The fund dovetails with one of the key priorities of Fordham’s recent fundraising campaign, Cura Personalis | For Every Fordham Student, with its emphasis on equity and inclusion as well as the wellness of every student. Here are five examples of the numerous activities it has made possible:
No. 1: Ignatian Q.
With support from the fund, 10 Fordham students traveled to St. Louis University in April for this annual conference organized by the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities to promote community and spirituality among LGBTQ students. (Fordham hosted Ignatian Q in 2023 with support from the wellbeing fund.) In the words of one Fordham graduate student who attended, Tatum Allen, FCLC ’24, “it offered me a space to feel less alone as a queer person of faith.”
No. 2: Students Together for Acceptance, Respect, and Support (STARS).
Piloted last year by professors and students in the psychology department and the Graduate School of Social Service, this network brings Fordham students together with local high school students seeking to engage with LGBTQ peers, find support, and build community. Two of the high schoolers also took part in a year-long research project on LGBTQ experiences in school and presented their research at the Eastern Psychological Association Conference in Philadelphia.
No. 3: Oral History Project with SAGE Center Bronx.
Last year, undergraduate students in a communications class—titled Photography, Identity, Power—worked with residents of the SAGE center, a community center for LGBTQ seniors, to produce a digital exhibition of their photography that includes an oral history element. Students in an art class, Visual Justice, later met with the seniors and made portrait photographs of them.
No. 4: Queer Prayer Book.
The book Queer Prayer at Fordham was developed in 2023 and distributed at Ignatian Q when it was held at the University.
No. 5: NYC Interfaith Pilgrimage/Retreat
This daylong retreat at the Lincoln Center campus, held in February, centered on art as a way to explore the intersection between spirituality and queerness. About two dozen students and alumni gathered for morning presentations, toured sites important to the LGBTQ community in Greenwich Village, and reconvened on campus to produce their own art.
No. 6: Urban Plunge and Global Outreach Scholarships.
With support from the wellbeing fund, LGBTQ students received scholarships to take part in Urban Plunge and Global Outreach, two programs of the Center for Community Engaged Learning.
Sources: Fordham Campus Ministry, Center for Community Engaged Learning
]]>Then came the welcome news that ended the uncertainty: her costs would be covered by gifts from members of the Fordham University President’s Council, a group of accomplished alumni who mentor students and work to advance the University.
“I literally started tearing up,” said Mosquea, a senior at Fordham College at Rose Hill. “I told my mom, and she was ecstatic. I couldn’t believe it. It was just so helpful, and I was so grateful for it.”
Mosquea is one of dozens of students to benefit in recent years from President’s Council members’ gifts to make Global Outreach accessible to students in Fordham’s Higher Education Opportunity Program (HEOP), who have high financial need.
A Social Justice Focus
Council member Anne Williams-Isom, FCLC ’86, made the first such gift in 2018 after learning that the HEOP leadership wanted to make Global Outreach an integral part of the HEOP experience. Since then, member gifts have helped dozens of students in the program, including 48 students who took part in Global Outreach this year and last year alone.
Mosquea participated twice in Global Outreach, which runs week-long projects in the U.S. and abroad—in partnership with other organizations—that are centered on social justice and community engagement.
‘My People’: A Personal Connection
For the first project, in spring 2023, she traveled to the Dominican Republic, where her family is from; learned about environmental conservation efforts firsthand; and met up for the first time in 14 years with her father, who lives there. “It was just an incredible experience to not only learn about the land, but also my people as well,” she said.
Last spring she served as a student leader for a project in Puerto Rico, where she and the other students helped efforts to convert an old U.S. military base into a community center that promotes environmental education and ecotourism.
Both projects fueled her desire to work in environmental education and sustainability consulting. “Global outreach is so unique, it’s so beautiful,” she said. “It’s really enriched my life in so many different ways.”
Deepening Spirituality
Another student in HEOP, Fordham College at Rose Hill junior Miguel Picazo, also received support for traveling to Mexico with Global Outreach in 2023, where he learned about sustainable farming, and then for traveling to London this year. Through a partnership with the Jesuit Refugee Service, students visited migrant-heavy areas of East London and South London, attended Mass at Jesuit churches, and volunteered in their food pantries, among other service work.
The London Masses, with their diversity of celebrants, reinforced some of the impressions gleaned on his Mexico excursion, when he encountered migrants from diverse countries who were sustained by their spirituality.
“This spirituality sense makes you feel more human—we’re not all different, we all want the same thing,” Picazo said, “a better life, better education, a better future for our families and kids. And experiences like that stick with you for a while.”
]]>Less visibly, the event also showed the power of philanthropy. Hosting Ignatian Q is just one thing made possible by a fund that is creating new momentum around the University for initiatives that support lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer or questioning students, plus other sexual and gender minorities.
Founded last spring, the LGBTQ+ Student Wellbeing Fund is supporting everything from pastoral care to academic events and the development of classes reflecting LGBTQ+ themes—with the promise of more initiatives to come.
“I’m really encouraged and optimistic about the kind of response the fund has gotten, not only from LGBT members of the Fordham family but also straight members of our family who are deeply committed to issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion,” said Joan Garry, FCRH ’79, a former executive director of the LGBTQ+ advocacy group GLAAD and nationally recognized activist who serves on the Fordham University President’s Council executive committee.
Garry and her wife kick-started the fund last year by leading a Fordham Giving Day campaign for it and providing a $50,000 matching gift.
The need is plain, Garry said: The number of students who identify as other than heterosexual or cisgender is growing “off the charts.” These students “have all kind of struggles every day,” from self-acceptance to harassment to bullying, and suffer disproportionately from anxiety and depression, she said.
The fund is also needed because of a political climate that has become “downright terrifying,” she said, pointing to the Human Rights Campaign’s June 6 declaration of a “state of emergency” for LGBTQ+ people due to laws being enacted around the country.
