Tamarack Institute With Danya Pastuszek, President & CEO

Tamarack Institute is a leading organization dedicated to making community action toward lasting societal transformation. Danya Pastuszek, its president and CEO, joins Douglas Nelson to share her bold vision to end poverty. Learn how Tamarack Institute is igniting real action within various communities and transforming systems to create a more equitable world. Danya also shares her insights on the importance of collaboration, challenging traditional narratives, and embracing transparency in leadership.

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Listen to the podcast here

 

Tamarack Institute With Danya Pastuszek, President & CEO

Hello and welcome to The Discovery Pod’s conversations with social profit leaders. I’m your host as always, Douglas Nelson. My guest on this episode is Danya Pastuszek. Danya is the President and CEO of the Tamarack Institute for Community Engagement. In our conversation, she talks about how you translate an ambitious audacious goal, in their case, to eliminate all forms of poverty into actionable steps that affect more than 16 million Canadians and more than 180 collaboratives and partnerships across the country.

She shares the lessons she has learned, the questions she is asking, and the way to manage the conversation about changing the focus on risk in your organization to one on opportunity and fulfillment of purpose. If you’re interested in learning more about the Tamarack Institute, I encourage you to check them out. They do incredibly important work in changing the narrative in our sector. I was thrilled to have Danya on the show and even more thrilled once we had our conversation. It’s one you certainly don’t want to miss.

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Welcome to The Discovery Pod, Danya.

Thanks so much, Doug. It’s great to be here.

Tamarack Institute: Who They Serve And Their Mission

It is great to have you on. For this conversation. I’ve been looking forward to this. My experience with the Tamarack Institute has been whispers in the wind and then people shouting from the rooftops about the great work your organization has been doing through our travels here at The Discovery Group. I’m appreciative of you taking the time to be a part of our conversation. I guess we’ll start at the top. For our listeners who don’t know, what is the Tamaric Institute and who do you serve?

I’m going to pick up on your “whispers in the wind.” Tamarack is doing its job if we feel like we are whispers in the wind. Our work is about amplifying community and amplifying the brilliance of local places and the brilliance of the people in those places. We are a community of 40,000 learners and 180 community collaboratives all across Canada. Increasingly, we’re doing work in the US and across the world as well.

Our big goal is to end poverty in all of its forms. In 2020, we set an audacious goal to bring Canada’s poverty rate to below 5% to contribute to doing that by 2030. That will mean bringing about 2 million, additional people out of commitments of poverty. We’re doing that in a variety of ways. First off, we know that poverty is not just about economics.

Poverty is multifaceted. Ending poverty and achieving prosperity requires changing the systems that impact income, wealth, access to water, food, shelter, digital infrastructure, education, health, belonging, participation in our communities, and politics. In the disproportionate impact of climate change on communities impacted by poverty.

We know that any poverty and moving towards prosperity that we all want and deserve calls us to understand and address the systemic inequities that are facing racialized and other equity-deserving communities. When I say poverty, I want to stress that I don’t just think it’s about money. We don’t just think it’s about economics. It is about the whole list of things that we need to live good lives.

We work with people. You might come across some of our tools or workshops, but we believe that building the capacity of people and to be in cooperation together around complex problems is important. As I mentioned, we work in places. We support about 180 local collaboratives all across this country.

Groups of people are coming together across organizations and sectors to solve complex problems. Because there’s so much power in the collective, we are increasingly working on public policy and perception. We know that not all of the issues that impact different types of poverty are local. We’re trying to organize the value and the wisdom in local places.

It is breathtaking the scope of the number of collaboratives you’re supporting, and the scale of the problem you’re trying to solve. When you tell someone who hasn’t heard that goal before, that is to end poverty and all its forms, what are the typical answers you get? What are the looks on people’s faces when you say that?

I had this conversation with the brilliant Charles Buchanan in Calgary, working on food security and digital infrastructure today. What I shared is that the answers are varied. Especially now, it’s easy to feel a lack of hope and a lack of definition of what’s possible. Sometimes I get a bit skeptical and it’s fun to try to understand why people might be skeptical, to try to understand what they care about, then to try to offer stories from communities that are working to make this dream a reality in their local places.

