Allison Dean: Wife, Mother, Volunteer to the Stars
An Ohio native, Allison Dean attended the Savannah College of Art and Design and received her master’s degree in art therapy from the School of Visual Arts in New York City. Now she lives in Kensington with her husband and two sons.
Dean has been giving back to the community since her formative years. She is currently the board president of Friends of Hackett, a non-profit branch of the 19125 Parents Coalition that seeks to better educate children from Kensington and the surrounding areas, co-owner of 3 Mama Llamas Consignment Store and an ardent volunteer for By My Side, a parenting program for children ages five and under. She devotes to these wonderful organizations a combined total of anywhere from 25 to 55 hours per week.
Allison Dean.
Through her volunteerism, Dean hopes to foster a network of camaraderie and change within the members of her Kensington community.
“I’m creating a neighborhood that I want to raise my kids in,” Dean said. By offering her time and indefatigable support, she seeks to weave a tapestry of togetherness akin to the environment in which she herself was raised.
Dean has been happily surprised by the level of commitment of those around her. She has met many of her closest friends through these charitable organizations. “It’s been so easy to find a lot of other like-minded people that really want to help,” she said.
Dean believes that energy is the key to a strong community, saying “It’s the energy of this larger group that I find kind of exciting.” Dean values the small-town aura that her and her colleagues’ volunteerism has generated throughout the neighborhood.
Three Mama Llama’s is a children’s consignment shop in Fishtown.
Dean says that she has met a rather significant amount of resistance from some residents in the neighborhood, many of whom feel threatened by the rapidity with which their neighborhood is changing. Dean assures them, though, that “there is nothing wrong. We’re not changing anything because it’s bad. We’re looking at something and we’re saying: ‘How can we turn up the volume on this?’”
But Dean is not at all concerned with pushback. “If you’re putting yourself out there there’s always going to be someone that is going to work against you,” she said.
Dean is a tireless supporter of local issues, a paradigm of altruism whose lead we would all be wise to follow. Her unparalleled work ethic, indomitable spirit, and take-charge attitude bear great testimony to the flourishing of the neighborhood she has for six years now graced.
“I don’t know how to not do this,” she said.
