Long before Dr. Denise Raquel Dunning co-founded Rise Up Together, she knew she wanted to make the world a better place for girls. 

She can trace that conviction back to when she was 12 years old, riding a train in her mother’s native Buenos Aires, Argentina. A girl only a few years older than Denise stepped onto the train carrying a baby and pulling a toddler behind her. As she moved through the train asking for money and food, Denise watched as passenger after passenger looked away. 

“I just remember feeling so angry and so ashamed that no one wanted to help her,” Denise recalled. “I remember promising myself that someday I would do something to make things better for girls like her.” 

That promise would eventually shape a career dedicated to advancing the rights and wellbeing of girls and women – and a fundamentally different vision for how lasting change happens. 

Denise’s early interest in Latin America and global health eventually led her to study development around the world. After college, she received a Fulbright fellowship to work in Honduras, where an experience early in her fellowship changed the way she thought about international development, and her own future. 

A project funded by a multilateral development institution was providing chickens to women in rural communities as part of a child health and women’s microfinance project. There was just one problem: the chickens kept dying. 

On her first day at work, Denise, 22 years old and new to Honduras, learned about the failing project from her new boss. “She looked at me and asked me what I thought they should do,” she recalled. “I knew nothing about chickens, I knew nothing about Honduras, and I had no idea what to say.” 

“So I looked at my boss and said, ‘Well, what do the women say about why the chickens are always dying?’ She stared at me for a while and finally said, ‘Oh. We haven’t asked them yet.’” It was a simple exchange, but it crystallized something Denise had already begun to question: Why were people far removed from communities deciding what those communities needed? 

A few weeks later, when Hurricane Mitch devastated Honduras, Denise began working with a small local organization supporting rural community development and reconstruction. There, she saw another way. 

“The leaders of these local communities and organizations know what their own needs are. They know the challenges because they live them every day, and they know what needs to be done,” she said. “They just often don’t have all the resources they need.” 

That insight would eventually become foundational to Rise Up Together.

When Denise and Co-founder Josie Ramos launched what would become Rise Up Together, they built the organization around a belief that they still hold today: women, girls, and young people are not simply beneficiaries of change. They are the people who can lead it. 

Today, Rise Up Together identifies local leaders already creating change in their own communities and provides them with intensive leadership and advocacy training, funding, coaching, and connection to a global network. 

“We truly believe in the deep knowledge, wisdom, and expertise of local leaders, communities, and organizations to create the change that’s needed,” Denise said. 

It’s an approach that deliberately challenges traditional top-down models of international development and philanthropy. 

“We know that we don’t know the answers. We don’t understand every context, and we don’t know what every solution should be,” Denise said. “Instead, we find local leaders and organizations who do have the answers and support their vision for change.” 

After two decades of doing this work, Denise’s belief in local leadership hasn’t changed. But her understanding of what it takes to create lasting progress has. 

“Change isn’t linear,” she said. “Positive change can take a long time to achieve, and then it requires persistence and vigilance to maintain. There is almost inevitably pushback, and hard-won progress can be lost so quickly.” 

Another lesson has become equally clear to Denise: “Women and girls don’t live single-issue lives.” 

A girl needs access to education – but her opportunities are also shaped by whether she can access health care, whether she lives with violence, whether she has job prospects when she finishes school, and increasingly, by how climate change and political instability affect her community. 

That understanding has shaped Rise Up Together’s work across health, education, economic opportunity, and now climate resilience. 

“Effectively supporting people to improve their own lives and communities requires an intersectional approach,” Denise said. “Change doesn’t happen in a vacuum – effective health strategies often need to integrate gender-based violence prevention, and climate solutions are often linked to economic opportunities.” 

The same is true of democracy. For Denise, advancing gender equity and justice is inherently connected to who gets to participate in decisions, whose voices are represented, and who holds power. 

“Democracy, civic participation, and representation are inherently connected to gender equity and justice,” she said, pointing to the importance of women’s leadership in communities and public institutions – and the ways women’s rights and freedoms can be threatened when democratic norms erode. 

Asked what she is most proud of as she thinks about Rise Up Together’s work over the years, Denise doesn’t begin with an organizational milestone or an impact number. 

She’s proud that Rise Up Together has built an approach that challenges the traditional top-down development paradigm and creates lasting change from the ground up. But she’s equally proud of how the organization does that work: with a culture that values both meaningful impact and the people making it possible. 

“We focus on doing work that matters and doing it well,” Denise said, “and doing it in a way that is sustainable for our own lives.” 

For Denise, that means creating a workplace where people can work hard and pursue ambitious goals that create meaningful impact while still having time for their families, communities, and interests outside the office. 

But when asked what gives her hope for the future, Denise’s answer is immediate: Rise Up Leaders themselves. 

“They work unbelievably hard to change some of our world’s most important and deeply entrenched social problems,” she said. “They just keep showing up every single day, pushing forward with so much resilience, courage, vision, strength, and deep dedication to creating a better future for their own communities, and for all of us.” 

Nearly two decades into the organization’s journey, Rise Up Leaders continue to motivate her. 

“They keep climbing, no matter how steep the path or how many obstacles stand in their way,” Denise said. “They refuse to stop until they reach the change they set out to achieve.”