Profiles of Pandemic-Responsive Community-Engaged Learning

Reconciliation is a valuable framework for examining how we embed ourselves in public service and activism. It is a commitment to repairing harm and recovering what is lost. Reconciliation means holding ourselves and those around us accountable as we work towards creating a more just world.

At the University of San Francisco’s Leo T. McCarthy Center for Public Service and the Common Good, we design and facilitate programming that prepares students for lives and vocations of public service, advocacy, and activism. Applying a reconciliation framework to these learning experiences calls us to reimagine and rebuild interpersonal and institutional relationships that identify and repair past and current harms, and restore trust so we can move forward in true solidarity with those most affected by injustice. In this conversation, students and staff at the McCarthy Center discuss this framework of reconciliation in our work, lives, and the future as an ethic to build a more socially just and equitable world.

Contributors are: 

Angeline Vuong is the Assistant Director, Public Service Programs at the Leo T. McCarthy Center

Jacqueline Ramos is the Community-Engaged Learning Program Manager at the Leo T. McCarthy Center

Isabel Tayag is a Community Empowerment Activist at the Leo T. McCarthy Center

Zoe Baker is a McCarthy Fellow in San Francisco at the Leo T. McCarthy Center

Dr. Michelle Millar, Associate Professor of Hospitality Management, discusses her community-engaged learning course focused on event planning with student, Tyler Overbey, and community partner, Joy D’Ovidio, Co-Founder of A Meal with Dignity.

Instructor, Jackie Ramos, talks with student, Aaron Fontan, and community partner, Brad Hirn, Lead Organizer at Housing Rights Committee of San Francisco about how to develop students’ community organizing skills and support social movements during the pandemic.

Learn how Dr. Helen Maniates, Associate Professor of Teacher Education, worked with long-time community partner Chaniel Williams, Program Manager at Collective Impact youth organization and Master of Teaching Reading students like Rachel Real to design and implement an engaging virtual summer literacy program for K-12 youth.

Dr. Kathryn Nasstrom and student, Valeria Dabdoub, reflect on the learning experience of curating contributions to “A Journal of the Plague Year,” an online archive of stories from the COVID-19 pandemic.

Dr. Dory Escobar talks about the challenges and successes of re-imagining aspects of the Applied Practice Experience (APEX) component of USF’s Master of Public Health program to ensure high-quality student learning and high-impact public health projects during the pandemic.

Dr. David Martinez, Associate Professor of Clinical Psychology and Program Director for USF’s PsyD program reflects on how the pandemic has required creative and innovative strategies for meeting community mental health needs, conducting dissertation research, and staying rooted in a commitment to social justice.