In the fall of 2025, we welcomed Marianna Fresquez to the Foundation as our new Programs Graduate Fellow. She has recently completed her master’s degree in the Education and Policy Planning Program at The University of Texas at Austin. As her tenure as our Grad Fellow ends, we asked Marianna to reflect on her experience and share what’s next in her journey.
What drew you to Trellis Foundation’s graduate fellowship?
Two things stood out to me when considering this fellowship. First, I was already familiar with the Foundation through their funding of Project MALES, where I worked as a site coordinator. Second, their mission and commitment to postsecondary access and completion resonated deeply with my own experience in higher education.
I was new to the philanthropy landscape, but the alignment with my learning goals and values made the opportunity exciting. I was also motivated by a desire to understand the funder side of this work. My prior experience had been almost entirely on the implementation side—working directly with students and seeing firsthand the barriers to access. I wanted to round out that perspective, and Trellis Foundation’s reputation for thoughtful, relationship-centered grantmaking made it feel like the right place to do so. That instinct proved correct.
While working on the programs team, I was also representing a grantee of the Foundation, working directly with students. Holding my own experience, my students’ experience, and the Foundation’s broader view all at once was a genuine full-circle moment, and it showed me how many levers of change are at play in this field and how small a part any one of us plays in moving them.
What has been the most rewarding part of your fellowship?
The team has been the most rewarding part of this experience. As someone still early in my career, I’ve been given real space to sit in on strategic planning and to shape my own professional goals alongside people genuinely invested in my growth. That kind of mentorship is something I’ll carry with me as a benchmark for future workplaces.
Being embedded in the Foundation’s ecosystem has been equally valuable. Between convenings and grantee reports, I’ve gained a front-row seat to how an interconnected field operates, who the key players are, how relationships between funders, grantees, and institutions are sustained, and how much intentionality goes into ensuring funding translates into lasting impact. That systems-level view has genuinely shifted how I think about my own career path.
Beyond that, this team consistently pushed me to reflect on my own work style and how I approach feedback. That kind of investment in who I’m becoming as a professional, not only what I produce, is something I haven’t experienced elsewhere, and it’s reshaped what I’ll look for in every role going forward.
What was the most surprising thing you learned?
The most surprising thing I learned was how much influence philanthropy has over agenda-setting in a field. There’s real privilege in being able to set priorities, and I’ve come to appreciate Trellis Foundation’s emphasis on historically marginalized populations because their work shapes not just what gets funded, but what the field as a whole begins to prioritize and study. Philanthropy truly helps build the field, and that was a concept I hadn’t fully understood coming in.
That influence became even clearer to me as I realized how many programs I already knew, or had worked adjacent to, were funded by the Foundation without me ever knowing it. Seeing that reach firsthand made the abstract idea of “field-building” feel concrete, and it reshaped how I understood the relationship between funders and the work happening on the ground.
Getting to witness how reciprocal those relationships actually are, the ongoing conversation, the mutual accountability, and the real investment in whether grantees can do their best work helped me more accurately conceptualize what a “funder” is and should be. I’m leaving with a far more thoughtful understanding of what philanthropy can do when it’s approached with intention, and a clearer sense of the quiet, structural ways it shapes an entire field of work.