Alumni Spotlight
Emily Penprase knows about paying it forward. The University of Michigan alumna is taking the lessons she learned while she was a graduate student at U-M and spreading it to the next generation at Oxford College of Emory University in Georgia.
Penprase, who earned a Master"s of Social Work degree in 2005, is the coordinator of community service at Oxford College, a private, two-year college with 700 students east of Atlanta that offers students a small school environment before they move on to earn their bachelor"s degree at Emory.
"Community service has been in my blood for my entire life," Penprase said. "For me, it"s a family value." Her mother was a social worker and her stepfather a therapist. But Penprase said she wanted her work to be at a more global level rather than the one-to-one level of her parents. That"s what she learned at U-M.
But when she stepped into her first Master of Social Work class at the U-M, she was intimidated: one of her fellow students had just published a book, and another had a law degree. "I thought maybe this wasn"t the place for me," she said. But as she got to know the program and other students, she changed her mind. "I found a family within the program, people who I shared values with, people who had the same passion for helping people to grow," she said.
While a student at the Ginsberg Center, Penprase worked in Detroit as a program associate with the America Reads Family Literacy program and as an AmeriCorps member working with two middle schools in Ypsilanti. She also landed two internships while she was working on her graduate degree, one for the American Red Cross and the other for the Nonprofit Enterprise at Work. Her time at U-M, she said, changed her life. I got my feet wet in a lot of different areas."
For the past year, Penprase has led community service efforts at Oxford College of Emory University. She oversees the Bonner Leader Program at Oxford, a community-based scholarship program for students that requires 400 hours of service at a non-profit organization. Students work in the schools, at camps for children with special needs, with chronically ill patients, with the juvenile court system, and more. The program uses federal work-study, AmeriCorps and the Pierce Institute for Leadership and Community Engagement to fund stipends for students who volunteer for a two-year term of service.
Her Oxford office has worked on a number of projects, including a campus-wide Earth Day celebration that brought in community partners and was capped off with a moonwalk powered by biodiesel fuel created from the College"s kitchen waste. She also took 40 students to New Orleans to paint and repair homes and serve food to the homeless as part of an alternative spring break trip.
Jennifer Kellman Fritz is passing it on. As an undergraduate and graduate student at the University of Michigan, Fritz participated in service- learning at every turn. "I was involved in community service as much as I could," she said. "I was a student and became a facilitator as many times as they allowed. Maybe more times than they allowed!"
Now, the assistant professor at the School of Social Work at Eastern Michigan University (EMU) is creating opportunities for her students to have what changed her life - a chance to serve and learn with the community.
Fritz was involved in community service at U-M for 12 years, beginning when she came as a freshman in 1988, mostly in programs dealing with corrections. She was a Project Community student and became a peer facilitator, site supervisor, GSI, and research assistant. She continued her work as she earned her MSW and Ph.D.
Fritz came to college with the idea of becoming a lawyer after watching her lawyer father do pro bono work, and enrolled in a Project Community class at W. J. Maxey Boys Training School. But her work in the community changed her mind about a legal career. "It made me recognize that I didn't want to be a lawyer," she said. "I thought I could be more useful as a social worker."
At least some of the classes Fritz teaches at EMU have a service-learning component: her section of a required undergraduate social work class she currently teaches saw her 14 students travel to Washington D.C. at the end of February as an alternative spring break, working with a program for teens who are HIV positive or have AIDS. The trip was modeled after the Ginsberg Center's ASB and the one at EMU, Fritz said: students did fundraising for the trip, there were peer facilitators, and there was a learning focus.
Fritz also encourages students outside of her classroom to become involved in the community. She's the faculty liaison for Social Welfare Action, a student organization at EMU involved in the community. "I am such a believer in service-learning," she said. "It affected my whole life."
For Eunice Yu, a single moment at a chance event during her senior year came to define what she would do for a year after she graduated from the University of Michigan in 2007.
