When Philanthropy Northwest was planning our Juneau conference in 2013, our local co-chairs gave us a different kind of advice for dinners, or ‘dine-arounds’: if we really wanted to understand Juneau, we needed to get off the tourist track and sit down at the table with people who live there. 

So we moved dinner into the homes of 25 local hosts, each graciously welcoming 10 or so conference participants for an evening of food, conversation and connection.

“It felt wild at the time, but it worked,” recalls Lyn Hunter, who led Philanthropy Northwest conferences from 2006 to 2017. “People had this rare experience of breaking bread with local people and hearing what was happening in their communities – including the challenges they were facing, and most importantly, how people in Juneau were coming together to find their own solutions.”

This is what ‘place’ has meant at our conferences for decades. Not a theme, but a practice – of leaving our desks, going into the community and really getting to what’s going on on the ground. It’s why today, instead of picking a conference theme, our host city is the theme.

Central to this practice is a deep reverence for Indigenous communities and leadership. 

This reverence has shaped our conference both programmatically and behind the scenes. “I remember learning about the importance of gift giving and reciprocity for the Indigenous leaders who helped shape the conference. It was an example of the subtle ways that place-based and relational commitments informed our work,” Elyse Gordon, who led the conference from 2018 to 2020 shared. “And it wasn’t necessarily like ‘okay, we have to make sure we do this.’ It was just, ‘this is how we do this, because this is who we are,’” she said.

Coming out of the pandemic, JulieAnne Behar, who has led conferences since 2021, helped the network revisit why this gathering exists at all. The answer, overwhelmingly, was place. And that's what we've built around ever since. 

This year, over 450 of you are joining us in Anchorage, not because we set out to grow, but because this experience of gathering in place sticks. It’s also a milestone year for us as we celebrate 50 years of connection and collective action.

We asked Lyn, Elyse and JulieAnne, what message they want to send to PNW26 attendees ahead of our largest gathering to date in Anchorage this year. Here’s what they shared: