Brisben Annual Breakfast - 2025

Description

Brisben Annual Breakfast - There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America

Co-presenters: Dr. Brian Goldstone - author & Dr. Janet Gullickson, formerly President Germanna Community College.

Brian Goldstone is a journalist and author of There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America. Told through the lives of five families in Atlanta, the book traces the rise of America’s “working homeless,” exposing the forces—gentrification, racialized displacement, precarious low-wage labor—fueling a deepening crisis of housing insecurity. It will be published by Crown in March 2025.

His longform reporting and essays have appeared in The New York Times, Harper's, The New Republic, The California Sunday Magazine, Guernica, and Jacobin, among other publications. He has written about psychiatric care in Ghana, life after incarceration, the plight of chronic pain sufferers during an opioid epidemic, Israel's secretive campaign to deport African asylum seekers, and, most recently, homelessness and housing precarity. He is editor of African Futures: Essays on Crisis, Emergence, and Possibility. In 2019, he co-organized the symposium “Uncertain States: Narrative Journalism and Its Limits” at the Columbia School of Journalism.

Brian received his PhD in anthropology from Duke University. In 2017-2018, he was a Luce/ACLS Fellow in Journalism, Religion & International Affairs; prior to this, he was a Mellon Research Fellow in the Society of Fellows at Columbia University. He is the recipient of grants and fellowships from New America, Fulbright, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the American Council of Learned Societies. In 2015-2016, as a Justice-in-Education Fellow at Columbia, he taught at Sing Sing prison. 
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Dr. Janet Gullickson served as President of Germanna Community College since July 2017, when she made history as the institution's first woman president. Under her leadership, Germanna experienced remarkable growth, serving 13,500 students annually and achieving a 13% enrollment increase over five years. The college maintained a $55 million annual budget and employed more than 800 faculty and staff across its service region, which spans an area larger than Delaware.  Recently, the college opened the Kevin L. Dillard and Barbara J. Friend Stafford Center, providing nursing, cybersecurity, business, general, and workforce development education.
Dr. Gullickson secured over $20 million in external grants during her tenure and grew the Educational Foundation's net assets to $24 million. She has championed diversity through initiatives like Black Minds Matter, resulting in nearly 50% enrollment of students of color. The college has garnered national recognition from the Aspen Institute and established innovative programs, including Virginia's only one-year associate degree program and partnerships with industry leaders like Amazon Web Services.
Before joining Germanna, Dr. Gullickson held executive positions with the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities System, Colorado Department of Higher Education, and Community Colleges of Spokane. She holds a doctorate in Leadership and Policy from the University of Minnesota and has served on numerous regional boards. 
Her commitment to education excellence has earned her the Virginia Business Women in Leadership Award and national recognition through the Boys and Girls Clubs of America National Service to Youth Award. In early 2025, Germanna was named as the only Opportunity Community College in Virginia, and one of only 37 community colleges nationally, by the American Council on Education and the Carnegie Foundation.  This recognizes that Germanna both attracts a student body representative of the communities it serves and graduates secure jobs with family-sustaining wages.
A proud mother of three and wife to a U.S. Navy veteran, Dr. Gullickson continues to work in the nonprofit field as a consultant in culture and institutional transformation, board development, enrollment management and growth, and executive coaching.