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.”

It wasn’t long before they were doing just that. The following summer, during a service trip to the Dominican Republic, Rose spoke with some local artisans who planted an idea: “They said, ‘You should take some of our stuff and go try to sell it to your friends. You should take more of this back to America with you,’” Rose said.

Thus was born Radiate Market, their web-based business that sells the artisans’ jewelry, art, and personal accessories to customers across the United States, providing the artisans with more consistent customers and sustainable incomes.

Running a business while carrying a full course load is hard work, but they love what they’re doing. “It has been an incredible learning experience and life experience so far,” said Maloney, who along with Rose is a Fordham College at Rose Hill senior.

They launched Radiate Market by using Indiegogo, the crowdfunding site, to raise funds for their initial wholesale orders of jewelry and other items. Rose and Maloney are majoring in anthropology and economics, respectively, but they picked up entrepreneurial skills with the help of the Fordham Foundry, a business incubator run by Fordham’s Gabelli School of Business in collaboration with the New York City Department of Small Business Services.

They worked with nongovernmental organizations to find out which artisans would be most receptive to working with them. They’ve both taken part in Fordham’s worldwide Global Outreach service program, and their approach was informed by its emphasis on cross-cultural understanding and solidarity.

They’ve found a ready market for the distinctive handcrafted items, which evoke the stories of artisans who invest time in making them and benefit greatly from the sale. All four of the wholesale orders they’ve placed within the past year have sold out.

The business reflects their belief in changing current consumption patterns to benefit the developing world—in this case, by helping the artisans find a wider market for their culturally distinct creations. Their Dominican partners include a fair trade cooperative that produces seed bead jewelry and splits the work and profits equally among the artists; a Haitian immigrant who produces metal art; and a mother of three who makes rugs out of rice sacks and recycled fabrics.

“If we’re able to give someone the feeling that they can be creative and work hard at something that they actually get satisfaction out of, and provide for their family, that’s the most satisfying thing,” Maloney said.

Shown below are some of Radiate Market’s goods: bracelets, a necklace, and a platter: 

They’d both done service trips throughout high school, and in that first year at Fordham they talked a lot about sustainability and ethical consumerism. Then, during a summer service trip to the Dominican Republic, Rose spoke to local merchants who planted an idea: “They said, ‘You should take some of our stuff and go try to sell it to your friends.’”

Today they’re doing that and more, selling the merchants’ locally produced jewelry all over the country through Radiate Market, a web-based business that reflects their belief in changing current consumption patterns to benefit the developing world.

And they’re running the business in the midst of junior-year coursework, maintaining an inventory and handling all the bookkeeping and shipping themselves.

“We spend a lot of time at the Fordham post office,” Rose said.

The two have sold dozens of items since launching the business in August, driven by a belief in helping developing-world artisans earn sustainable incomes in ways that preserve and celebrate their cultures. With startup funds raised through Indiegogo, the crowdfunding site, they’ve bought three wholesale orders of jewelry and have a fourth in the works.

They’re finding a ready market for the handcrafted items—bracelets, necklaces, Haitian metal art—that evoke the personal story of a merchant whose life was tangibly improved by the purchase.

“The ultimate goal would be to have people feeling fulfilled by the work that they’re doing,” Maloney said. “If we’re able to give someone the feeling that they can be creative and work hard at something that they actually get satisfaction out of, and provide for their family, that’s the most satisfying thing.”

Neither student is a business major; Maloney studies economics and Rose, anthropology. But they’ve picked up business savvy with help from the Fordham Foundry, which connected them with a business coach and a student who provided accounting help.

And their business approach was informed by their service trips with Global Outreach, Fordham’s cultural immersion and service program. Last summer they made an extended trip to the Dominican Republic to build connections and show their commitment; they also worked through a few nongovernmental organizations to find out which artisans would be most receptive.

“A huge part of our model is definitely being aware of what’s going on in the communities that we’re working with,” Maloney said. “We don’t just want to come in with a set structure and say, ‘This is going to work for you.’”

Maloney and Rose both love the feeling of providing opportunity to Dominican artisans, one of whom used the income to hire neighborhood boys to help fulfill the orders. The two students plan to return this summer to learn more about how the artisans’ communities have benefited from the business.

They might expand the business to artisans in Guatemala or even in the immigrant communities of New York City, and they hope to work at it full time after they graduate.

