Who She Is

Administrative assistant in Fordham College at Lincoln Center’s residential life office since 2006. 

What She Does 

“I man the front office and assist with any parent questions or concerns,” she said. “I supervise the student workers and assist the housing operations director with anything housing-related.” 

Dealing with Mom and Dad 

“Transitioning from high school to college is an adjustment for both students and parents. A lot of parents [of first-year students]think, ‘This is my first child going to school and I just want to make sure my child has everything [he or she needs].’ So I help calm those nerves and help the parents let go a little bit. Helping parents and students navigate this transitional time is one of my favorite aspects of working in the office of residential life.”

Born in the Dominican Republic, Bred in the Bronx

At 8 years old, Baez immigrated to the U.S. She grew up in the Bronx, where she attended Theodore Roosevelt High School—just across the street from the Rose Hill campus.

“I’ve joked around that I didn’t want to go to Rose Hill because I didn’t want to just cross the street to go to college. A year into me being at Marymount, I find out that Fordham is purchasing Marymount. So I still graduated with a Fordham degree, even though I didn’t want to just ‘go across the street,’” she said with a laugh. 

Over the next three decades, Baez became a three-time Fordham alumna. In 2005, she graduated from Marymount College with a bachelor’s degree in business. In 2016, she earned a master’s degree in counseling from the Graduate School of Education. In 2018, she received a master’s degree in nonprofit leadership through Fordham’s Center for Nonprofit Leaders. (From 2005 to 2006, Baez also worked in the Rose Hill career services office as an internship coordinator.) 

Leading a New Nonprofit

In the summer of 2017, she created Strive4HigherEd: a grassroots program that provides minority students, particularly those from the Bronx, with events and activities that build financial literacy, wellness, education, and career exploration skills. Several months ago, Baez shortened her nonprofit’s name from Strive4HigherEd to StriveHigher. 

“I wanted to make sure that there wasn’t just an emphasis on higher education because the idea of ‘strive’ is to expose students to different experiential and learning opportunities and life skills. I wanted to create a nonprofit that wasn’t just pushing kids to go to college. While that’s something that we do focus on, I focus more on developing the whole child,” she said. “My goal is to help children develop into well-rounded individuals who can reach their full potential. I think that everyone has a different path in life, and the main thing is just figuring out what works best for you and what makes you happy.”

This month, the nonprofit officially became a 501(c)(3) organization. 

“Hopefully it will be funded through grants pretty soon,” Baez said. “But right now, it’s been a grassroots nonprofit … so just out of pocket and friends and family donating. But the support I’ve received with this nonprofit fuels me to continue the work and know that I’m on the right path.” 

From Storytime to College Tours

Baez’s program offers activities for children of all ages, ranging from pre-K to high school students. In the past, she has coordinated financial literacy workshops with Bank of America, where several children created their first savings accounts. She has brought coding classes, courtesy of Code Equal and Fordham’s office of multicultural affairs, to Bronx kids on the Rose Hill campus. And most recently, she started reading stories like “Lucía the Luchadora” and “Hair Love” to children in a local T-Mobile store—stories that often spotlight characters of color, who resemble many of the children that attend Baez’s storytime sessions. 

“A lot of kids in the Bronx are not at reading level,” Baez said. “My goal is to express to parents how important it is to read to their kids and to have the kids reading and being excited about the books they’re reading.” 

She also spearheads local college tours for Bronx students, including children as young as 11 years old. In the summer of 2017, Baez took a group of middle school students and their parents on a tour of Fordham College at Lincoln Center. The following month, they toured the Rose Hill campus and met the women’s basketball team. 

“A lot of parents are like, well, why do we even have to think about that [now]?” Baez said. “It’s [about]exposing the kids to a campus, to a dorm room, and have them hear the words ‘studying abroad’ and know what that means … being able to have that type of vocabulary, no matter their home situation or their neighborhood.”

‘I Want Them to Be Successful and Happy’ 

“[I want to create] a legacy of students building generational wealth. What matters to me the most is for kids to be able to grow up and buy a house or that car and not be in debt, travel, do all these things that are normal in other families and races … and I want them to be successful and happy. I want that to be the legacy that I leave behind.” 

Follow StriveHigher on Instagram for its latest news and updates.

The event was presented in part by One Girl, Barakett’s nonprofit, which seeks to empower young women to be leaders in their chosen philanthropic cause. She said she started the organization after meeting so many young women from the pageant circuit, who had specific philanthropic goals but got sidetracked by life events ranging from college to work and children.

“For me, I wanted to do more with my community, but I didn’t know how to get involved,” she says. “Through the conference, we’re creating community that helps young women get involved or keep the momentum on projects they may have already started.”

For her part, Barakett doesn’t easily tout the volunteer work she has done. It takes a bit of probing before she reveals personal passions. Her main concern is keeping others on track to give back.

“Being a part of their journey is what’s important to me,” she says.

The Nov. 17 event, now in its third year, aimed to help women network and discover how they can make change in their own lives and the world around them. The event included panels on social change through activism, through business, and through personal wellness.

The Graduate School of Social Service (GSS), the Institute for Women and Girls, and the Center for Nonprofit Leaders cosponsored the conference. Barakett got her master’s in nonprofit leadership from GSS just two years ago. She said that she had already set up a 501(c)(3) when she started at Fordham, but needed a bit more to get her organization organized.