By helping to foster a more inclusive campus community, the fund dovetails with a key priority of the University’s $350 million fundraising campaign, Cura Personalis | For Every Fordham Student.
Impact of the Wellbeing Fund
In addition to providing critical support to the Ignatian Q conference, the Wellbeing Fund has supported Campus Ministry programs including Queer Spirit Community and the Prism Retreat, as well as the publication of a Queer Prayer at Fordham booklet distributed at Ignatian Q, said Joan Cavanagh, Ph.D., senior director for spirituality and solidarity at Fordham.
The fund has also supported Center for Community Engaged Learning initiatives including scholarships that helped LGBTQ+ students take part in Fordham’s Global Outreach and Urban Plunge programs, a panel discussion on LGBTQ+ history, and grants for faculty. Co-sponsored by the Office of the Chief Diversity Officer, the grants support innovative classroom projects related to LGBTQ+ history and advocacy.
The Wellbeing Fund has “ignited an understanding that there is so much to do,” Garry said. “I am excited about the forward motion the fund is creating to educate, drive awareness, and galvanize support.”
Learn more about the uses of the LGBTQ+ Student Wellbeing Fund and make a gift.
See related story: Pope Francis Sends Warm Letter of Support for LGBTQ+ Conference at Fordham
]]>Now, as she helps plan this year’s Jubilee reunion weekend, she wants her fellow alumni to reconnect with their own college memories—and how their Fordham experiences have fueled their lives and careers.
“I had a world-class education, and I took every bit of advantage of it … but I also loved that I was in New York City,” said Sullivan, a partner in the Washington, D.C., office of Hogan Lovells, a global law firm. “I had organized my life so that I had no classes on Friday, and I would walk up to the D train, and I would go down to Fifth Avenue and window shop in stores that I couldn’t begin to afford.”
Sullivan is one of 15 alumni serving on the Class of 1973 planning committee, a dedicated group of volunteers helping to plan engagement events and reach out to fellow classmates leading up to the reunion celebration, from June 2 to 4. Though class years ending in 3 and 8 will be celebrated this year, all Rose Hill alumni are welcome.
As vice chair of the University’s Board of Trustees, Sullivan gets back to campus fairly often, but she said it’s not quite the same as getting to reunite with her fellow Rams.
“I am really excited at the prospect of seeing people who I have not seen in many cases since graduation,” she said, “and in some cases just rarely because I’m not in New York and a lot of my friends from Fordham stayed in the New York area.”
Breaking Ground—and Glass Ceilings
The women of Thomas More College—Fordham’s undergraduate school for women from 1964 to 1974—are known for being trailblazers in various fields, and Sullivan is certainly no exception. She’s one of the top energy lawyers in the country, having served as general counsel for the U.S. Department of Energy in the Clinton administration and as the department’s deputy general counsel for environment and nuclear programs.
Both of Sullivan’s parents—Eileen Ahern Sullivan, UGE ’42, LAW ’46, and Francis J. Sullivan, LAW ’34—were Fordham graduates, and they showed her firsthand the value of public service, particularly through their involvement with the fair housing movement. “We didn’t talk about ‘men and women for others’ then,” she said at a Presidential Welcome Reception she hosted with her husband, Larry Petro, at her firm’s offices in Washington, D.C. “That’s just the life they lived. And what they taught me.”
That sentiment fuels her efforts to combat climate change, both personally and professionally: She provided critical legal support for the world’s first deep geologic disposal facility for radioactive waste, for example, and negotiated the first agreements with electric utilities on voluntarily reducing greenhouse gas emissions. At Fordham’s 2015 Commencement, the University bestowed an honorary doctorate on her in recognition of “her exceptional and groundbreaking leadership in energy law.”
She’s passionate about giving back, as well. She’s a member of Fordham’s Doty Loyalty Giving Society and the 1841 Society, and has created and supported a number of endowed scholarships funds, including the Eileen Sullivan & Francis J. Sullivan Endowed Scholarship (named in honor of her parents), the Thomas More College Endowed Scholarship Fund, and the Fordham Founder’s Undergraduate Scholarship Fund.
Sullivan also has supported the Global Outreach program, which is celebrating its 60th anniversary this year.
‘A Very Fordham Thing’
Though she was a self-described “nerd” and serious student who focused her studies on metaphysics, Russian literature, and economics, she was among the student protesters who “took over” the University’s administration building during the Vietnam War. She described the early 1970s as an “era of protest” but added that their particular occupation was a very “Fordham experience,” meaning it was more orderly than most.
“I will never forget this guy in the business school had a can of Pledge,” she said, “and as we were leaving the building, he was polishing the table. We were very respectful of the space. It was totally Fordham, you know.”
Fordham Five (Plus One)
What are you most passionate about?
I am passionate about climate change. We are frying the planet, and there is too little urgency about the need to change our behavior. It is on all of us to do what we can to turn things around: Insist on carbon-free power from your local utility—it is available if you ask—take public transportation, don’t drink water that has traveled on the road (i.e., bottled water), “reduce, reuse, recycle” in every part of life, don’t order anything for home delivery if you can pick it up the next time you are out running multiple errands, and never order just one thing for home delivery. The traffic jam of delivery trucks in my neighborhood drives me crazy because of the horrific carbon footprint it represents. There are promising big solutions out there, but the little stuff that we can control matters more than we acknowledge.
What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?
The best advice I got was probably in first grade, when I told my mother school was too hard. She told me I could do it if I tried. Effort is not everything, but in my life, it has counted for a lot.
What’s your favorite place in New York City? In the world?
In New York City, my favorite place is the Brooklyn Bridge, on foot. You can see the skyline of New York and the Statue of Liberty, which cannot help but inspire. At the same time, you can look at the river and New York Harbor and imagine New York before it was New York, when nature was all around. I think it is a magical walk.
The world has so many spectacularly beautiful and exciting places. Picking one favorite is hard. In the end, I come down to Antarctica. It is spectacularly beautiful and different from everywhere else I have been on the planet. And it is where I learned that penguins operate their own, very organized daycare centers. It was amazing to see some adult penguins stay behind with the babies who cannot yet swim while others went out and got food and brought it back for the babies and the daycare workers. For some reason, that made more of an impression on me than almost anything else I have seen in my travels.
Name a book that has had a lasting influence on you.
I confess that I am not as much of a reader as I wish I were or should be. Sitting quietly is not my strong suit. However, a couple of years ago, I picked up Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman from one of those little neighborhood library boxes. I loved it so much I read it cover to cover twice in short succession. It was a tale of overcoming incredibly challenging personal circumstances with the help of acts of kindness of others. Notwithstanding the trauma underlying her story, I found it a very hopeful story.
Who is the Fordham grad or professor you admire most?
I was a philosophy major when Fordham was home to a pantheon of philosophy giants: Norris Clark, S.J., Robert O’Connell, S.J., and Quentin Lauer, S.J., to name a few. I cannot pick one among them. I loved the education I got as a philosophy major and can remember 50 years later some of the insights I took away from their classes.
What are you optimistic about?
In my family, I am often referred to as Pollyanna, which has become a noun that means “an excessively cheerful or optimistic person.” Does that mean I am optimistic about everything? I think it really means I am good at forgetting the bad stuff. But I guess I am optimistic that we can make a difference in this world, which has many things to be pessimistic about, if we try.
“It’s a humbling experience—it makes me feel like I’m part of something bigger,” said Petalcorin, a Gabelli School of Business sophomore who is now a Global Outreach team leader. “Something we like to say is ‘exist outside of yourself.’”
Petalcorin and her fellow classmates spent a week in Aberdeen, Mississippi, trying to do just that. They immersed themselves with Camp Friendship, one of Fordham’s long-standing community engaged learning partners, and worked with the students as camp counselors, where they learned from foster care children and their service providers.
“When you learn the struggles of the community as well as their strengths, you get to understand how to empathize, not sympathize,” she said, “and [you]work in solidarity.”
History of ¡GO!
Today, Global Outreach—often known simply as ¡GO!—runs about 15 projects each year, all of them centered on social justice and community engagement in the U.S. and abroad. But the program can trace its roots to a single trip to Mexico in 1962.
That summer, a group of 27 students traveled to Mexico, where they worked on various community development projects, such as building homes, teaching classes, and volunteering in the local hospital, according to Vanessa Rotondo, FCRH ’17, GSE ’19, the associate director of campus engagement and senior advisor for Ignatian leadership at Fordham.
Rotondo said that the Mexico project continued for years and inspired a similar series of projects in Peru. By 1988, the program was known as Global Outreach, and it continued to grow, sending students to more than 30 countries and many domestic locations, including India, El Salvador, Kenya, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, and San Jose.
In 2018, the program was brought under the auspices of the newly formed Center for Community Engaged Learning. It has continued to evolve while staying rooted to the same core values, according to Ben Medeiros, FCRH ’22, an immersion coordinator for the center.
“The Jesuit value of being men and women for and with others—to see that last … I think that’s really impressive,” he said.
Rotondo said she and her colleagues are very intentional about connecting local community partners with the student leaders early, usually via Zoom well in advance of the project, to help them gain an understanding of the community where they will be working and learning. And the groups meet multiple times throughout the semester before they leave, because Medeiros said that he’s “a huge advocate of community happening before they get there.”
The students are also tasked with developing “sustainable outcomes,” or ways they can continue the work beyond the one experience.
For Rotondo, this work is designed to help students “be transformed,” she said, using a phrase from Óscar Romero, the archbishop of San Salvador who spoke out against the treatment of the poor before he was assassinated in 1980. The goal is for the experience to help students become global-minded leaders engaged with issues affecting their community.
A Transformational Experience
Petalcorin said she felt this transformation when she returned from her first ¡GO! project and recalled a message from Joseph M. McShane, S.J., then president of Fordham, who encouraged students to “be bothered by injustice.”
“After going with GO, I was bothered,” she said, adding that “in a perfect world,” the students she met in Mississippi wouldn’t be in foster care. “Some people think it’s a week and you don’t think about it—you’re there for a week, but you take so much after it.”
That certainly was the case with Joseph Woodring, D.O., FCRH ’98. As a Fordham undergraduate, he participated in a 1995 ¡GO! India project and learned to connect with suffering and honor the human dignity of sick and impoverished people. That experience came flashing back to him a several years later, he told Fordham Magazine in 2015, when he was comforting a patient who was dying in Kolkata. “If I don’t get upstream and learn what these guys have,” he thought, “I’m not fixing anything. I want to be able to actually treat people.”
He became an epidemiologist, and his career has included deploying to Liberia with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 2014 to help contain the Ebola outbreak there.
For Eric Stolar, FCRH ’19, participating in two ¡GO! Projects—in San Jose, California, and Nicaragua—helped reshape his worldview and connect his education to real-life situations.
“I came from a fairly privileged background … and GO and Urban Plunge challenged that immediately,” he said, referring to the preorientation program designed to connect first-year and transfer students with neighborhoods and community leaders in New York City. “The way I’ve learned to be able to talk about social injustices, to talk with people with different backgrounds—coming into Fordham I definitely didn’t have those skills. I genuinely cannot thank [those programs]enough for forcing me to grow.”
Both Global Outreach trips allowed him to see and understand the impact of U.S. policies in practice. In San Jose, for example, he was part of a team working with recent immigrants from Mexico. In Nicaragua, he and his team were on the ground when former President Donald Trump made disparaging remarks about Central American countries.
“We were quite literally approached by people of Nicaragua, asking, ‘How do you feel about this?’” he said. “We got to see the impact of how small of a thing like a tweet our president made had. That was something that I was something I was incredibly grateful for, that I got to have that education at Fordham—discussing current events and [their impact]personally, academically, civically.”
Now the assistant dean for student leadership and engagement at Allegheny College, Stolar said he tries to infuse into his work with students some lessons he learned from Global Outreach, such as helping undergraduates see social issues through “a lens that’s academically driven and grounded in core principles.”
Putting the Mission into Practice
Petalcorin recently led a ¡GO! trip over spring break to North Carolina as a part of the Ignite Scholars Program through the Gabelli School of Business. The students worked with the Industrial Commons, a group that supports “employee-owned social enterprises and industrial cooperatives, and supports frontline workers.”
She said that the project helped students think about the Gabelli School’s focus on “business with a higher purpose,” and learn about sustainable business practices designed not only to generate profits but also to “help others advance.”
Community Connections
Daniel Gibney, FCRH ’14, participated in ¡GO! as a student, and today he’s a community organizer with JOIN, the Justice Organizing Interfaith Network, in Alaska. He said Rotondo’s predecessor at the center had been reaching out to alumni for potential partnerships before COVID hit. He recently reconnected with Rotondo, and they worked together on a ¡GO! Alaska project.
As a part of the experience, the students went to a local Anchorage Assembly meeting. Gibney acknowledged that local government meetings aren’t always the most interesting, but the students were engaged—and many “had never experienced anything like” watching local government in action, he said, and seeing how elected officials make decisions that directly impact people’s day-to-day lives.
“And that evening I remember several students said, ‘I am going to go to the New York Assembly when I get home. I’m going to start going to local government meetings,’” Gibney said, adding that students during the Alaska project, students also met directly with government officials, community agencies, and residents, sharing a few meals with them to better connect.
“You go to a place, you learn about it,” he said, and “you build relationships with people who are there.”
Supporting Students Along the Way
In honor of the program’s 60th anniversary, Global Outreach is hosting a gala on Saturday, April 15, and has launched a fundraising campaign to “support student scholarships and create more opportunities” for students to participate in Global Outreach. The program offers scholarships to about one-third of participants, and students also fundraise to cover a portion of the costs, which can range from $600 to $1,600 per student per project.
To learn more about the campaign, as well as upcoming events, visit fordham.edu/go.
]]>The state was North Carolina, and many of the people he met there were immigrants who had suffered greatly before coming to work at the cooperatives that he was visiting with other Fordham students. Listening to their stories “just put a lot of things into perspective for me,” he said.
Grullon is one of many students who spent their spring break with Global Outreach, Fordham’s service and cultural immersion program that runs projects—in the United States and abroad—that are centered on social justice and community engagement.
For Grullon and eight other students, the experience was a gift—quite literally. As students who came to Fordham via its Higher Education Opportunity Program (HEOP), they have high financial need. Except for the small portion for which they raise funds themselves, the students’ costs for the weeklong projects in North Carolina, Puerto Rico, and St. Thomas were covered by members of the Fordham University President’s Council, a group of accomplished alumni who mentor students and help advance the University.
By giving in support of the students, they were advancing a key priority of the University’s $350 million fundraising campaign, Cura Personalis | For Every Fordham Student—ensuring that the full Fordham experience is accessible and affordable for all students.
A Southern Excursion
The experience in North Carolina was eye-opening for Grullon and other students. “The culture is so different,” he said, noting how open and friendly everyone was. They were visiting worker-owned cooperatives making a variety of clothing and, at the same time, learning firsthand about sustainable sourcing and ethical business practices.
Giovanni Alva, FCRH ’22, a Bronx native who is now a first-generation college graduate, said the work at the clothing cooperatives made him appreciate the exhausting textile work that his own parents performed in New York City after immigrating from Mexico.
“Being able to see it in person made me realize, so much, the sacrifices that they went through … to give me the opportunity to even attend Fordham and reach my potential,” he said. The workers in the co-op seemed grateful to have health care and other benefits, and to be able to become co-owners of the company, he said.
Grullon, a first-generation college graduate himself whose parents come from the Dominican Republic, said he met immigrants including a young Hmong woman who played a managerial role in one of the cooperatives. She had spent a lot of time healing from scars, both physical and mental, that she had suffered in an internment camp before coming to America. “There were so many people just telling us similarly tragic stories,” he said. “It just taught me that … everybody just has their own struggle in life, even though you don’t see it.”
He was happy to be able to bond with other students in a way that he hadn’t before, since he was a commuting student for most of his time at Fordham. “I got a lot of good friends because of this trip, and I don’t feel as alone as I did before,” he said. “And that’s a huge thing.”
A Gift of Experience
For the past few years, when he has visited New York City high schools to tell students about HEOP, Biswa Bhowmick, associate director of the program, has been telling students about Global Outreach as a way to show what Jesuit education is about and illustrate cura personalis—or care of the whole person—in action.
In fact, he said, “this is basically our dream, to make [Global Outreach] an integral part of the HEOP experience” for all who seek it. In 2018, Anne Williams-Isom, FCLC ’86, became the first President’s Council member to give in support of this goal, and others have since contributed, including Christina Luconi, PAR, and Christine Valentic, FCRH ’04.
After meeting with Bhowmick and learning more about HEOP, Valentic said, “I just really fell in love with the program and the idea of being able to give these students the experience that they might not have been able to have.” She knew what it was like to benefit from others’ giving, since her parish’s “adopt a student” giving program had funded her Catholic school tuition. At Fordham, she had wanted to take part in Global Outreach but hadn’t had the means.
The Global Outreach program has been growing its funding sources for students; today, it offers scholarships to about a third of participants, and students also organize fundraisers to cover a portion of the trips’ cost, said Vanessa Rotondo, assistant director of immersions and senior adviser on Ignatian leadership with the Center for Community Engaged Learning, which oversees Global Outreach.
Costs for the spring break trip ranged from $600 to $1,600 per student, which they can find daunting, Bhowmick said. When they learn that their share of the cost is much smaller, he said, “that really changes the whole perspective for them.”
One HEOP student, Najelly Almonte, who is going into her senior year at Fordham College at Rose Hill, first learned about Global Outreach during the summer before her first year at Fordham, and found that financial worries never took hold.
“HEOP has always been open to the idea, ‘If you want to do anything on campus, we will help you with the funding,’” she said. “It feels nice to have that support and feel like you’re not alone and, like, ‘Oh, I can’t afford this, I can’t do the same thing as everybody else in college.’”
Discovering Education in Puerto Rico
Almonte was one of the students who went to San Juan, Puerto Rico, to help paint a mural on a middle school building that was being restored after hurricane damage. They worked with the Puerto Rican artist Pablo Marcano García on the mural, an illustration that celebrates the importance of teachers and the past, present, and future of education.
Meanwhile, the teachers at the school were on strike, which the students learned was “a regular thing,” said Cira Merlin, a participant who is going into her junior year at Fordham College at Rose Hill. “As we were painting to show teacher empowerment, how important these teachers are … they’re fighting for their pay,” she said.
The students were hosted by APRODEC, a nonprofit corporation that promotes local, sustainable economic development. They had the chance to tour historic sites, talk with students at the school, and learn about local culture and Puerto Ricans’ pride in their heritage.
“When I talk about this trip, I wouldn’t dare say ‘community service,’ because this was so much more than that,” Merlin said. “We were learning from the school, from the students, from the community. It was so much more than a service trip.”
Because of the project, she said, “I would say my love for education really grew.”
To inquire about giving in support of the Higher Education Opportunity Program, Global Outreach, or another area of the University, please contact Michael Boyd, senior associate vice president for development and university relations, at 212-636-6525 or [email protected]. Learn more about Cura Personalis | For Every Fordham Student, our campaign to reinvest in every aspect of the Fordham student experience.
]]>“We Fordham students have a privilege and also a responsibility to work with community-based organizations to help make the Bronx a better place—and that’s true of any community you live in,” said Medeiros.
Nutrition and Affordable Housing for Families
When Ellie Bauer walks across the commencement stage this spring, she’ll have earned two master’s degrees: one in economics and another in international political economy and development (IPED).
In 2020, she entered Fordham as a Peace Corps Coverdell Fellow, a fellowship for recently returned Peace Corps volunteers. She had volunteered in Ethiopia, where she taught nutrition classes to middle school students and helped families reach their nutritional goals. As part of her fellowship at Fordham, she served as a volunteer coordinator at the University Neighborhood Housing Program (UNHP), a nonprofit that creates and improves affordable housing for residents in the Northwest Bronx. Over the past two years, she managed volunteers and interns and helped clients complete their affordable housing applications. She also worked with a team to implement a new virtual tax assistance program for low-income residents.
“I grew up in a town of 2,000 people, where we all knew each other and shared a certain culture. Moving somewhere for a job or school provides you with a different community to live with, and it’s important to learn more about that community,” Bauer said.
Thanks to her Presidential Management Fellowship—a program that matches outstanding graduate students with federal opportunities—she will move to Chicago and become a program specialist in the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food and Nutrition Service, where she will support WIC, a supplemental nutrition program for low- to middle-income families.
Bauer said she is grateful for her mentors in Fordham’s IPED program, who ensured that Bauer and her classmates got to know each other during the pandemic and secured funding for their unpaid internships and language training.
“I feel very lucky to have found the IPED program and the directors who make it so great,” she said.
Listening to Men Experiencing Homelessness
Benjamin Medeiros is graduating with a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Fordham College at Rose Hill. In his first year at Fordham, he tutored elementary students and tended to a community garden in the Bronx. Over the past year, he has worked to dismantle stereotypes about the homeless population with his classmates through Fordham’s Engaged Leaders Fellowship, offered by the Center for Community Engaged Learning. His team interviewed men living at a Manhattan shelter about their lives and surveyed more than 100 Fordham students about their perceptions of the homeless community.
At the end of May, he will fly to Mississippi through Global Outreach, a Fordham service and cultural immersion program. For one week, Medeiros will serve as a counselor at a sleepaway camp for foster children from low-income backgrounds. This fall, he will return to Fordham to pursue his Ph.D. in counseling psychology.
“Being a counseling psychologist is essentially being a community-engaged learner. You interact with a community and learn from the people that you work with,” said Medeiros, who hopes to someday counsel clients at a correctional facility in New York.
“My experiences at Fordham have taught me how to appreciate the people in the larger community, especially in marginalized corners of that community,” said Medeiros, “and how to use my skill set and voice to make that community better.”
“The formation process is now intentionally crafted with the location and partners in mind, and the focus on historical context and social justice as they relate to each project is stronger,” said Vanessa Rotondo, assistant director of immersions and senior adviser on Ignatian leadership at CCEL.
Over the past three decades, the program—more popularly known as GO!—has sent thousands of students to 36 different countries. These trips have always served as opportunities for students to meet people from different backgrounds and reimagine their perspective on the world. But when the program became part of CCEL four years ago, the way that students prepared for their trips changed.
In a 10-week “formation” process before their trip, they research and discuss the cultural, socioeconomic, and historic factors surrounding their trip. Instead of meeting community partners during the first few days of the trip, they also meet in advance on Zoom. After the trip is over, the students develop “sustainable outcomes,” or ways that they continue to apply the lessons from their trip to the classroom and beyond.
