Education is a rare privilege in his hometown, and many students quit because it’s too challenging to get to school, but Zongo persisted because he believes knowledge is a potent tool, he said.

From Burkina Faso to Manhattan: A Long Journey for Higher Education

“School for me is like a vessel of knowledge,” Zongo said. “School is something that I always look up to, to have a place where people can better themselves and learn and grow and even possibly learn about the world and different things in life.”

Zongo was accepted to the University of Ouagadougou, in Burkina Faso’s capital, but couldn’t start the program because of a lack of funding and study materials. In 2013, he came to the U.S. on a Diversity Immigrant Visa—a lottery-selected program available to people from countries with low U.S. immigration rates. Looking back now, Zongo says his journey to Fordham feels like a dream.

When he arrived in the U.S., Zongo spoke three languages—French and two local languages, Moore and Dioula—but not English. After struggling to find enough work, he enrolled in remedial English at John Jay College, where he eventually earned his bachelor’s degree in International Criminal Justice, graduating cum laude in 2018.

Understanding Vulnerable Communities

Zongo’s background and experiences prepared him well to become a social worker, and left him with an intrinsic desire to help others and to give back, said Linda White-Ryan, associate dean of GSS. 

“It gave him an in-depth understanding of many of the vulnerable communities, the people that social workers assist,” White-Ryan said. 

While at John Jay, Zongo also received the prestigious DAAD scholarship to study at the Berlin School of Economics and Law. He now speaks five languages, adding German and English to his repertoire.

After graduating, he worked in various community organizations helping vulnerable New Yorkers access services and health care. In 2021, he received the Mayor’s Graduate Scholarship—which encourages full-time NYC government employees to pursue higher education—and enrolled in Fordham’s MSW program.

Working with Undocumented and Unhoused New Yorkers

The program’s helped him hone his skills and passion for helping the city’s underserved communities. While at Fordham, Zongo worked full-time as a Community Health Worker at Bellevue Hospital, an outgrowth of the contact tracing work he did through the Public Health Corps early in the pandemic. His job is to help social workers and doctors make sure they’re offering complete services to patients.

“As a CHW, my role is to effectively interact with undocumented and homeless people and to identify complex barriers to primary care,” Zongo said. “My second role is to provide formal, trauma-informed care tailored to the patient-oriented care goals while addressing substance use, mental health, housing progression, and chronic disease.”

At Fordham, Zongo’s particularly enjoyed the humanitarian and mental health classes he’s taken, including his Integrated Behavioral Health, Health Care Policy and Advocacy, and Suicide Assessment and Treatment classes, because they’ve bolstered his cultural understanding and prepared him to better serve people he works with in the future.

“He’s developed a very strong skill base and developed social work competency at a really superior level,” White-Ryan said. “We are proud he’s a graduate of Fordham…he’s a shining example of this program.”

After graduation, Zongo will continue in his Community Health Worker position and study toward a Master of Public Health degree at Columbia University this fall. He plans to spend his life making sure overlooked and underserved populations have access to good health care.

—Meredith Lawrence 

After seven years of working closely with a team from New York City’s Department for the Aging on a new educational intervention, Linda White-Ryan, Ph.D., and Janna Heyman, Ph.D., have developed an intervention that has proved successful on both fronts.

“As a person ages, there are many changes that take place in their life, such as the way we metabolize any substance, even if it’s aspirin in combination with alcohol, said White-Ryan, associate dean of academic affairs at the Graduate School of Social Service (GSS).

“We wanted to see if this educational intervention could really make a difference in the understanding of older adults about any of the possible risks, and how they communicate with their health care providers,” said Heyman, a professor and the Henry C. Ravazzin Chair at the GSS.

White-Ryan and Heyman began working on the intervention in 2016 with funding from the New York Public Trust.

Their research partners included Thomas Caprio, M.D., a professor at the University of Rochester Medical Center, Jacquline Berman, director of research at the New York Department for the Aging, and Manoj Pardasani, Ph.D., a former member of the GSS faculty who is now provost and vice president of academic affairs at Hunter College.

In 2018, after two years of design work, the team conducted a randomized control trial in older adult centers in Staten Island, Manhattan, and the Bronx. Participants were assigned to either the intervention group or a control group that received traditional services. The intervention group received educational material about health, physical and other aging changes, medication use, and possible adverse interactions between alcohol and medications, as well as strategies to initiate communication with physicians and other healthcare providers.

The authors of the study, which was published last fall in the journal Gerontology & Geriatrics Education, also made the information given to the intervention group available to the control group after the study was complete.

The intervention was titled Communicating with your Health Care Providers. It involved two meetings, held 10 days apart, with a total of 115 participants—55 in the intervention group and 60 in the control group. The median age of participants was 72, and 60% were women.

Role-Playing to Instill Confidence

The meetings were conducted in group settings, which was key to the intervention’s success, said Heyman.

“This intervention was so powerful because it allowed older adults to really be in a room with their friends and peers and say, ‘It’s OK, we need to ask important questions to our physicians and pharmacists,” she said.

