else,” Sirois says. “I get to interact with the community we serve on a level that a lot of people don’t. I get to see when someone gets a job or a license, their excitement and pride after going through one of the most challenging periods of their lives and coming out in a better place, feeling more equipped to be members of their community.
 
“We can see data on our reports, but seeing a person grow into who they are, to live authentically and with the support of an organization, to become part of a community, not just someone hiding in a room in a house, that’s my No. 1 goal,” she says. “That’s what keeps me going.” —Leigh Ann Stuart

 

Hope Is the Thing With Feathers
Farah Naz Rishi teaches us how to move forward after profound loss. 

 
Novelist Farah Naz Rishi has many stories to share, and the Philadelphia area has helped shape them. 
 
“I’ve always felt that the Philadelphia suburbs are some of the loveliest places in the world,” she says. “But there’s a quiet melancholy to them, too. I remember driving along backroads in the fall, the trees erupting into gold, everything painfully lovely, beautiful, and lonely at once, like being locked inside an Andrew Wyeth painting.”
 
Raised in Kennett Square and Chadds Ford from age 8 until she left for college at 18, the Bryn Mawr College alumna now lives and writes in Philadelphia. Her most recent book, The Flightless Birds of New Hope, which takes its name from a certain Bucks County suburb, is a meditation on grief and the possibilities that awaken after a devastating loss.
 
Rishi spent much of her childhood wandering in the woods with other neighborhood kids and stumbling upon “small wonders” such as broken arrowheads half-buried in the dirt. Those early experiences taught her important lessons—namely, how to sit with silence, how to notice what’s been left behind, and how beauty and loneliness can coexist.
 
“That sensibility has shaped me both as a person and as a writer,” she says. “I’m drawn to quiet spaces, to overlooked corners, to the emotional weight of places that seem still on the surface but are full of history underneath. That undercurrent of melancholy runs through much of my work.”
 
Bill Donahue interviewed Rishi about her life experiences, what she has learned from animals, and where she finds hope, even in the bleakest of times. 
 
Q&A
The Flightless Birds of New Hope tackles themes such as loss and grief, and how we process those things as we try to move forward. Most of us have lost someone close to us, and I know you have, too. Was writing this book something of a catharsis for you? 
Absolutely. On a personal level, especially in the turbulent times we’re living through, I’ve struggled to reconcile why terrible things happen to decent people. I’ve lost both my parents and my only sibling. But I’ve also witnessed, as so many of us have, the suffering of others: lack of access to health care, mass shootings, state-sponsored kidnapping.
 
In the past, I tried to comfort myself with the idea that even the worst things must happen for a reason. Writing this book helped me sit with the possibility that sometimes there is no reason for the unthinkable. And that the absence of meaning doesn’t absolve us of the responsibility to keep going. You wake up the next morning. You eat. You care for the people and animals in your orbit. You move forward because, in the end, there is no other way to live. And maybe that’s enough of a reason to. 
 
I love stories in which human and nonhuman characters not only share space but also develop extraordinary bonds. Your book is a great example, with Aden Shah and a cockatoo named Coco Chanel. Can you share an example of a similar bond with an animal from your own life?  
I had a Siberian cat named Kisa. I got her when I was a sophomore at Bryn Mawr College, reeling from a bad breakup. She had a habit of sneaking out of my dorm room and into my friends’ rooms, padding down the hallways like she owned the place, which quite literally forced me out of my shell. When the cleaning crew discovered I’d smuggled a kitten onto campus, they promised not to tell anyone as long as they were allowed to pet her whenever they wanted.
 
“She’s just a cat,” some people might say. But the animals we’re lucky enough to share our lives with are extraordinary teachers. They ask for so little in return. Cats, in particular, are famously naughty. They’ll teach you patience whether you want to learn it or not. They’ll also teach you the value of simply being there for the ones you love. How sitting beside someone in silence can be enough. 
 
I believe animals are the best of us. I wish we treated them that way. 
 
I’ve seen your work referred to as “hopeful stories in a not-so-hopeful world.” How and why do you—through characters such as Aden Shah—find optimism when the real world has an abundance of darkness and bleakness?
I think hope is a reflex, as fundamental to living as breathing. Even in moments of deep despair—when I’ve stepped outside and felt unable to move my legs under the weight of sadness—I still notice small, beautiful things. A sign taped to a lamppost for a missing cat, with the word FOUND scrawled across it in Sharpie. Chalk flowers blooming on the sidewalk. Sparrows singing from the tops of abandoned buildings. 
 
Despite everything, beauty persists. “How? Why? Don’t they know everything is terrible?” some small, curmudgeonly voice in the back of my head complains. Maybe the point is, they do. Writing is how I practice, albeit imperfectly, living with that contradiction. Through my characters, I try to make peace with it. I imagine them as dolls in a dollhouse; I place them in terrible situations and force them claw to their way through. I figure that if I make them do it often enough, I’ll learn how to survive alongside them.
 
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
 
Published (and copyrighted) in Suburban Life, December 2025.