It might seem like the last place anyone would choose to be. But for those like Michelle Charles, GSS ’15, with a background in palliative care, it’s exactly where she wants to be. Charles graduated from the Palliative Care Fellowship program at Fordham’s Graduate School of Social Service (GSS), one of a handful of programs of its kind nationwide. Today she is an oncology social worker at Memorial Sloan Kettering.

Charles’ upbeat demeanor belies the gravity of her role. Like so many in palliative care, a personal experience inspired her to get into the field; her grandfather died at home when she was applying to graduate schools.

“We dropped everything and we moved into his house, me and my parents, my sister. He was on hospice care and we were all there to take care of him,” she said. “That was kind of the experience that really propelled me to apply to grad school.”

She said when she heard there was a palliative care fellowship at Fordham, “it just clicked.”

“There are certain people who are lucky enough to not be facing this right now, but we all face this; there’s suffering for all of us in life, there’s death at some point for ourselves and for people that we love,” she said. “For me, getting to come here every day, I get to be really intimate with that and it takes away a lot of my fear.”

 What Is Palliative Care?

The World Health Organization today defines palliative care as a health care “approach that improves the quality of life of patients and their families facing problems associated with life-threatening illness, through the prevention and relief of suffering by means of early identification and impeccable assessment and treatment of pain and other problems, physical, psychosocial and spiritual.”

The Palliative Care Fellowship

The Palliative Care Fellowship began at GSS in 2013. Acceptance as a Palliative Care Fellow is highly competitive and intended for students who are certain they want to work in palliative care. There are two required courses: One is Palliative Social Work, which deals with basic practices and principles, policy issues, and clinical issues. The second is Grief, Loss, and Bereavement. Students also have a dedicated field seminar led by an experienced palliative social worker. Cathy Berkman, Ph.D., associate professor of social work, is the director of the Palliative Care Fellowship and has been in the field since the mid-1990s. Berkman is a constant presence throughout the program for fellows, meeting them for lunch once a month, advising them during the fellowship year, and assisting with their careers after graduation.

Berkman recalled the early days at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Greenwich Village, when she worked on several large studies as a co-principal investigator with the hospital’s chief of geriatrics before securing a grant to establish an interdisciplinary palliative care service at the hospital.

She said that a large multi-site study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1995 presented a grim picture of the care given to terminally ill patients in hospitals; their wishes were largely unknown by their physicians. In the years that followed, as the medical field refined the practice of palliative care, social workers staked out their unique role, bringing their expertise in providing biopsychosocial and spiritual support to the table.

By 2010, a new study published in the New England Journal of Medicine showed that cancer patients who received palliative care at the same time as their usual cancer treatment lived several months longer and suffered less from depression. Today there are more than 1,300 programs registered with the National Palliative Care Registry.

“Palliative care does not compete with the curative care that’s being attempted, it adds to it to enhance people’s lives,” said Berkman.

With social workers filling the role of intermediary between doctors, nurses, social workers, chaplains, and family members, she said, patients now have a continuous presence throughout their illness, a professional who can provide support and act as an advocate to help them see their wishes carried out.

From Fighting to Living 

Sophie Rivera is currently a palliative care fellow doing her field placement at Montefiore Medical Center’s Wakefield Campus in the Bronx. Her supervisor there is Kenneth Meeker, GSS ‘12. On a recent afternoon, the two came together for an interview in the hospital’s Caregiver Support Center. The room is bathed in natural light, the sound of a small waterfall wall splashes in the distance, and boxes of tissues never sit more than an arm’s length away. 

“I will tell you every family that we work with says that their loved one is a fighter because that’s part of their hope,” said Rivera. “And this is a touchy thing because we have to talk to the patient about what they would want and sometimes it’s not congruent with what the family wants.”

Rivera speaks from personal experience. Her mother died of cancer at Montefiore’s Weiler campus, also in the Bronx. She said that sometimes it’s helpful for families to let patients know it’s OK for them to choose to forego painful treatment.

“At the beginning, my mother was, ‘Let’s try for everything,’ but then I noticed in her that she looked tired; the chemo was just too much,” she said. “There was a point I had to have the talk and say ‘It looks to me like you’re just trying your best to maintain yourself because of me.’ I had to alleviate her of that because I didn’t want to feel that guilt either.”

She said she had a remarkable palliative care experience at the hospital that brought her full circle back to Montefiore, but this time as a practitioner.

Shifting the dialogue from one of a battle to one of acceptance requires a great deal of delicacy and trust, said Meeker. It falls to the palliative care social worker to ascertain what the patient wants and communicate to them what is possible.

“I teach my students from the beginning, you’ve got to connect with the families and the patients,” he said. “If you don’t connect, there’s nowhere to go.”

He said building a rapport can start with sports, music, or anything that’s not related to the crisis at hand.

Discussing the Inevitable

Unless something acutely traumatic happens, no one should ever have to say that didn’t know that a loved one was about to die, unless they choose not to be told, said Berkman. Patients and their families should be able to prepare for the end by facing the truth pragmatically, and that preparation should never wait until the opportunity has passed.