“I had the passion, but I lacked the formal education underneath,” she says. “They took me through all the behind the scenes stuff, like the paperwork, and the taxes. It just gave me a lot more confidence.”

In addition to Fordham faculty experts on women’s issues, like Marciana Popescu, Ph.D., associate professor of social work, the event featured GSS students out in the field, like Ph.D. candidate Felicia Pullen, CEO of the Pillars, a Harlem-based recovery center. It also included social media influencers, like Sophia Roe, and spoken-word poet Dailyn Santana.

Many of the panelists detailed how they arrived at their particular cause and how they got involved, says Barakett.

“We really try to get into the individual and find out what they care about,” said Barakett. “It usually comes from something personal, maybe something happened to them or to a family member, or maybe something struck their heart strings, like a book, and that opens the flood gates.”

For Barakett, a book detailing an activist’s imprisonment and eventual escape from the sex trade inspired her activism. She began working with an organization that combined activism and yoga—which she practices regularly. She was soon teaching yoga to victims of sex trafficking and domestic violence.

“The work we do for the community is important, but so is the internal work that we do,” she says, stressing the importance of wellness for those caring for others.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, FCRH ’79, has appointed Kirk Dobson, PCS ’10, GSAS ’11; Kimberly Wedderburn, LAW ’16; and Hanna Reyes, who holds a certificate in nonprofit management from Fordham, to the 2016–2018 class of Empire State Fellows. The program prepares mid-career professionals to be New York state government leaders and policy makers.

“The fact that it’s something so competitive—in a class of eight people, to have three Fordham alums in the mix—I was so proud,” said Dobson, who started the fellowship this fall and was appointed to the state health department. He’s working with the deputy commissioner for the Office of Health Insurance Programs, helping to create new processes that will provide Medicaid patients with better access to care.

“I’m learning so much about these programs,” Dobson said. “It’s absolutely fascinating.” He added that the program goes beyond “just getting your feet wet” and gives fellows the chance to interact with senior staff.

Though the fellows come from many different professional backgrounds, Dobson happens to have some experience in the political arena. After earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees in political science from Fordham, he spent time working on various political campaigns in Massachusetts, New York, and Georgia, where he earned a doctorate in public administration from Valdosta State University.

Wedderburn, who was appointed to the Department of Labor, said attending Fordham Law in the evening while working as a special education teacher prepared her well for the program. “I began the fellowship equipped with the requisite legal education, work experience, and problem-solving skills needed to hit the ground running,” she said.

Reyes also credited Fordham for the “foundation that made it possible” for her to be selected, and said she’s “full of pride” to be able to say she’s both a Fordham alumna and an Empire State Fellow. She’ll be serving in the executive chamber.

While they’re in Albany, Dobson, Wedderburn, Reyes, and the other fellows will get the chance to participate in professional development activities, including mentoring by cabinet members. At the end of the program, qualified fellows are given the opportunity to continue to serve as leaders in New York state government.

“I absolutely think it’s going to be a great entryway for all of us,” Dobson said.

A gift from BNY Mellon is helping to provide scholarship support and mentoring opportunities to 60 students enrolled in the nonprofit leadership MS program for the 2015-16 academic year.

New York City Taxi and Limousine Commissioner David Yassky addressed this topic when he spoke to students in Professor Allan Luks’s Advocacy and Public Policy class on Feb. 1. “It’s always hard to get social changes approved,” said Yassky, “but I don’t think it’s any harder now to get change, as long as it doesn’t cost a lot of money. And you, as social workers, through your daily experiences, can identify such solutions and fight to get them adopted.”

Each one of the second-year students in Luks’s course must identify and advocate for a new, small public policy that can improve society at little cost. The students have had no problem finding these issues and their public policy solutions. Some examples include: stopping users of suboxone, a methadone-like drug, from selling their supply to get others high; requiring people who are HIV positive to inform those they are sexually active with; have public TV and radio regularly post social indexes on how well or poorly society is solving its social ills and invite public involvement where changes are most needed; offering affordable transportation for low-income cancer patients, who now may be late or even miss appointments; regular mental health seminars in high schools so students can identify warning signs in themselves and others and prevent the violent behaviors; a requirement that public housing conditions that cause asthma be fixed within a month rather than a year; and allowing pregnant women to avoid going through school metal detectors.

“Social workers are required by their profession to identify solutions to public problems and advocate for their implementation,” said Luks, who also directs Fordham’s Center for Nonprofit Leaders. “For the needy, who are most affected by the Great Recession, these small ideas of social workers become a balance that says optimism for the future is still possible.”

A former nonprofit executive with more than two decades of experience, Luks tells students of his successful efforts to champion laws that have since become national models. In the 1980s, he led the adoption of New York City’s law requiring posters in bars and restaurants warning about drinking during pregnancy, which resulted in national legislation. He also advocated successfully for the city law preventing job discrimination against recovered alcoholics, which was then adopted by many states and cities. In 2007, he led the call for the state law requiring mentoring programs to inform parents about whether or not they did background checks on their mentors.

“Social workers starting out today have high tuition bills, a high cost of living and the worry of their charitable employers cutting back,” he said. “So, there is pressure on them to just do the work they are employed to do and not to go beyond and start trying to change public policies.

“The goal of the Fordham program is to show the second-year graduate students that social workers are one vital counterweight to the Great Recession.”