I find that stories of things that have happened can help bring people out of their skepticism. Often though, I get a lot of excitement. There is a deep desire that a lot of us hold to contribute to big things. There’s a deep desire that a lot of us hold to live in a world that works well for everyone, and there’s a real experience that a lot of people have of things working well for themselves or the people around them.

I often find that people are excited to think about the scope of what is possible and to think about what they could contribute and how powerful those contributions can be when they’re lined up with other people’s contributions toward something that no one could accomplish alone, but that together, it’s very possible.

The Meaning Of “Community Is A Verb”

One of the phrases that I associated with Tamarack that I’m hoping you’ll talk a little bit about and I’ve heard it in context. It’s even on your website. It’s that the community is a verb. What does that mean?

Credit to my good friends and our board member Sunshine Chen for this expression. The idea of community is a verb is that community can be part of everything we do. Everything that we do can be done with an eye for building community. Everything can be done in a way that is community. The idea of community as a verb is that it is something that we can actively create. It is something that can be part of or should be part of every single decision that we make.

Community is a verb. It is something that we can actively create and should be part of every single decision we make. Click To Tweet

Earlier, you reference the importance of optimism and the excitement that comes from the big bold idea of eliminating poverty and all of its forms. That represents so much of the potential of our sector to solve those big problems. Our social profits sector ends up with problems that businesses can’t solve because of their structure and their profit motives. Governments maybe could but can’t find a way to do it and it comes to the social profit sector to deal with what we call the knowtty problems that are harder to describe, harder to diagnose, and where a prescription might not yet exist. That’s that’s where our work comes in.

Advice For Organizations Taking On Community Issues

You and your colleagues do such a tremendous job of offering tools and a path for organizations that are willing and interested to start down that optimistic journey to solve these problems. What advice would you have to an organization and executive director or a board that wants to get started, or that wants to take on what matters most in their communities or these big knowtty problems?

I was completing an assessment the other day. We just restructured our team and are standing up what we call an alignment team of people across our organization or stewardship for a piece of our organization. I’ve been trying to find some assessments that will help us get to know one another better and that we can use in a way that is part of our principles in an ongoing way to see if the goals that we have for the culture of our organization we’re moving or making progress on them.

I bring that up because, within that assessment, there was a question and a set of questions about how much of a rule vendor or a rule follower you are. We have to think about the set of rules that we’ve inherited, and which one of them makes sense for now and which ones don’t. We have to think about mandates. I grew up in the framework of collective impact which is all about cross-sector partnerships. That resonates with me as an idea.

I think that the downside of that idea is it helps us to segment ourselves into different sectors. We have a nonprofit sector. We have a business sector. We have this rule that we’ve created that no longer works for us about what you’re mandate is if you’re in the nonprofit sector, and what your mandate is if you’re in the business sector.

My advice would be to throw away that rule, think about the big thing you want to accomplish that you can’t get done within your organization or your sector, and get into partnership with people from other “sectors” who have different gifts to bring into the mix to help all it be something together that we may feel is the pulse of one sector, one industry, or one group of people.

As always, it’s more complex than that, which we all have complacency in holding up because of these systems that we’re in. Think about the rules that are governing the work. Throw away the ones that don’t matter anymore. Press upon this idea of what is our mandate. Try to move past mission and mandate into a big audacious goal that you can’t get done alone that you need those for.

I want our listeners to appreciate how well this is done. You said something very revolutionary as though it was the obvious next step. That’s a practiced skill to be able to do that and to share it that way. What is getting in our way of being able to address these problems or even fully define these problems is a good place to start. What are those rules that are getting in the way? Can you think of an example where Tamarack had to throw away one of the rules or is trying to throw away one of those rules that doesn’t serve the purpose?

I’ve always credited Tamara for transparency. There’s an unconscious not always talked about rules that we need to be poised, professional, and to have it all together in public. I learned about what some people call Dominic culture, white supremacist culture, and Western culture. Modernity is a term in a book I’m reading right now called Hospicing Modernity. The more I think about this moment and the structures that were in, the more I see that this rule around showing up and having it all together, and therefore, needing to sometimes hide some of what’s happening, is not one that serves anyone.

Tamarack as an organization focused on learning and improvement has had to throw away this rule around having it all together. We are going to publish in a couple of weeks something I’m proud of. It’s been the work of many people for more than eighteen months. It’s called Seeds of Belonging, Equity, and Indigenization Framework and Action Plan. It’s going to be published by the time that this episode airs.