“There are several things you may want to be able to say to family and friends before you die; you want to say ‘I love you”, ‘I forgive you’, or ‘I’m sorry’,’” she said. “Those are things that may have accumulated over a lifetime. You need time to say all those things and by not knowing what your prognosis is, you’re deprived of the ability to have those conversations with people that you care about.”

All too often discussions about the realities of disease advancement get usurped by a battlefield culture around terminal illnesses and the rhetoric that goes with it.

“‘She lost her battle against cancer’ is terrible language and many people in this field really try to fight against that,” said Berkman. “It doesn’t matter how strong your will is and how much positive thinking you do, these are cancer cells or this is heart disease. Being stoic or thinking about unicorns and rainbows is not going to chase it away.”

At some point, palliative care social workers will facilitate a conversation with the patient and their families about the future. For some, that future could mean stopping disease-directed therapies and beginning to shift toward comfort care. For others, it could mean even more aggressive treatment that brings hope of a cure, but also pain and other distressing symptoms. The palliative care social worker must have a holistic understanding of the patient and family, including the medical and psychosocial issues, and then synthesize options and challenges so that the patient can make an informed decision about their future, said Berkman.

Palliative care should be offered from the moment of diagnosis of any serious illness so that patients have time to grapple with the entire arc of the disease—not just the late stages. Ideally, doctors would continue to deliver curative treatment as long as this is effective and desired by the patient, while the palliative care team helps the patient address pain and other physical symptoms, she said, as well as anxiety and depression, their spiritual needs, and social and financial issues that could affect their decisions. But that’s not always the case.

“Unfortunately, the specialist treating the illness with a curative goal in mind often does not refer patients to palliative care,” she said, noting the medical profession’s still-nascent view of palliative care. “Many still see it as not compatible with curative care or equating palliative care with hospice care and therefore as premature, or ‘giving up.’”

Living at the End

Kasey Sinha, GSS ‘19, received the prestigious post-MSW palliative care fellowship in the Division of Palliative Care at Mount Sinai Beth Israel near Union Square in Manhattan.

When Sinha’s grandmother was dying three years ago, Sinha read Elizabeth Kübler-Ross’ seminal book On Death and Dying, which famously outlined the five stages of grief (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance). From that moment she was drawn to the profession.

“I started doing research and came across palliative care, and was so moved by it,” said Sinha. “I felt like I had finally found my calling.”

She noted that everyone approaches the end of life in their own way and she feels privileged to bear witness to that.

“I love talking with people about their lives, how they’re coping, and what they’re struggling with,” she said. “As clinicians, we only see a small part of someone’s life, and being able to learn about them as a person, and not just as a patient, is a pivotal part of this work.”

A lot of patients who don’t believe in an afterlife take time to review their past and think of what their life means to them, she said. Other patients who believe in an afterlife look beyond their time on Earth.

“I often hear people talk about what they think heaven is like, or saying that they’re so excited to be reunited with people they love,” she said.

And still others are not ready to face mortality and want life-prolonging measures at all costs.

“Again, it’s really sort of understanding where the person is coming from and what they want, like if they want to hear serious news or how they want to hear it, so we ask a lot of questions,” she said.

Amidst the pain, Sinha finds beauty.

“People always ask me, ‘How can you do this work? It sounds so sad.’ But there is so much joy in seeing how much people love each other. So when you’re meeting someone who’s coping with a very serious diagnosis or you’re working with a family whose loved one is at the end of their life, being able to witness the love and care that they have for one another is incredible.”

Gregory Donovan, Ph.D., assistant professor in the Department of Communication and Media Studies and co-founder of the Fordham Digital Scholarship Consortium, organized the conference with department chair Jacqueline Reich, Ph.D.

Instead of paying a fee, conference-goers were asked to send donations to Goddard Riverside at Lincoln Square Neighborhood Center, which offers services to the Amsterdam Houses across the street from Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus.

Digital mapping is a process that merges data with maps to create a virtual online image that can be static or interactive. Donovan said focusing on social justice issues through the lens of digital mapping allowed for a cross-disciplinary approach that wouldn’t ordinarily be found at a typical geography conference. Professors came from a variety of disciplines, including history, art history, urban planning, Latinx studies, psychology, social work, and education.

“Spatial media have politics, these are not neutral things,” said Donovan, who teaches a course of the same name as the conference for the Masters in Public Media.  “We need to look at how our subjects are using digital mapping in their own lives and not just use this technology to study them from afar, like a scientist with a clipboard.”

In panel titled “Mapping the Local: A Focus on New York,” Jennifer Pipitone, Ph.D., assistant professor of psychology at the College of Mount St. Vincent, and Svetlana Jović, Ph.D., assistant professor of developmental psychology at SUNY Old Westbury, presented research that essentially handed the digital “clipboard” over to the Bronx Community College students they were teaching —and studying. At the time, the two were writing fellows at the college.

In an effort to map what “community” meant to the students, the researchers used geo-locations of photos taken by the participants “in order to illustrate and make sense of their experience of belonging in the city,” they wrote in the abstract. The maps revealed that students restricted their movements to above Central Park, “delineating participants’ lived boundary of race and class.” The method is referred to as “participatory action research.”

Throughout the conference, dozens of examples were given on how mapping technology can be used to heighten consciousness and problem solve. Adam Arenson, Ph.D., associate professor of history at Manhattan College, also on the Focus on New York panel, talked about how he worked with his students to help map slave burial sites in the Bronx, many of which sit unmarked on New York City parkland.

“These are all ways to memorialize the injustices of the past, to map them in the landscape and to be aware of them,” he said. “Though the information is incomplete, and we must do what we can to fill out the map, make the connections, and demonstrate how the injustices of slavery still shape New York City today.”

In her keynote address later that day, Sarah Elwood, Ph.D., professor and chair of geography at the University of Washington, took a theoretical look at how mapping with communities through participatory methods helps “unprivilege the map,” thereby making it less of a colonial process.

As one of the early theoretical thinkers in the field of geographic information systems, known as GIS, she said she is still learning how to infuse her work with “critical race thought” that has surged in academia over the past five years. After the lecture, she recalled a moment at a mapping justice conference in Baltimore when she noticed the diversity of the participants.

“I looked around the room and I realized that it was a different room than one that I had ever been in, in this critical mapping world,” she said. “It was full of activists and young scholars and people of color, queer folks, thinking and theorizing in ways that were not part of my first 20 years in this field.”

She called the moment an “epiphany.” She said while she continues to incorporate Marxist critique that allows her “to get at some structural processes of inequality” in mapping, her work is now heavily informed by black feminism, queer theory, and Latinx studies.

“Once you’ve had an epiphany like that, it’s like, ‘Well, duh, obvious!’ but yet, you’re also embarrassed that it’s taken so long for this epiphany to happen,” she said. “I always think, in those moments, ‘Thank God we have our whole life to become ourselves.’”

From August 18 to 26, the students visited Buenos Aires, Argentina, as part of a monthlong onboarding process that emphasized camaraderie, academic excellence, and helping the less fortunate.

Julita Haber, Ph.D., a clinical assistant professor of communications and media management and director of the full-time MBA program, said this year’s trip, which followed three weeks of orientation both on campus and remotely, expanded upon previous years’ trips, when students did consulting work for local nonprofit organizations. This year, they also brought goods with them to donate to charities and devoted a full day to community service, helping to refurbish a shelter for homeless children.

Serving Local Charities

The three nonprofit groups they worked with were Mensajeros de la Paz, which runs residential homes and daycare centers for underserved children and the elderly; Pilares, which works alongside the families living in precarious settlements in Buenos Aires; and Educar y Crecer, which designs, implements, and evaluates high quality educational programs for children living in vulnerable situations.

“This year, we enriched their involvement and touched on their emotional connection with these populations,” she said, noting that after interviewing the heads of the NGOs about issues such as human resources and marketing, students then presented their findings in person at the NGO’s headquarters.

“Emotionally, students felt a lot more compelled to tap into a social innovation space and do things that open up their ability to give back, which I think is important for MBAs.”

Argentina isn’t the only place the students are traveling; in March, MBA students will travel to London to work with for-profit companies. Both trips are part of a program that emphasizes a global outlook, personalized leadership development, collaboration, rigorous curriculum, and business with purpose.

Forming Tight Bonds

Kostapanos Miliaresis, a member of the class who created to a spreadsheet to track the unassembled bicycles, sheets, towels, rain gear, and other items that the cohort brought with them to donate, said the trip resonated a great deal with him. The mission of Ethelon, the company he co-founded seven years ago in Athens, Greece, is to connect companies with volunteer opportunities. He decided to get his MBA to explore new opportunities, and Fordham’s designation as a Changemaker Campus convinced him to move to New York City. The trip was a great bonding experience, he said.

“We have all these get-to-know kind of gatherings, but when you spend all this time together, you really get a better sense of who someone is,” he said.

Hermann Rinnen, a native of Dusseldorf, Germany, said the trip exceeded his expectations. A 2013 graduate of Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, Rinnen said he enrolled in the MBA program to strengthen his accounting and finance skills. He was part of a team that addressed human resource management at Mensajeros de la Paz, a project that enabled him to share insights he’s gleaned as co-owner of a family-owned logistics company, Rinnen GmbH & Co.

He said he considers the group’s donations and the service work to be even more important than the consulting projects.

“With the consulting project, we also benefitted from it, not just the organization. We were able to grow and apply knowledge and insight. But doing the community service opened my eyes to how important community work is and how important it is to pay attention to people,” he said.

“I think it was a really great experience to have one day of this kind of community work, I could have done it two or three more days.”

Haber said the trip, which was the third of its kind, has proven to be an excellent bonding experience. This year, the group was treated to a reception at the home of new Fordham Trustee Dario Wertheim, GABELLI ’91. Wertheim also earned an MBA at the business school, and is currently the director of Grupo Werthein, a firm whose portfolio includes mass consumption, energy, insurance, agribusiness, real estate, and technology.