The company name comes from a conversation they had on the 4 train as freshmen, Rose said: “We were talking about people that radiate these qualities that we really admired, and we really enjoyed meeting people who we had felt lived in a way that radiated things that they love.”

Launching the business has changed their lives. “(Because) we’re doing this thing that we love, people want to share the thing that they love with us too,” Maloney said.

When she had signed up for Susan Greenfield’s course on homelessness this semester—an English course with 30 required hours of service learning—she was as ready and willing as any Jesuit-educated student to serve the community.

But when she showed up to volunteer at a Bronx shelter for women and children and was told that there was no need for her, Shilo was at a loss.

“When we fulfill a need, we feel important, we feel irreplaceable, and we feel satisfied,” Shilo, a junior at Fordham College at Rose Hill, said during Greenfield’s Friday morning class. “When . . . this need-based satisfaction was taken out of the [equation], I began to question what my motive was in doing service.

“Am I serving simply to feel good about myself, and is it okay if I am, as long as the result is the same? Am I doing it as a type of ‘humble brag,’ making sure everyone knows that I am a socially conscious, ‘good,’ and caring individual?”

Feeling conflicted about service

These are the tough questions that Greenfield, PhD, a professor of English, wants her undergraduate students to be bothered by. Her course, Homelessness: Literary Representation and Historical Reality, uses a literary approach to examine the complex issues surrounding homelessness. On the reading list are texts ranging from classics such as The Grapes of Wrath to contemporary memoirs such as Lee Stringer’s Grand Central Winter: Stories from the Street.

On the experiential side, students have heard stories firsthand from formerly homeless individuals who spoke to the class. In addition, the students are required to complete 30 hours of service in an organization that serves the homeless—a fairly easy quota to fulfill when you live in a city of more than 59,000 homeless men, women, and children. (In fact, this estimate is extremely low, because it does not include the number of people living on the street, nor the number of women and children in domestic violence shelters.)

The service component, it turns out, has prompted a healthy amount of internal conflict.

In response to Shilo’s predicament, another student in the class shared her ambivalence about the idea that volunteering helps the privileged become more aware of and sympathetic to those in need. “It’s service, but you’re just ultimately serving yourself,” she said. “I don’t have an answer to that dilemma.”

That may be, but educating and inspiring those who do service can still be useful, suggested another student. “Look at an organization like Part Of The Solution (POTS),” he said. “That’s how POTS began—[the founders]had an initial experience of service and then began that organization, which really does make a difference.”

The desire to “make a difference” is often what draws students to service, Greenfield said. In class, however, as they’ve begun to consider that desire, the students are learning that “making a difference” is a nebulous goal. Moreover, there seems to be a tacit power dynamic beneath their good intentions.

“Someone needs and someone is needed. Being needed feels good; being in need doesn’t feel so good,” Greenfield said. “That idea, to me, is important. Is there a way to do service that fosters equality rather than replicating the power problem that created the situation in the first place?”

One way to achieve that is to respect the autonomy of whoever is being served, she said. “Even a simple gesture [such as]saying ‘Can I help you?’ rather than ‘Let me help you,’ is a political change. It’s a move from ‘I’m going to do this’ to ‘Do you want me to do this?’ That’s how you can make a difference on the local level.”

Heroism and homelessness

Literature is an entryway into these kinds of conversations, Greenfield said. Many texts, such as Shakespeare’s King Lear and Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, exalt homelessness rather than view it as a social failing.

“The characters who fall socioeconomically ultimately rise as human beings. They become even better people,” Greenfield said. “There’s a certain nobility and integrity that comes from ending up at the bottom. It becomes a kind of heroic act to have fallen.”

And yet, that hardly serves as solace for someone living the trauma of homelessness. It still overlooks the question of whether one can ever alter the power struggle in the service dynamic—or, as Shilo wondered, whether it even matters if the end result still benefits the person being served (or at least does not cause harm).

“I always find when I teach this course that there’s a place at which my brain just stops. I can’t get beyond some of these questions,” Greenfield said. “It’s not like reading literature and discussing, where you have a eureka moment and reach some kind of conclusion.”

There’s no clear-cut answer, unfortunately. Greenfield cautions her students about this upfront: “Unless we ourselves have been homeless, we cannot presume to understand the trauma,” she wrote in the course syllabus. “But we can open ourselves up to learn about it and to work toward social justice.”

Sometimes, forming relationships are the only option available. To that end, stories are a good start.

“Literature is an exercise in imagining another person’s experience and being open to it,” Greenfield said. “To bring that kind of awareness and openness to people who you might normally just pass by and not even notice, it does change things.”