We’ll be pretty much laying there some of what is challenging for us in our network and in our organization, and some of what we’re committed to moving into in this effort toward creating a world where poverty doesn’t exist. To do that work, we have to look at equity gaps and the ways that current systems prioritize people like me who are White and able-bodied and have other privileges and deprioritize people who hold different from this. This piece around transparency lying there comes to mind if you ask about Tamarack.

 

That’s a helpful example. This is another thing I wanted to ask you about. I think so much of the work in our sector, we learned through negative examples. I can speak to having had a boss earlier in my career who whenever challenged steered toward conflict with anyone and everyone. Working in that particular organization was tumultuous.

I also learned an incredible amount. Some of it was I’m never going to behave like that. Maybe don’t choose violence all the time or subtle ways like that. In our sector, we learn a lot through the negative examples, which have been addressed over the years with better training and actual programs to learn the work.

There is so much incredible value in transparency, being able to learn from mistakes, and organizations being able to share. We saw a problem. We had an idea about how to move forward, and how to make progress on it, and it didn’t work. Here’s what we learned and here’s what we’re going to do next.

Leadership Lessons Learned Through Suboptimal Outcomes 

That builds credibility faster than an annual report or republication that says, “Here are all the amazing things we did.” Thinking in your role as president and CEO, what are some of the lessons you’ve learned through maybe sub-ideal outcomes in your approach to building the organization and working in this space?

I’ve only been a president and CEO for twenty days, so I’m going to look back a little bit further.

When this airs though, it’ll be two and a half months, so you can sound experienced.

I learned this lesson multiple times and part of the reason I talk about it a lot is because I think talking about our fail forwards, talking about our learnings, talking about our failures, whatever we call them, and sharing them with others create the way for others to find us and support us. If you keep learning this, I think it’ll be an ongoing evolution for me.

The thing that I keep learning is not to be too hard on myself. Many people that I’m privileged to be around are like me. They care deeply about the work that we do. This is what attracted me to the sector and this is what largely keeps me here. This is hard work for so many of us. That, combined with the accountability that I feel by nature rolls to creating conditions or contributing to conditions where 2 million people are living in prosperity. It can make it very easy to feel like you’re failing all the time.

Three things helped me. The first is to remember why I play. It helps to talk about, to believe in, to build toward this future that I’ve talked about, and to remember that that’s the end goal. If I mess up a podcast recording, I don’t show up as I wanted to in a hard conversation, or I don’t get a grant, or any of these day-to-day things that can cause me to be hard on myself, it’s remembering why I play.

It’s not about the grant. It’s not about the one podcast episode. It’s about the bigger goal. That’s been helpful. Particularly when I do the equity work that I committed to when I’m feeling down on myself because I know that I caused harm to people that I care about, I think of a quotation that I wrote down by Nicole Cardoza. I’m going to look over here and read it so I get it right. Nicole says that we should remember that energy goes where our attention flows, and to keep it honed on addressing the issues, not attacking those who bring you discomfort, not attacking the situations that bring you discomfort.

 

Remembering that I create the feelings that I want for myself energetically has been helpful. The last thing I’ve been thinking a lot about recently is that I was very fortunate to get to meet Ernest Barbaric in Victoria. Ernest taught me to think about and ask myself what threat I think I’m seeing and then ask myself if it’s real. Often, I realize that the reason I’m down on myself, the reason I think I’m experiencing threat isn’t real. I just need to remind myself that. That can help me move from feeling so self-critical so often.

There aren’t monsters under the bed.

I don’t think so.

The Importance Of Self-Forgiveness And Recognizing Small Wins 

At our best, we pretend they’re not there. We pretend to believe they’re not there. You touched on something critical to leadership in our sector. There’s such a commitment to such an ethos of servant leadership. There is so much to honor, value, and hold up in the principles of servant leadership. One of the gaps for a lot of people who see themselves as servant leaders and more importantly, those they work with see them as servant leaders, is they don’t make that space either to forgive themselves or to measure minor progress.

Particularly given the ambition and the scale that you’re working on, how do you find those minor successes? How do you find those points where you can say that was a good day, that was a good Initiative, or that was a good project? How do you remind yourself, let alone the people around you?