“By having our students travel together, we are actually creating cohesive cohorts,” Haber said.

“That cohesiveness is something that distinguishes us from other, larger MBA programs.”

Donna Rapaccioli, Ph.D., dean of the Gabelli School of Business, said the renewal, which takes place every five years, is a testament to Fordham’s dedication to coordinate resources from across the institution and focus them toward improving the lives of others.

“It’s external validation that we’re living our mission. When you look at what AshokaU is doing, it’s really holding us accountable to educate change leaders. That’s what Fordham is really about—educating students who will make positive change,” she said, noting that being a member of the network also allows Fordham to tap into resources of universities around the world that have similar missions, visions, and goals.

One of the highest-profile changes to take place at Fordham as a result of the partnership with AshokaU was the creation of the Social Innovation Collaboratory. Housed within the Gabelli School of Business but open to the entire university community, it hosted 10 social innovation applied learning and action research groups last year. The groups, which comprised 131 undergraduate and graduate students, focused on topics such as financial inclusion, sustainable fashion, climate impact initiatives, diversity, equity and inclusion, and social-impact storytelling.

AshokaU noted in its renewal letter that Fordham has shown its commitment to social innovation in multiple ways. Last fall, the collaboratory’s steering committee, which is co-chaired by Maura Mast, Ph.D., dean of Fordham College at Rose Hill, and Dean Rapaccioli, was reformulated to include more senior leadership. In March, a new assistant director position was filled at the collaboratory, and a part-time communications position will also be filled in the near future.

Fordham has also begun using a Kumu visual map to match students with opportunities for social innovation throughout the University’s schools, departments, and centers.

“It shows you the network of different things that are going on. It will help us identify the various entry points that students can take, whether it’s curricular or co-curricular, to engage in social innovation efforts,” said Lerzan Aksoy, Ph.D., associate dean of undergraduate studies and strategic initiatives and professor of marketing at the Gabelli School.

“It’s a kind of GPS for the students.”

The Ground Floor, a course that is offered to every first-year student at the Gabelli School of Business, was also retooled last fall to have a greater emphasis on social innovation. Working with mentors from the Fordham Foundry, students in the class are now tasked with forming a plan to address one of the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals. At the end of the semester, the plans are entered in a contest co-sponsored with PVH Corp., and the team with the best plan is awarded a $2,000 prize.

Aksoy said a good example of the direction Fordham is heading is the Ignite Scholars program, which the Gabelli School launched last year. To be admitted to the program, students must demonstrate leadership skills as well as academic success. Starting a business is one example of leadership; taking action to improving their community is another.

Resilience is a big part of the Ignite program. Associate professor Yuliya A. Komarova, Ph.D., has been organizing workshops on resilience with students, and on Sept. 26, Gabelli Social Innovation fellow and Nobel Peace Prize co-recipient Jerry White will conduct a workshop on personal transformation.

“His story is really inspiring; he worked with Princess Diana on eliminating landmines, and was himself the victim of a landmine,” Aksoy said.

“It’s not just about academics,” she said, “but also about building these really important skills and mindsets in our students.”

The group’s diversity reflected that of the United Nations. Members hailed from Brazil, Ghana, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and nearby Orange County. Most of them had already entered the working world: Three were on leave from their jobs at the city’s Administration for Children’s Services (ACS), one was taking time away from her position as a case manager at an independent living center for people with disabilities, and a third was currently working with immigrant students at a Washington Heights nonprofit.

As part of their participation in the U.N. student group, they each held internships at nongovernment organizations that are affiliated with the U.N., including the International Federation of Social Workers; the Unitarian Universalists; the Public-Private Alliance Foundation; and Close the Gap, an NGO bringing technology to remote areas of the world.

Collaborating Over Coffee

These café meetings provided the group with an informal way to talk about their work, support each other, and even rib each other a little.

“It’s pretty easy-going. There are a few running jokes and some teasing,” student Alessandro Guimaraes said of the early-morning sessions.

“A lot of things come up. When they needed two more people to present at a conference, (classmate) Taylor and I volunteered. When it comes to work there’s always more than enough people to speak about the issues we each work on. If we can’t speak then on something, we’ll help do the research.”

In the weeks that followed, the students sat in on several U.N. committees and related events, including a presentation of the rights of indigenous peoples, a meeting of the Committee on Migration, and the Women’s Institute Conference. They presented research to the American Psychological Association, at the Commission on the Status of Women, and organized several conferences and panels of their own. Between their NGO internships and their additional time at the U.N. itself, they far exceeded the 21 weekly hours required to complete their second year’s fieldwork requirement.

Guidance from a Celebrated Social Work Educator

In the café, beneath a map of the world, Elaine Congress, D.S.W., a longtime associate dean at GSS and a respected stalwart in the field of social work, observed her students as they bonded over program she directs.

Hers is a well-known name in social work circles. Debra McPhee, Ph.D., dean of GSS, once said of Congress:

“There isn’t anybody in the profession who doesn’t know Elaine. The two most common questions we get are ‘Do you have a Ph.D. program?’ and ‘Is Elaine Congress still teaching there?’”

Congress said that the morning meetings help counterbalance the formality of the U.N. Similarly, she said the program came into being rather informally as well.

“The person that had been chair of the international committee for New York City’s National Association of Social Workers and the main representative for the International Federation of Social Workers said to me, ‘Would you like to represent the NGO at the U.N?’” she recalled. “That’s how I started working with these NGOs.”

Almost immediately on her arrival, she began getting her students involved, first in assisting IFSW, and later at other NGOs internships she arranged

Around her, the students swapped stories from their day jobs and outlined plans for future conferences that they were organizing. The initial levity gave way to serious moments when they discussed what they’d heard in their various committee meetings.

For Guimaraes, the statistics can be shocking—“whether we’re talking about violence against women or indigenous people being taken from their lands,” he said. “We’re human and we have emotional reactions, but a lot of times you become used to hearing those things and it’s not as shocking. But that’s why we’re here to do the work.”

As the meeting ended, Congress watched her students fan out to their various committee meetings.

“These are the future social worker leaders in our city, in our country, in our world,” she said.

An American Immigrant Helping Immigrants 

When Guimaraes walks the halls of Gregorio Luperon High School for Science and Mathematics in Washington Heights, teens give him a hand slap and a half hug. He serves as a counselor at the school, which is the setting of a second concurrent GSS field placement, one that is more people-focused than his U.N. work. Spanish is spoken everywhere in the halls. Guimaraes talks about the kids as they pass him: “He’s on the chess team. … We stared the school newspaper with him. … She’s on our drum team.”

One student stops him and asks, “What’s that test you were talking about? The P-something?”

“The PSAT,” he answers. “Give me a second, I’ll get you the form.”

He explains to a visitor that the high school is for students who have been in the country for less than four years. Most are from the Dominican Republic, where the schools are often at capacity and lacking in quality, he said. After Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico, the school saw an uptick of students from there, but most of the students don’t arrive with an American passport. There were a few migrants from El Salvador. Recently, there was a student admitted from Venezuela. She hadn’t eaten for four days before arriving. 

Guimaraes can relate to these kids. He left Brazil when he was a teen to live with his father in the U.S. He didn’t speak English and he struggled.

“I had my own experience going through changes—changing country, changing education. I was a pretty bad student in Brazil because I didn’t have anything that I knew I wanted to work toward,” he said. “When my dad asked if I wanted to come I said, ‘What the hell do I have to lose?’”

Guimaraes acknowledged that his challenges were not as difficult as those faced by immigrant students in Northern Manhattan. But his past remains part of the reason he wants to work on problems created by migration. It’s also why he likes his full-time job with Fresh Youth Initiatives, a community-based organization (CBO) that helps immigrant children navigate grade school and high school, as well as prepare for college.  The job sprang from his first-year placement. He liked it too much to leave, so this year he began working there full time and takes his GSS classes on the weekends.

“I am just trying to figure out, how can people have opportunities that might spark that interest in them. The more challenges you have to go through, the less likely you’re going to have that opportunity. I’m just trying to be the bridge between those different worlds. That’s what I want to do,” he said.

Global Informing Local

Guimaraes said his work at the school is informed by his U.N. placement, which is with the International Federation of Social Workers (IFSW), where he chose to focus on the Committee on Migration and its subcommittee on Migrant and Refugee Children.

The dual placements allow him to see the micro practice at the local level and hear the macro approach of policy at the global level. The two go hand-in-hand, he said.

He’s appreciated getting the global perspective, but he’s noted that bloated bureaucracies can stymie getting things done at the local level.

“We know what we have to do: We have to open up access for people to get quality education, get health care, all that kind of stuff, and preserve their basic human rights of being able to move if they have to.”

But approval processes are complex and implantation of new ideas can prove difficult. And the recent uptick of anti-immigrant rhetoric in the U.S. hasn’t helped, he said.

“The students I see may be a little bit behind, may need a little bit more time and resources before they can contribute to society, pay taxes, all of that,” he said. “But all of it just has to do with that welcoming piece. In the United States, the people with this point of view are not the ones who are in government now and so they’re turning other people away.”

And though he’s appreciated watching international policy develop at the U.N., he thinks he wants to continue to work at the local level.

“I haven’t found myself with enough motivation to leave clinical practice entirely, because while we have to think globally and advocate for global issues, the work has to be done locally,” he said. “If you can connect with communities, engage community-based organizations, the public-school system, politicians, stuff like that, on a community level, you’re able to slowly take it up a level, even as far as the U.N.”

Valentine’s Day

A month passes; the students have continued to meet every week at the café near the U.N., which Congress has come to call her office. It’s Valentine’s Day and one of the students is passing out chocolate hearts. Another is getting teased for his constant attempts to delegate work.

Yasarina Almanzar smiles knowingly. Almanzar also works for ACS; she deals directly with the children and their families when the court finds her supervision necessary. Like her colleagues, she’s been given leave and a partial scholarship to get her master’s at Fordham.

Two days a week she goes to her U.N. internship at the Unitarian Universalist Office of the United Nations. There she focuses on different social justice issues. She’s been working with other interns to organize a three-day seminar focused on equality. As part of her research for the conference, she met the Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, a human rights expert appointed by the U.N.’s Human Rights Council.

“I’m not really exposed to that kind of work at ACS, things like policy work and how you go about bringing a change,” she said. “It helps my work at ACS, because we have a lot of children of color, it’s important to understand the work that’s being done internationally.”

As an immigrant herself—she arrived from the Dominican Republic when she was 12––Almanzar has experienced racial bias first hand.

“As a woman of color, I see the differences in treatment I get,” she said. “And in terms of my clients, who are people of color that have needs, understanding how to advocate for them becomes a great cause.”

Advocating for Others Who Don’t Look Like You

Almanzar’s lived experience as a woman of color contrasts sharply with Guimaraes’ experience as a white man. She can go into a community as a part of the community. Whether one is advocating on behalf of a community-based organization or an NGO, it helps to look like the people you’re representing, said Guimaraes.

“Coming here from Brazil at the age of 14, without any English, I couldn’t really identify myself with white Americans, even though I was white,” he said.  “I’ve always tried to be aware of the historical context of how my family ended up in Brazil, how I ended up here, how people move around the globe.”

He said that most of his family fled World War I from Europe and emigrated to São Paulo. Growing up, he was taught to go after what he wanted. But he realizes it’s not that easy for everyone.

“I try to acknowledge that as a cisgendered white male, you get pushed forward more than other people.”

Another great concern of Guimaraes is for the welfare of native peoples. As part of his U.N. practicum, he has served as assistant secretary to the NGO Committee on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. There he quietly takes down the minutes for the meetings and streams them live on Facebook.

He has been told by a professor to be aware that research differs greatly from lived experiences, and as a social work professional, he needs to be aware of that.

“Yes, you can be an ally, but it’s important to recognize that someone with experience is the expert,” he said. “To the immigration experience, I can say that I lived through it. I can speak to it. To being indigenous, I can’t.”

He tries to teach his students at the high school to engage in the global conversation so they can represent themselves. He even helped one student become a youth representative to an NGO at the U.N.

“If I can teach them how to speak for themselves, or use maybe the privileges or the platform that I have to get them to be better represented, then I think that’s a good thing,” he said.

Roberto Borrero, chair of the NGO Committee on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, said sitting in on subcommittee meetings opens up a new world view for social work students, regardless of their background.

“There’s different types of learning, there’s learning you get at the University, there’s various tasks that you have to get your accreditation, but it’s different when you participate in meetings where there’s different levels of bureaucracy and you learn to engage,” said Borrero.

On Language

As most of the students have worked for large municipalities, they are familiar with the language of local government and the many acronyms used by its agencies. For example, Guimaraes works for a CBO at the DOE while interning in an NGO at the U.N.  Likewise, Almanzar works at ACS serving mostly POC communities. The U.N. and it’s NGOs present yet another set of acronyms and nuanced language use.

“The students are here and witnessing how things work,” said Borrero. “They hear U.N. folks come in, how they talk, the terminology that they use, it might not be the same terminology that they hear in their specific field, but again this has expanded their mind to it.”

A Careful Introduction

By mid-March the students had attended at least a dozen subcommittee meetings between them. When the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) convened at the U.N., 400 related panels were held around the city.

The students each presented individually on underrepresented women in a panel titled “Shining a Light on Forgotten Women.”

Indeed, Guimaraes began his presentation on indigenous women with a precise series of caveats, acknowledging his white cisgendered male identity and warning listeners that some of the violence he was about to discuss might trigger people in the audience who had experienced similar trauma. And he shouted out all the women who played a role in his success.

“Thank you to the women in the room, the women in my life, and the women in leadership that helped me speak to you today,” he said.

A Rigorous Fieldwork Program 

Outside Elaine Congress’ office sits a hopeful student seeking to get into the United Nations program she runs for next year. The student sits quietly, while within earshot Congress explains the program requirements to a visitor in her office.

“We require 21 hours a week for field placements. I take only leadership students, because there aren’t any clients, unless you count nations as clients,” explained Congress.

GSS students have to complete two field practicums: a generalist placement, which exposes students to foundational social work practice, and a specialist placement during the advanced year.  In the generalist field practicum, the goal is to expand students’ social work practice experience with populations that are new to them. During the specialist year, students are assigned field placements in their preferred areas of practice, working with more complex client populations and settings. All of Congress’ students are on a leadership track.

With 10 books behind her, Congress is recognized as an expert on many aspects of the discipline, but on multiculturalism in particular. She is working on the fourth edition of widely referenced Multicultural Perspectives in Working with Families (Springer, 2013). And she is the recipient of dozens of awards, including a lifetime achievement award from the New York City chapter of the National Association of Social Workers.

Congress said she has always been interested in social justice work. She worked in a mental health clinic in Brooklyn with the Latino community before getting her doctorate moving toward academia.

“I was always concerned about the poor and I was also very interested in people from different backgrounds,” she said. “Then I came to Fordham, and progressed on up through the ranks from assistant to associate professor to associate dean, and I started to write.”

Self-Assessment is Critical

On listening to Congress, one can begin to see the influence she has on her students. As an educated white woman, she said, she too needs to understand where she comes from to help people with backgrounds distinct from her own.

“It’s very important to do a self-assessment even before you begin to work with clients,” she said. “You have to know about who you are before you work with others.”

And, she said, collaboration amongst social workers is key. That’s why she insists on those morning meetings.

“Issues come up all the time. It could be a current event issue. It could be an event at the UN. We talk about all of it. It’s education. It’s also supportive,” she said.

She bid her visitor goodbye and welcomed the waiting student into her office.

Building Strong Bonds

The bonds formed by these students over the course of the semester are palpable to even the casual observer. They’re fans of each other’s work and offer support at every turn.

When MSW candidate Taylor DeClerck, a case manager at an independent living center for people with disabilities from Orange County, had to present with the group in the city at 8 a.m. on a Saturday, fellow student Abigail Asper put her up for the night.

And the group was uniformly impressed by student Melissa Cueto’s presentation on elderly women at the “Forgotten Women” panel on March 14.

“She is such a great public speaker and she works at ACS too, but I never had an opportunity to meet her until I came here. We all learn from each other and we’re always sharing,” said Almanzar, who reached out to Guimaraes for help in forming a panel on indigenous women.

“One of the best things that come from the group is diversity,” said Guimaraes. “We’re all interested in different topics, but we’re all interested in the advancement of human rights. At some point, they all have to do with each other. They all have some commonalities—like us.”

The Orthodox Christian Studies Center welcomed 28 scholars and journalists to Fordham from March 20 to 22 for the first seminar in its five-year research initiative on Orthodox Christianity and human rights.

The meetings brought together an international group of experts in Orthodox Christianity from several disciplinary backgrounds and areas of specialization to discuss the major issues surrounding Orthodoxy’s complicated and often contentious relationship to human rights discourse.

According to center co-director George Demacopoulos, the goal of the project is to “flood the field” with publications analyzing multiple facets of Orthodoxy’s relationship to human rights: the history and theology of human rights in the Orthodox tradition, as well as current engagements with human rights among Orthodox communities in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. Over the next five years, the participating scholars will not only publish their research in academic books and journals but, in consultation with journalists, will disseminate their work through popular media to promote a more nuanced public understanding of Orthodoxy and human rights.

The three-day seminar, held at the Lincoln Center campus, featured sessions offering a broad overview of the current state of the field.

Kristina Stoeckl of the University of Innsbruck introduced participants to the Russian Orthodox Church’s recent statements on human rights, especially in debates in the United Nations over the family and “traditional values.” Stoeckl said that over the last decade, Russia has become the global leader in challenging Western understandings of universal human rights and has sought to transform human rights language to promote its “traditional values” agenda.

Michael Hanna of the Century Foundation led a discussion on Christians in the Arab world, where their status as religious minorities has led to a different relationship to human rights than in Orthodox-majority countries like Russia. For Middle Eastern Christians, negotiating questions of human rights is fundamentally an issue of survival, not one of values, he said.

The center also welcomed as a guest speaker Samuel Moyn, a leading historian of human rights at Yale University, who offered a historical overview of the origins of 20th-century human rights discourse through the work of Roman Catholic “personalist” philosophers like Jacques Maritain and their promotion of human dignity. Discussion turned to Maritain’s links to Russian Orthodox personalists who fled to Paris following the Bolshevik revolution, as well as to the role of Lebanese Orthodox thinker Charles Malik in drafting the 1948 Universal Declaration of human rights.

Major support for the project is provided by the Henry Luce Foundation with additional support provided by Leadership 100.

–Nathaniel Wood

Students stepped into the lives of migrants—those crossing the border both legally and illegally—at a Rose Hill workshop on March 27.

As part of a two-day forum called “Voices from the U.S./Mexico Border,” Campus Ministry hosted an interactive workshop where students could better understand how difficult it is to immigrate to the U.S.

Leading the workshop was Joanna Williams, director of education and advocacy at the Kino Border Initiative (KBI)—a faith-based organization on the U.S./Mexico border that serves deportees and asylum-seekers.

“One of the most common questions that comes up for us is, ‘Why aren’t people just coming legally? Why are people trying to cross the desert instead of just going to the consulate and getting a visa?’” Williams said. The workshop attempted to provide an answer.

In Bepler Commons, Williams simulated the crisis at the southern border with about 30 students. To the right of the room: a group of chairs labeled “U.S. consulate,” where migrants apply for U.S. visas. To the left: the “port of entry,” where migrants show their documentation to U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers. And finally, in an empty area between the two stations was a “third-world country”—the group of countries migrants were fleeing from.