But throughout the years, the main goal of GO! has stayed the same.
“Fordham’s mission states that we seek to create global leaders. Global Outreach is the lived incarnation of that mission,” Rotondo said. “Having done a number of these projects myself—both as a student and now as an administrator—I think they are some of the most transformative experiences that the University offers.”
During the first year of the pandemic, GO! canceled several planned trips and pivoted to a virtual experience with several countries, including the Dominican Republic. The program also developed a civic education and digital activism project called GO! Vote where students raised political awareness across campus. In 2021, students resumed in-person experiences, but stayed close to home.
‘Personal Care and Pride’ in Bronx Parks
One of the biggest GO! projects of 2021 was a two-semester experience where students partnered with local nonprofit The Bronx is Blooming to learn about environmental justice in the Bronx. During the formation process, the team met with their community partners and discussed how inadequate government funding has led to public parks becoming breeding grounds for invasive plant species, in comparison to privately funded parks. Then they traveled to actual parks across the Bronx, where they removed several invasive species and partially restored the natural environment.
One popular local invasive species is Phragmites australis, a reed with a thick plume of seeds that had grown so thick in a Crotona Park pond that it choked out the native wildlife and their habitats, said Amelia Medved, FCRH ’23. Her team wore chest waders and entered the pond, where they hacked away at the plants and cleared them out. A few weeks later, they returned to tear out the regrown sprouts and replace them with native plants, including irises and blueberry bushes, that support local wildlife.
Besides working in nature, the students became acquainted with the community. They created homemade seed balls—seeds wrapped in soil and clay that can be planted anywhere—and set them up on a table along the Mosholu Parkway, where residents could take them home and talk to students about their own relationship with the public parks, said Medved.
“We developed a real attachment to the parks and this mindset that we can use later in life … how caring for the local ecosystem in our neighborhood is something that we can take personal care and pride in,” said Medved, an environmental studies and visual arts double major who plans on becoming a landscape architect. “It’s not a one-time volunteer day—it’s an ongoing effort.”
Another local GO! project was the Bronx Immigration Project. Students supported the work of three organizations, including the Violence Intervention Program, to host food, toy, and clothing drives for women and children from underserved backgrounds, especially those that have experienced abuse.
“The center helped me realize that there is a way for academics to be engaged in the world,” said Benedict Reilly, FCRH ’23, a theology and religious studies and humanitarian studies double major who participated in the project last fall, “and I want to continue doing that.”
‘A Heartbreaking Reality Check’ at the U.S.-Mexico Border
Other students traveled to the edge of the U.S. Earlier this month, a group of students traveled to Puerto Rico for a nine-day trip. They worked closely with APRODEC, a nonprofit that serves the northeastern region, to renovate their Eastern Ecotourism Center—a place where the community will work together to promote their economy and people through sustainable tourism practices.
Emely Paulino Cuevas, FCRH ’22, said she observed a strong sense of community abroad that reminded her of her native Bronx.
“We don’t have the best reputation. A lot of people have given up on us. But what I’ve seen throughout the years and learned through history is that many people from the Bronx have supported one another in order to rebuild our community,” said Cuevas, a psychology student on the five-year teacher education track who plans on becoming a kindergarten teacher. “And I see that in Puerto Rico, too.”
More than 2,000 miles away, another group of students visited the border between the U.S. and Mexico.
“Our goal was to better understand the realities of life on the border. These things can be hard to understand when you’re not physically there,” said Lauren Pecora, FCRH ’22, who served as the trip’s student leader.
In collaboration with the Kino Border Initiative, Pecora organized and led weekly meetings throughout the fall semester, where students learned about the immigration process and discussed what it meant to enter new communities. The main highlight of the actual “immersion,” or trip, said Pecora, was listening to migrants tell their own stories. She recalled a 20-year-old man named Aldo who fled from the drug cartel in his native Honduras, where they had been trying to recruit him.
“He had to deal with corrupt authorities and violent experiences. Hearing all of this, and then playing soccer with him and the kids at the shelter and then realizing that he’s our age—it’s a heartbreaking reality check that he could be us,” said Pecora.
Over the next few weeks, Pecora said her team will come up with ways to stay connected to the national issue. Among them are a letter-writing event and involvement in the Hostile Terrain 94 art exhibit that moved from the Lincoln Center campus to Rose Hill this semester. What has stayed with her was physically witnessing the complexity of real-life issues, she said.
“I thought each experience would become a puzzle piece that created this picture of migration that I was missing, that these experiences would simplify the picture for me. But it really didn’t. It complicated it, in a very real way,” said Pecora, an international studies and theology double major who is considering working in community engagement for a nonprofit after she graduates from Fordham this spring. “And I think that speaks to Global Outreach’s mission: for students to be challenged by these partnerships with organizations around the world.”
]]>Gafney arrived at Fordham two years ago as the center’s director of administration and academic development after several years in higher education as an instructor, administrator, and independent consultant. She started during a time of restructuring within the Office of Mission Integration and Planning, which included launching the center to bring together established community outreach programs alongside service learning curricula.
Gafney will now oversee marquee programs like Urban Plunge, the pre-orientation program that introduces first-year students to the city through service, and Global Outreach, which partners with community-based organizations at home and abroad to help students better understand social justice issues at the ground level. On the academic side of the house, Gafney will continue to build on her work with faculty to facilitate curricular offerings that include engagement with the community.
“My background it the humanities and the liberal arts laid out a path where I fell in love with teaching, but then I began to look at more systemic ways to create policies that put relationships with people first, which is essential in education,” she said.
A graduate of Tufts University and the University of Chicago, Gafney earned her doctorate from the City University of New York Graduate Center. Mentoring and teaching students at Hunter College and John Jay College sparked an interest in student success.