Yu, an economics major, had taken a mini-course in the Residential College on the drug industry's influence on American society and life. She attended a panel discussion held as part of the course, and met Peter Lurie, a representative from Public Citizen, the Washington D.C.-based public interest watchdog group founded by Ralph Nader.
By the time the panel discussion was over, Yu knew she wanted Lurie to be her mentor, even though her interest was in international health inequities and Public Citizen focused on domestic issues. When she graduated, deferring medical school for a year, Yu headed for the nation's capital to work for Public Citizen.
It wasn't until Yu came to the University of Michigan and was introduced to the Ginsberg Center that she came to understand that advocacy and activism are community service just as volunteering in an after-school program or at a nursing home. "They weren't connected, they were disconnected," she said.
"In high school, I worked on a recycling initiative, a global warming campaign, and I protested the war in Iraq. But the idea of community service didn't become meaningful until I came to the University of Michigan. A lot of kids at U-M had the opportunity to do community service in high school, but it wasn't connected to the learning aspect."
Yu became active in the University community -- and stumbled upon the Ginsberg Center -- in 2004 when she and four other students founded Human Rights Through Education. It continues today. Yu and the other co-founders wanted a student organization that depoliticized but encouraged discussion about human rights. It made sense to them, she said, that an academic institution should foster such discussion. They organized a conference on the right to health, bringing in scholars from Harvard and Columbia universities.
But in addition to bringing human rights issues to campus, organizers wanted to create an organization with a non-traditional structure. "We wanted the structure of the organization to be non-hierarchical, to be democratic," Yu said. "We wanted to build leaders as we went." They turned Ginsberg for help. Anita Bohn, then director of student initiatives at Ginsberg, consulted with the group to assure a sustainable, non-hierarchical organizational structure.
Yu will work at Public Citizen until returning to the U-M campus at the end of the summer to attend medical school. At Public Citizen, Yu has worked on the FDA's regulation of medical devices and come to understand a flawed system that allows the FDA to accept funding from the very companies they oversee. While this has long been true for pharmaceutical firms, it became true for medical device companies in the 1990s, she said. One case she's worked on for Public Citizen has been watching the clinical trials for a medical device that acts as a mesh sock around the heart for cardiac support. While the device's makers were pushing for FDA approval, Public Citizen questioned its safety and effectiveness, Yu said. The FDA decided to study the device more.
The Ginsberg Center showed Carmen Wargel that she wouldn't have to pick between social work and community organizing. She learned how to combine the two.
Now, she's taken that lesson into the real world, where she works as director of community development at Turning Point Inc., a Mt. Clemens-based center that offers services to end domestic and sexual violence. But rather than offering direct services at Turning Point, Wargel works with law enforcement, the courts, social service agencies, the schools, and the medical community to bring the Mt. Clemens community together around domestic violence issues. As 2007 was wrapping up, Wargel looked for a way to thank Project Community for paving the way: she made a generous donation to the program.
When Wargel arrived at the University of Michigan in 2002 as a graduate student in the School of Social Work, she interned at the Ginsberg Center with the LUCY (Lives of Urban Children and Youth) Program, a four-semester course sequence in the School of Education that teaches students to understand and work in urban settings to create change.
But she also wanted to introduce Project Community's undergraduates to social justice issues and the art of community organizing. "My graduate degree was in community organizing," she said. "I wanted to teach students how to create community change. I thought it was important for undergraduates to understand that they can have an impact on the world, that you don't just have to help people one on one: that you can change policy, change structure so you won't need so much one-on-one."
At the time, Project Community offered only courses that allowed undergraduates to provide direct services, from tutoring in the schools to working in the prisons. Wargel wanted to see if skills needed to become effective community organizers could be taught: she helped write a grant, created the syllabus, identified an appropriate community partner, recruited students, and helped launch the pilot. "It was important to see if we could teach community organizing skills," Wargel said. The community based change section of Project Community was launched in 2003, and has expanded to one of Project Community's umbrella programs, Organizing for Social Justice.