I’ll go back to your monsters thing first. I always tell my children that there are and I don’t check under their beds to see because I’m usually tired. To your question, I’ve learned that it’s important to think about that question proactively because it can be hard within a day or in a stressful period of time or a busy period of time to look for those markers of progress.

As a leader, if you can’t find them and bolster your own energy or positive energy for what you’re doing, you can’t inspire those around you and help them see the critical contributions they make and express authentic gratitude to them. Having practices of determining at the start of a year or a project what those minor measures are is important. I have been listening, for example, over the past year for how often the people that I work closely with can draw the connections between their work and our audacious goal.

We have an amazing account payable team member. I was looking at the payables the other day and thinking, “I wonder if this person knows how much she’s doing to contribute to members’ well-being by approving the expenses that are related to their learning and their gratitude funds that are part of their well-being.” I wonder if she sees how much money she’s putting into the hands of amazing lived experience experts who don’t always get recognized and don’t always get the chance to participate in Creating tools, speaking at events, and co-creating cohort series.

A measure of success For me right now is hearing people able to speak with confidence about their contribution to this broad goal, whether it’s someone working in accounts payable or it’s the amazing coordinator of our climate partnership in the regional district, or it’s a funder who’s new to the Tamarack community and has just made an investment that sizable for them. Always listening for that has been helpful to me, but it took that practice of determining what are the things that are going to matter that I might expect to happen every day to know to even listen for that. I would say it’s the practice that matters,

That’s good advice to think about it. One of my colleagues here at The Discovery Group, Karen Gilmore, says that sometimes, as an organization, you need to focus on the milestones that you measure out in advance and then move towards. Sometimes you need to pay attention to the inch stones you put down as you make very slow progress and recognize that there is success in each of those.

One of the core values that we have here is always be learning. It reminds us to be curious to lead with questions rather than know what we should do or that approach of showing up as an expert. We want to show up as the most curious consultants people have ever worked with. I’ve noticed in our conversation that a lot of your answers start to describe the questions you asked as an approach to the problems you’re trying to solve or what you’re trying to understand. What are some of the questions you’re sitting with now that you’re thinking about as you’re as you’ve moved into this leadership position and as you’re moving the institute forward?

I do think questions are so critical. When I think about the many collaboratives that I’ve worked in over time, it’s the ones where people felt seen, heard, and essential, and where they felt like different perspectives were understood, that were able to make progress at the pace that kept people at the table. Without the ability to ask questions and listen well slow down the ability to build trust and understanding of what different people care about and therefore the ability to find the common ground that we need right now to work with people who may not share all of our principles or who may not share our goal.

Without the ability to ask questions and listen well, we slow down the ability to build trust and find common ground. Click To Tweet

That’s my why questions. A question that I’ve been thinking a lot is about narrative. I read a definition of narrative a couple of days ago that I liked. It said that narratives or the big stories that we tell ourselves about the world influence how we process information and make decisions. It pointed out that they don’t come within us. They depend generally on what we’ve heard and what we’ve been exposed to.

That led me to this question of wondering in every place I’m in right now, what are the narratives that we’re each referencing as we’re participating in the conversation? Do those narratives play to the world that we’re trying to move into? If not, what are the different narratives that we need to try to get out into spaces that will be supportive of the world we’re trying to move into?

That’s a big question. Do you have an answer yet?

It depends on different contexts. A smaller question that I’m asking right now is simply, “Am I communicating in a way that is exciting and accessible to the people I’m talking with?” There’s a feedback that I got probably twelve years ago now that stuck. I don’t remember who said it. It was, “Danya, you sound so academic.”

At the moment, I did. I was super nervous and so I was talking without thinking about what I was saying. It was very hard to understand what I was trying to relay. Ever since then, I tried to hold this question of whether I am communicating in a way that is right for these moments. I still have work to do on that, but that’s the question. Maybe it’s the one.

Navigating Risk And Fiduciary Responsibility In Social Impact Investments

There’s some self-awareness in realizing that when someone says you sound academic, that’s not necessarily always a compliment. I was thinking earlier in our conversation. I want to go back to something, talking about throwing out the rules that don’t serve. One that I’ve encountered a fair bit over the last year relates to risk in organizational direction and changing or redirecting organizational purpose.