Under the designation “Ashoka U,” Fordham joins 25 other universities and colleges around the nation that are helping change the world through social innovation. They include fellow Jesuit schools Boston College and Marquette University, and other top schools such as Princeton, Duke, Cornell, and Brown universities.

Ashoka is a nonprofit worldwide network that supports entrepreneurial efforts to solve social problems. Marina Kim, co-founder and executive director of the organization’s Ashoka U initiative, said Fordham fits the profile of a changemaker campus for several reasons. The University’s engagement with the community in the Bronx is one. Its focus on research in areas such as health care, technology, environmental protection, social justice, and religious dialogue is another.

The University’s Jesuit identity and commitment to teaching students to be “men and women for others” is likewise a factor, as is service learning, which is “deeply embedded into the campus culture,” Kim said.

“That’s a hugely important foundation on which to build new social entrepreneurship,” she said.

“There are a lot of building blocks already in place, and already strong, that [are]aligned with social innovation as a broader campus-wide strategy.”

Ashoka U’s main focus is strengthening networks of like-minded individuals, both within a university and within the changemaker campus network. Fordham is advancing this effort through its newly formed Fordham Social Innovation Collaboratory (FSIC), said Ron Jacobson, Ph.D., associate vice president in the Office of the Provost.

The three main themes that FSIC will address are global environmental sustainability, human well-being, and social justice and poverty.

“The whole idea of social innovation is something that Fordham as a Jesuit institution has been a part of for almost 175 years, and I think this is just another way of reaffirming the mission of the University,” he said.

“It’s going to break down some of the artificial walls that exist, in terms of curriculum within schools, and in terms of co-curricular activities, where people at one campus know about an event but people at the other campus may not.”

Michael Pirson, Ph.D., associate professor of management systems in the Schools of Business, first proposed the partnership last year. He quickly found others interested in the collaboration, including Jacobson and John Davenport, Ph.D., associate professor of philosophy. Pirson hopes it will help Fordham redefine itself based on its strengths.

“There’s so much complexity, so many big problems and big issues that we’re all faced with,” he said. “In some ways, education is lagging behind in terms of adapting to what folks need to know to make sense of the complex and always-changing environment.”

In addition to integrating curriculums so that they’re more geared toward social innovation, the partnership is leading to various initiatives that create opportunity for students. These include a social innovation workshop course—hosted by the Gabelli School of Business but open to students throughout the University—and a new student organization, the Fordham Intercampus Social Innovation Team.

Jordan Catalana, a Gabelli senior who’s majoring in business administration and minoring in sustainable business, is one of the first students to get involved. She’s a member of the Fordham chapter of the Compass fellowship program, which teaches social entrepreneurship to undergraduates.

Given Fordham’s Jesuit identity, she said, “I’ve been hoping that social innovation at Fordham would be brought to light [and]marketed to more students” as well as to faculty and administrators, she said.

The first Ashoka U-related event took place Sept. 3, when David Bornstein, author of How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas (Oxford University Press, 2007), addressed the incoming class of the Gabelli School.

On Dec. 5, the world lost Nelson Mandela, who dedicated his life to human rights around the globe and civil rights in his native South Africa, and who changed the course of history through his actions.  Economics professor Booi Themeli, Ph.D., director of Fordham’s Ubuntu Program at the University of Pretoria, is one of the many people whose lives were changed by Mandela’s lifelong fight for equality. Themeli grew up in South Africa under apartheid, and next month, he will lead a group of Fordham students to his country to participate in the Ubuntu service-learning program and “follow in the footsteps of Mandela.”

Booi Themeli

 

When I was in high school, things were segregated. The apartheid system meant there were schools meant for white kids only, for Indian kids only, for black only, and schools for mixed race groups. I could not go to any university so I went to a black university, the University of Limpopo, because of the segregation.

He also describes school reform programs that raise test scores and build alliances between parents, teachers and principals. All of these services are provided by the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) network, a faith-based organization operating in Texas and the Southwest. Warren describes the network as “a model for reviving democratic life in the inner city.” Warren is the founder and director of Fordham’s Service Learning Program, which offers students an additional college credit for performing community service related to their course work. He sits on the board of the University Neighborhood Housing Partnership, a joint program between Fordham and the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition, which finances affordable housing in the Bronx. He is also a member of the Parent Teachers Association in Mount Vernon, N.Y., where his two daughters attend public school.