In the pilot, students learned how to develop rapport with residents, build credibility, and help a neighborhood identify its assets. "It's basic organizing techniques--show to bring disjointed groups together around issues of their own choosing," Wargel said.
Now, she's practicing what she preached. While most social services agencies are focused on direct services, Turning Point is the rare agency that also works on community organizing, Wargel said. She works with the Macomb County Domestic Violence Council to reach agreement on ideas for action, such as how law enforcement agencies, schools, the medical community, and others should respond to victims of domestic violence, their children, and batterers. "There are a lot of parallels between what I do here and what I worked on (at U-M)," Wargel said. "The topics are different, but the skills are the same. I've been able to put it all into practice."
Aaron Hurst took his personal credit card and ideas that had germinated when he was an undergraduate at the University of Michigan in the mid-1990s to found the Taproot Foundation, the largest non-profit consulting firm in the country.
San Francisco-based Taproot brings professional business services such as marketing, information technology, and human resources to non-profits who are too focused on their core mission and too under-funded to do the job themselves. Taproot recruits professionals to do pro bono work for the non-profits, but remains as the manager over each project. "We don't match, we manage," Hurst said. "We're not a dating service." A Taproot case manager is assigned to each project, whether it is to improve a Web site or establish a database. Services valued at $24 million have been performed since the beginning, Hurst said.
The idea for Taproot was born at the Ginsberg Center when Hurst served as a criminal justice program peer facilitator for Project Community (sociology 389). Across the street, not 100 feet away, stood the U-M Business School.
When he was at U-M, Hurst said he came to believe that the business school had the most to gain and the most to give to service-learning: reach out to the community to teach students about strategic planning, leadership, project management, consulting, and more, he said. At the same time, they could accomplish important community work. "There is so much opportunity for service to be done," Hurst said.
Hurst took this notion to create Taproot in 2001. Between the time he graduated in 1996 with a general studies degree he created that focused on service-learning and 2001, he spent time working in both the non-profit world and the business world (in product management) to learn the ropes of each. "I wanted to learn why a $1 million service agency stayed a $1 million service agency but a $1 million company could grow into a multi-billion-dollar company," Hurst said.
He took the leap to Taproot, piling up personal credit card debt for 1 1/2 years to keep his organization afloat. Today, Taproot receives funding from 50 foundations and corporate sponsors, including the Gates Foundation and Time Warner. It has offices in San Francisco, Seattle, Boston, New York, and Chicago and will open offices in Washington D.C. and Los Angeles next year.
It's not difficult to find people to do the pro bono work, Hurst said. "A lot of people want to do it, they just don't know it's possible. If you don't waste their time, people are incredibly generous."
A native New Yorker, Josh Sirefman is the interim President of the New York City Economic Development Corporation, and the director of Mayor Bloomberg's Office of Economic Development and Rebuilding. Sirefman got his start in community and economic development through his experiences in the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning and participation in the Michigan AmeriCorps Program.
Sirefman received his Master of Urban Planning from the University's Taubman College and participated in the inaugural year of the Michigan AmeriCorps program. While here, he studied the rapid population decline and resulting effects on Detroit's industrial base and housing stock. Sirefman honed his community and economic development skills working with the Islandview Community Development Corporation on the eastside of Detroit.
The Ginsberg Center hosted Sirefman's open talk at the School of Education last month. Students attended from a wide variety of disciplines, including Business, Law, Public Policy, Urban Planning, and Urban Studies. With a sharp, yet easy-going air, Sirefman opened the discussion by soliciting audience questions and then answering by sharing stories ranging from planning the reconstruction of ground zero in Manhattan to mediating talks between the Plaza Hotel and its labor union.
Considered a national leader in the field of economic development, Sirefman emphasized his perspective that economic development is more about people than dollars. "I like economic development, particularly when it is more like public development," he said. Sirefman stressed his New York City priorities: to build and secure affordable housing, locate jobs in areas with high unemployment, and develop parks. For Sirefman, a city is made up of its people and the task of city building is insuring all people enjoy a rich quality of life.