There are a number of organizations that are looking at social impact investing, taking what has been endowments that they’ve typically invested in the public markets, and looking at ways to align the outcomes of their investments with the purpose of their granting, for example. When you say it like that, it’s hard to imagine that that’s a big step for a lot of people. It seems pretty obvious, but it certainly is a change.

I’ve had the chance to work with a number of organizations that are committed to the principle and everyone around the table, every single board member around the table, certainly every member management team is nodding, “Yes, we want to make this change. We will align how we’re investing the assets we have so that they are producing outcomes that are in the same direction or at least adjacent to what we’re doing with our granting.”

In almost every instance, the organization gets close to either making that first big social impact investment or approving in principle the transition that they’re going to make. Someone or several someones just wait. They get uncomfortable and they say, “How are we supposed to be investing this to get the maximum return? Isn’t that what our fiduciary responsibility is?”

Fiduciary responsibility is a word in our sector that is often used to say, “I feel uncomfortable with this decision about money.” It’s not rooted in the meaning of what fiduciary responsibility is. When it comes to the table, those who feel expert in fiduciary responsibility feel emboldened and they’re the ones wanting to take risks. Those who aren’t sure what that means feel silenced.

I’m sure you’ve heard talk of this conversation. You’ve probably seen it in action more than probably anyone in the country. First of all, is it a rare thing that I’ve encountered or is it something that I’m doing that’s causing this? Which may be the case? When well-intentioned or well-meaning fellow travelers get stuck on this idea of fiduciary responsibility for investing in a different way, what’s the question you would ask or the answer that you would give to help them continue on their journey?

First, to your question about whether it’s simple, I don’t think it’s simple to align investments with purpose. I have been around several investment portfolios over my career. What I’ve learned is that financial products aren’t designed just to do this. There are lots of structural barriers. One thing that I’ve found can be very helpful, not helpful if you’re in this moment right now but helpful as more of a preventative factor.

When boards or any collaborative can go through a process of studying their partnership agreement can be incredibly helpful. Asking questions like, how are we going to make decisions? What kinds of risks are we going to prioritize as we make those decisions? What words or ways of being are going to make it hard for some of us in the room to push back, speak up, or express a different opinion? How are we going to create space for different opinions? What are the power dynamics that are in the room? How are we going to mitigate them?

Thinking through these kinds of questions collectively as any team, including a war team, can be very helpful when it comes to moments like this. I feel very grateful for all of the organizations and networks right now that are learning in public, specifically those that are daring where they do something a little bit counter-cultural. There are lots of community foundations. You and I probably know some of them that are on the cutting edge of doing this work. I have the privilege of being around enough community foundations to know that they’re being locked in a good way.

They’re creating early positive deviances. They are making it easier in many ways for others to follow the path. Amplifying the good thing that we’re trying to move into and the new thing and the risky thing that we’re trying to move into is happening is important. We need to do some work to reset what we consider as the highest risks as well. When it comes to fiduciary risk, there may be a risk of a lower return today.

There are lots of data and lots of experience to show that if we don’t invest right now in the critically dire food, housing issues, mental health issues, transportation and accessibility issues, and all the other issues if we don’t invest in fixing them, the only choice we’re going to be left with 5, 10, and 20 years from now is dealing with things that are far more expensive because the depth of the problem will have advanced so much.

 

Reassessing which fiduciary risk you’re prioritizing, the short-term one or the longer-term one that will come from the cost incurred for lack of action, I think about that. I think about trying to reprioritize the risk of our relationship with and credibility and communities that are experiencing so much oppression and harm right now as well. Fiduciary risk matters but it doesn’t matter as much as the rest that should be, if not on the official balance sheets yet on the balance sheet, on different types of balance sheets.

I like that framing of fiduciary risk having a short and long term. Where on that short versus long-term are we going to put our attention or put our priority? For leaders and folks in our sector who are listening, that question of what kind of risks are going to be prioritized is a great way that would work very well as a way to unstick some of those conversations.

What are we saying here if we say we’ve got to keep our investments all in the public markets because that’s what fiduciary responsibility means? What are the implications for that for our overall organizational purpose? What are the implications of that for our community? What are the implications from our donors and funders who had given us money to invest in social change and some cases, systems change? What does it say when we’re investing those monies in the public markets? You must do this for a living.