“I began asking questions about what gets students into college, how they persist, and what they need to complete college on time,” she said.
She later consulted for colleges and universities throughout New York state to develop and evaluate STEM programs with the ultimate goal of recruiting students from historically underrepresented backgrounds. Having fostered an interest in the nut-and-bolts of higher education, she arrived at Fordham tasked with growing the University’s community-engaged approach to coursework, she said.
“A community engaged class takes up a social justice concern or problem or topic and applies it to that class through community engagement,” she said. “It could be an organic chemistry class that deconstructs an environmental justice issue or a sociology class that examines redlining.”
Gafney said that while there was a strong tradition of service learning at Fordham when she arrived, the Center for Community Engaged Learning offers many more opportunities for students to get involved in community-based work through their undergraduate courses. Today, community engaged learning classes to ask each student to take on a direct service or project-based experience, along with two written assignments and a thoughtful reflective practice, such as journaling or a set of in-class discussions that unpack their experience.
These courses have increased in number dramatically as well. In the 2014-2015 school year there were seven service learning courses offered; this school year there were 52 community engaged courses supported by the center. Gafney credited several faculty members–whom she referred to as “expert practitioners”– with helping lay the groundwork for what is now a wide array of course offerings across disciplines.
CCEL provides support to faculty by connecting them with appropriate community based organizations that have an established relationship with Fordham. Gafney also facilitates faculty workgroups that meet eight times a semester to workshop course proposals. The group delves into the pedagogy of teaching a community-based course, she said, and “interrogates systems of racism” while discussing how to hold those difficult conversations in a classroom. The fact that she is a white woman facilitating conversations on race has not been lost on her.
“I am approaching a lot of this work as a student and learning from my staff, other leaders in the field, and from our partners,” she said. “I see this learning and developing myself as iterative, under construction, and something that I must return to every day.”
On her nightstand at the moment are books by Ibram Kendi, Michelle Alexander, and Bryan Washington, she said.
“I’m deeply committed to anti-racism in everything I do,” she said, after crediting several colleagues from across the University who she said have helped her deepen her understanding of racism. She added that the pandemic and recent Black Lives Matter protests have underscored inequities that CCEL has sought to address in its programming.
“Even more than in ordinary times, we really see the importance of community-based solutions,” she said. “We’ll be looking to our partners to see how they’re approaching this political, cultural, and social change, as well as a rising awareness around injustice and human rights violations in this country.”
Gafney said that the post-pandemic world could offer society an opportunity to realign its principles. She drew parallels to her research on 14th-century secular writing in England, France, and Italy to what that world might look like. She noted that in years after the plague, writers often employed the motif of the Garden of Eden as a stand-in for a newly constructed society.
“It was a way to think about how to construct a new society after the destruction of an urban society,” she said. “Then as now I hope for a restructuring of problematic hierarchies, like who has power and how it is used. Because in these moments of flux that we don’t wish for, that is when we can re-valuate what is possible.”
]]>The roots of the teach-in stem back to 1989, when Father Ignacio Ellacuría and his five fellow Jesuits were murdered in El Salvador, outside of the the University of Central America’s (UCA) Pastoral Center, where they lived and worked.
Since then, the teach-in has been held every year—virtually this year—as a way to continue to advance Jesuit causes of social justice and working for others.
Fordham has been an active participant in years past. This year, it had one of its largest groups ever join in the Oct. 24-26 multiday conference.
“Offering [the teach-in] to students this year, particularly during the pandemic, it was even more meaningful,” said Carol Gibney, associate director of campus ministry for spiritual and pastoral ministries. “I think everybody’s seeking and desiring community … It was very, I would say hopeful, joyful, inspirational. And reminded all of us that we’re part of a larger organization, with Ignatian spirituality and pedagogy.”
Gibney said that all of the students were able to participate in the conference remotely, but they also offered Bepler Commons at the Rose Hill campus throughout the weekend as a space where students could come and break out into small groups to discuss some of the topics including climate change, anti-racism work, and civil engagement. About 12 to 15 students took advantage of the in-person option.
For Lauren Pecora, a junior at Fordham College Rose Hill, the topic of “Asylum and Detention: Working Towards Dignity” stood out for her.
“The problem at the border is so multifaceted that it’s difficult to keep up with unless you’re directly involved, but the speakers were engaging and clear,” she said. “A complete reorientation of policy is needed at the border, away from criminalization and militarization.”
For Fordham College at Rose Hill junior Mari Teli, the session called “How Do We Build Up a Broken World,” held by the Jesuit Volunteer Corps, really impacted her.
“We talked about how do we, especially now, in the time of corona[virus] , how do we build up marginalized communities? It was a really big self-reflection of, what community are you involved in and how does that community harm or help other marginalized communities around you? Do you actively see yourself trying to uplift the voices of those marginalized communities?”
Teli was part of a group of students from GO! Vote, this year’s Global Outreach project, a section of which participated in IFTJ, according to Vanessa Rotondo, assistant director, immersions and student leadership at the Center for Community Engaged Learning, who coordinated the efforts.
“We got a little creative with Global Outreach this semester, and we formed GO! Vote, which was charged with raising civic awareness across both campuses,” she said.
Rotondo said the GO! Vote team hosted pre- and post-election talks and forums on civic engagement and awareness and participated in phone banking, in addition to being involved with IFTJ.
She said the students who participated in IFTJ will put some of what they learned in action through a partnership with Cristo Rey New York High School in Harlem where they will teach the students about civic education in early 2021.
“I think the big thing that struck my group in particular was this theme of planting a seed,” Rotondo said. “They want to do something where they’re physically both planted and see and watch it grow, and I think that really struck them through the lens of working with the high school students.”
]]>In short, self-recorded videos—most are about two minutes long—respondents discuss how they live Fordham’s mission in their careers and personal lives, how it inspires them to engage with the issues of our time, and more.