The sessions also involved role-playing, with participants attempting to have conversations with actors portraying clearly distracted healthcare professionals. They were coached on how to be assertive and ask questions they might otherwise have shied away from.

A Growing Need for a Rapidly Population

The need to help older adults feel confident about asking their doctors for information is rapidly growing. By 2034, the U.S. Census Bureau has predicted there will be more people aged 65 and over than those under 18 in the United States. At the same time, the National Council on Aging has predicted that the number of older adults struggling with substance abuse, depression, and anxiety is expected to reach 15 million by 2030.

Results

Surveys administered to participants afterward found that those in the intervention group displayed a greater awareness of the implications of combining alcohol with prescription drugs and more confidence in their ability to communicate with their doctors and pharmacists.

Although the intervention took place pre-pandemic, White-Ryan said the reception that they received from participants was so positive, they’re hopeful that it can be replicated in the future.

“These are the physiological changes and emotional changes that happen as we age, but you can have good health, and communication with your health care providers is a big piece of that,” she said.

“So this intervention gave them important information and taught them about engaging with health care providers, advocating for themselves, and reaching out to get the information so that they age well or as well as possible.”

She’s never forgotten how a social worker helped her and her family make that transition. And soon she’ll be in a position to offer help to others in need. On May 21, Guirand will graduate with a Master of Social Work from the Graduate School of Social Service (GSS).

To get there, though, she had to overcome some misconceptions about the field. Even though she was attracted to it as an undergraduate at Long Island’s Molloy College, she changed her major three times—from criminal justice to psychology to computer science—before settling on social work.

“I think a lot of people have just one perspective of the social work field—that they’re social workers that take children away from families,” she said.

Guirand attended Molloy on a basketball scholarship, and she said her coach encouraged her to stick with the social work field if it was really what she wanted to do.

“I think that was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made because I’m learning so much and it’s all I ever wanted to do. A social worker helped me, and I wanted to be able to give back,” she said.

When she first began taking classes with GSS remotely from her home in Norwalk, Connecticut, she was working part-time as a caregiver with Assisted Living Services. In February, a field placement assignment introduced her to Family & Children’s Agency (FCA), where she currently works as a social work supervisor, and where she will remain after graduation. Her focus is on geriatric care, an area where the need for social work is growing as the U.S. population ages.

“A lot of seniors, especially during the pandemic, haven’t had contact or relationships with other people, and as they get older, their family members kind of drift away from them,” she said.

“I want to be able to support them. If they need someone to speak to, or they need something that their family members can’t help them with, I want to be that person they can always call.”

The onset of the pandemic presented both challenges and opportunities. On the one hand, Guirand missed what would have been her final year playing basketball for Molloy, and in September 2020, when Covid infections were still spiking, her father had to travel from Stamford to Manhattan to undergo a non-Covid-related lung transplant.

At the same time, remote learning meant that she didn’t have to commute from Connecticut to Fordham’s Westchester campus, where she would have been taking classes if they were in person.

She was grateful, though, that her current placement with FCA is in person and has brought her face to face with clients—even though mask-wearing can sometimes pose a problem.

“One of my biggest challenges was communication, at least in the beginning. The clients are older, so they’re hard of hearing, and plus I have a mask on. It’s a lot of repeating and raising my voice, which I’m not used to,” she said. It made it difficult to establish trust.

“I want to build that rapport with them and coming off too strong, depending on the person’s personality, could be a problem.”

She has also learned the importance of being an advocate for her clients.

“It’s so important because they’re not aware of certain benefits they can receive, or how to advocate for themselves. I’m kind of a point person,” she said.

Linda White-Ryan, Ph.D., associate dean of student services and an adjunct professor at the GSS, said that Guirand helped create a sense of community in her class, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, a task made more challenging by the fact that it was held exclusively on Zoom.

Social work is fundamentally the act of building relationships, and Guirand, she said, is the quintessential role model for a social worker.

“One of the things that professors do is model that for students in the classroom and break them into small groups so that they begin to work on case studies together, practice interventions together, or pair up with other students to role play,” she said.

“Marthe helped students engage with each other by creating that safe space. I was impressed with her contribution to making the class such a comfortable place to be—a comfortable learning environment where students could challenge things that were being taught, and also contribute creative ideas.”

When the war in Ukraine began, talk in the class turned to the trauma felt by refugees fleeing conflict, and Guirand shared her own story of leaving the country she called home, White-Ryan said. Guirand detailed how she had to adapt to a change in the pace of life, the mix of excitement and fear associated with the move, and how she had to embrace a new cuisine.

Guirand said that she’s excited to follow in the path of her mother, who has also worked as a caregiver. She’s also taken joy in the fact that she is making an impact in the lives of the elderly people she works with.

“I see that every day with my clients. A phone call just to check in makes the biggest difference. They’re like, ‘Oh my God, Martha, thank you for calling.’ You know, it it’s things like that that make my day.”

Guirand said her favorite phrase is “In a world where you could be anything, be kind.”

“I really like that because you never know what someone is going through or has gone through,” she said.

“That person may act this way or say that, and maybe something is going on with them. So being kind is something that all of my classes at Fordham have emphasized. Empathy plays a huge role in this field.”