I have such a steep learning curve on this. I appreciated what you said and it makes me think there’s also a real power that many are exercising and that I want to start exercising a bit more when it comes to trying to influence some of the products that are available. From my understanding, it’s not always very easy for the people who are advising the investments that we have in markets to understand how the behaviors of companies within their markets have changed.

There’s amazing work happening to try to equip people who are advising us on our investments with better tools to do that work. There’s amazing work happening to try to influence what we need when we say ESG. As we’re thinking about these questions of risk, one way to think about it is to center different risks and another way is to try to fundamentally change the way that some of the sectors and institutions that are associated with these risks are incentivized and resourced to act.

Danya’s Vision For Tamarack Institute And Community Leadership

I think I could ask you questions about how to move through this risk issue with boards. This is my opportunity as a consultant. It’s asking you questions that will hopefully make me a better consultant. Most importantly, the listeners to the podcast. You have dedicated so many years and so much time to this work or this building of community is a verb. You said you’re in the very early days of the role of president and CEO there. What are you looking forward to?

There is a growing movement right now to do things differently. I have the privilege because I work with so many cooperatives from across the country and so many amazing national organizations to realize how little I know about all the different areas where creative equity focusing is happening. I’m in conversations every day where people are talking about these and they don’t understand.

It excites me because, in every conversation, people are asking questions. People are asking what we want the world to look like in 2050. People are asking what can we do together to try to build the power to create different realities and get through some of these rules that don’t work for us anymore. I’m looking forward to seeing what comes of that. I’m looking forward to seeing how everything will start to transform as everything takes these first steps.

I am looking forward to the continued focus that I think I see on the place and local community as a means of building the kinds of belonging, social connecting, joy, mutual aid, and support that are so needed especially now. This is a way to inform some of the big broad public policy and systems changes that are starting to happen.

I’m looking forward to what I see as more relief in all worlds emerging. I talked a little bit before about this pressure that I used to feel to show up as a professional. The very nature of what’s professional is changing. Maybe that happens generationally time and again and this is the time that I’m experiencing it, but it excites me to see how people are willing to come into conversations so often with people that they don’t know or that they hold power and balance with, and try to be real, authentic, and transparent.

The very nature of professionalism is changing. People are now willing to enter conversations and try to be real, authentic, and transparent. Click To Tweet

There’s a narrative out there that things are so divisive and that there’s so much anger and fighting. Yes, there is. Also, there is this connected and caring set of relationships in the world emerging. I’m excited to continue to amplify that so that we can see how normal it is and make it the dominant narrative.

That is a lot to be excited about and a lot to be looking forward to. One of the themes of our conversation that has been special for me is you talked about what you do, but you quickly pivoted to the why. Always going back to the why and then moving to the how and suggesting the positive tangible steps that you and your colleagues and the collaboratives that you’re supporting and working with can take to advance your audacious goal and the specific locales that those collaboratives and organizations are facing.

Danya, I so appreciate you taking the time to be a part of The Discovery Pod today. It’s been great to have them with you and learn with you over the last hour or so. I look forward to learning more with you along the way.

Thanks so much, Doug. Thanks for creating such a warm space. I appreciate this opportunity.

 

Important Links

• Danya Pastuszek on LinkedIn
• Tamarack Institute – website
• Hospicing Modernity on Amazon

 

About Danya Pastuszek

I am a mother, daughter, neighbor, runner, and partnership builder. My ancestors are from Ukraine, and I spent nearly four decades in the US before joining Tamarack Institute for Community Engagement in 2022.

I’ve worked with resettling refugees, youth and adults involved in our legal systems, and with government, business, non profit and community leaders collaborating for economic and education equity. At Tamarack, we accompany changemakers in their work to understand and influence systems. We work beside more than 200 local communities who are working to end poverty in all of its forms. And we bring local communities together to impact public perception and policy.

I seek to understand, amplify, and scale local learnings and results. I try to listen well, imagine and work toward what is possible, align our countless assets, and do this with those most impacted by our current inequitable systems.

In 2022, I was one of 15 women to participate in the inaugural Women in Power fellowship. I am a Utah Business Magazine CxO of the Year (2021). I graduated from The Aspen Institute’s Sector Skills Academy (2011), the inaugural StriveTogether/Annie E. Casey Foundation Leadership Program to advance place-based partnerships (2014), and the Kennedy School’s Leadership for Systems Change (2024). In the US, I learned English and Spanish. I am working on French.