Cultivating Connection and Community
In the first episode, Donna Rapaccioli, Ph.D., dean of the Gabelli School of Business and a 1983 Gabelli School graduate, said her Fordham education taught her to look for God in everyone.
“This search to find God in all things has helped me see beauty and wisdom in unusual places, including mistakes I have made and losses that I have experienced,” Rapaccioli said. “It’s also helped me lead difficult conversations and to humanize my colleagues who have goals that don’t seem to align with my goals, by stepping back and reflecting on the profound premise that God is in everyone.”
Other respondents, such as Daniel Groff, a 2020 Gabelli School graduate, have reflected on the lasting friendships they fostered while studying at Fordham.
“These aren’t surface-level friendships where it’s just people I hang out with on the weekends,” Groff said. “I’m so grateful that Fordham provided that type of community that allowed these friendships to grow and continue to grow after my time at Fordham … and I’m excited, as I enter this next stage of my life, to continue growing those relationships.”
Finding Inspiration in and out of the Classroom
In her reflection, Nina Heyden, FCRH ’17, credited Fordham’s Urban Plunge and Global Outreach programs for helping her connect with people beyond the Fordham community, sharing in their stories and experiences in a way that profoundly influenced her career trajectory.
During an event Fordham hosted when she was an undergraduate, Heyden had an opportunity to speak with the caterer, a local restaurant owner who “shared a really tough story” of how she and her family were facing “displacement due to the gentrification that was going on in the Bronx.”
“That got me thinking of all of the others who must be going through this systemic injustice as well, and was one of the motivating factors for me to turn to a research career and go into data science and statistics, to be able to provide concrete truths through numbers and take stock of all the people going through injustices,” Heyden said. “I feel really lucky to be able to do that.”
Loreen Ruiz, a Fordham College at Lincoln Center senior and the president of United Student Government at Lincoln Center, shared how she decided to major in theology despite identifying as agnostic.
“I’ve always had a complicated relationship with religion,” Ruiz said. “I was disappointed to find that theology classes were required as part of the core curriculum. I’d been avoiding religion and going to church for the past few years—this time, I had no way out.”
Ruiz said that, contrary to her expectations, the core classes offered her an opportunity to delve into and unpack the difficult religious questions about which she’d always wondered. “I quickly realized that these classes’ purpose was to teach critical thinking, and to examine religion from a historical and philosophical angle,” she said. “I began to lean into class discussions. … I found them so interesting that I declared my major in theology and never looked back.”
She added that, thanks to Fordham, she’s been better able to connect with her religious family and understand their perspectives because she treats “religion with respect, not disdain.”
Seeking Social Justice
Gregory Louis, LAW ’09, shared how he has used his Fordham Law education to work toward greater social justice, both through community lawyering and as a professor at the City University of New York’s School of Law.
“The motto of my current school … is the ennobling ‘Law in the Service of Human Needs,’” Louis said. “My Fordham Law education prepared me to join in this mission as a Catholic because it instilled in me the ideal of faith in the service of humanity.”
He added: “The zeal generated in the classroom drives you out into the world and, in my case, to the clinical program at Fordham Law and then to the community, lawyering out on the streets of New York. This happened because Fordham instilled in me a sense that … legal knowledge means absolutely nothing if it’s not immediately employed to and invested in the struggle for justice.”
In an interview, Louis added that he hopes his and other Magis Minute videos will invite some deeper reflection on “what it means to be a Jesuit university and, most importantly, how this engages with this broad question of schools that are having to think through their complicity in not advancing the rights of others.”
Sowing the Seeds for Reflection
Julie Fissinger, executive director of the President’s Council, is one of the organizers of the Magis Minute project. She said that as the dual pandemics of COVID-19 and racism wore on over the summer, she was looking for ways to foster a sense of social connection to unite people at Fordham despite the need for physical distancing.
“One of the most consistent things you hear [from students and alumni]is about the [value of the]Jesuit education that people receive at the University,” Fissinger said. She started thinking about how Fordham has its own “internal gems of resources,” and she wanted to hear from people “about their own experiences and how it’s impacted their lives.”
She teamed up with Matthew Burns, associate director for young alumni and student engagement; Kathryn Mandalakis, assistant director of the Fordham Fund; and Blain Bradley, leadership annual giving officer; along with Erin Hoffman, associate director of Campus Ministry, director of Ignatian Initiatives, and resident minister.
“I hope they can help be a positive and unifying moment for members of our community at a time when we face so many challenges in the world and are separated from one another in so many ways,” Hoffman said, adding that she hopes the series “can create enthusiasm about Fordham and showcase the numerous ways people connect with Fordham and grow during their time here.”
Engaging a Wider Community
According to Burns, “the goal is to make this as diverse as possible—students, parents, faculty, alumni, followers of non-Christian faiths (or none at all).” Fissinger added that project organizers would love to hear from staff who work in facilities, the cafeteria, and other areas of the University. “They’re not faculty, they’re not students, but I think they’re touched by the culture of the institution as well.”
Fissinger also said she hopes to engage community partners as well. In a more typical year, students are heavily involved in service projects around the city and in the local Bronx community. Bronx nonprofit leaders who meet Fordham students through programs like Urban Plunge, for example, could be invited to “talk about that relationship with the University and the students,” she said, “and the impact of that kind of programming on local communities.”
Hoffman added that she and her colleagues “take seriously our hope that the series reflects voices from a wide variety of perspectives within the Fordham community, and we seek to be attentive to diversity of many types when we invite people to participate.”
The Magis Minute team is always looking for nominations and volunteers. Email Blain Bradley at [email protected] to nominate the next Magis Minute respondent. New videos are posted every Thursday on the alumni website, Forever Fordham, and on social media.
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