Each student was then given a slip of paper that explained their new identity. Some of them were border patrol agents and visa interviewers. Others were migrants attempting to legally enter the U.S. But if they found no legal way in, the student “migrants” could break the law. One student, for example, successfully entered the U.S. with fake documents.

What made the simulation special was each of those characters. They were based on actual individuals—migrants who Williams and her colleagues met through the KBI or U.S. state department employees.

“In that sense, this is not a game. It’s not pretend,” Williams said. “These are real people’s lives that you’re going to be representing for half an hour.”

She urged them to think carefully about the people they were representing: “Be conscious of them. Embrace that character. And make decisions the way that you think they would have made them.”

Immersed in a Different Perspective

Christopher Shoudt, a first-year Gabelli School student, played a migrant. He was “Josué,” a coffee bean farmer from Chiapas, Mexico, who made 75 pesos a day—the equivalent of almost $4. He bartered his belongings in hopes that he’d be able to work in the U.S. and pay for his children’s education. But in the process, he lost his home in a scam.

Living Josué’s life for 30 minutes humbled Shoudt. It made him reflect on how privileged—and lucky—he is to be able to afford to attend Fordham. He also said the simulation better prepared him for an upcoming meeting with New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand and Congressman Jose Serrano, where he planned to advocate for a Catholic Relief Services initiative to help migrants.

“I hope I can bring [the issue]to her and show exactly what was shown to me today—to understand their situation and be able to empathize a bit more,” Shoudt said.

In an open, post-simulation reflection, students spoke about other things they experienced during the role play. Among them were pawning wedding rings to purchase legal papers and watching wealthier migrants receive aid more quickly. In a more dangerous situation, a drug cartel told a migrant that he and his family would be killed if he stopped paying them.

“At first, you try to go through some kind of a legit process, because you don’t want to stoop so low,” said one student, who simulated a single mother with three children. “And then you realize like … once you’re screwed by the system, you don’t care what you have to do in order to protect your family.”

Migrants weren’t the only ones who faced difficulty. So did those on the U.S. side of the border.

“People would come up and have these really powerful stories,” said a student who represented a U.S. consulate employee. “And you just had to deflect them and be very stonewalled.”

For her, it was a “sad” situation. But for actual migrants, it’s their life.

“As much as it feels realistic, this is still a fraction of how real it is,” said Brett Musalowicz, a Fordham College at Rose Hill senior.

An Expansion of Empathy

For one student, the simulation was a close parallel to a past experience. In her junior year of high school, Gabelli School sophomore Samantha Barrett visited the Kino Border Initiative and met migrants who had recently been deported, she said. One of them was a man named Raul, a 29-year-old Mexico native who was taken to Los Angeles when he was three months old.  

“The morning I met him, he had just sprained his shoulder and dislocated his knee, falling off a cliff while trying to cross back into Arizona. He was going to try and cross again the very next day, not giving himself any time to heal or come with up a plan because he was just so desperate to get back into our country,” Barrett said. “To this day, I don’t know if he’s alive or if he’s dead.”

She said the experience has stayed with her: “Even three years later, these people are still people that I think about every single day.”

Overall, the simulation at Rose Hill was a chance for students to recognize the complexity of the U.S. immigration system and expand their empathy for migrants who, far too often in news headlines, are simply a statistic.

“We encounter people for a few moments at the border. You, in the simulation, have represented people for a few minutes. But what I ask and encourage you all to do is to continue to think about that one person you were representing,” Williams urged the students. “Pray for them. Be conscious of them—and how their story continues.”

For five minutes, they focus on only one thing—the cadence of their breathing—and let the rest of the world fade away.

It’s a key exercise that’s part of a brand new psychology course at Fordham this semester—The Psychology of Personal Well-Being: How to Live a Happy Life, taught by David Marcotte, S.J. Every week, Father Marcotte teaches the students strategies to increase happiness, shows them how to cope effectively with stress, and ties everything back to empirical research on the neuroscience of well-being. He begins class with a five-minute mindful meditation exercise, designed to increase self-awareness and help students hone in on the present moment.

“The main goal is to help them be their best self,” said Father Marcotte, “and use that best self to make a difference in the lives of others—to contribute to the community in a meaningful way.”

College students are in the midst of “emerging adulthood,” he explained. This is often accompanied by emotional and mental distress—not just at Fordham, but at college campuses nationwide. A fifth of college students across the country—among more than 67,000 surveyed students—reported they were stressed or suicidal in the past year, according to a study published last September in the journal Depression & Anxiety. Father Marcotte’s class was created to help combat that, he said.

The Power of Gratitude

As humans, our brains are prewired for negativity; fear and anxiety helped our ancient ancestors survive. But that means we instinctively focus on the negative aspects of our environment, Father Marcotte explained. We also harbor emotions like envy, resentment, greed, and bitterness. They’re normal parts of life, he said, but if we allow them to fester, they make us miserable.

“Negative events are like a sponge. When they get wet, they start getting bigger and bigger,” he said. “And if we’re not doing something to counteract that, the sponge gets so big that it fills our head.”

In his penultimate lecture on Dec. 4, he spoke about how students can overcome negative thinking with a simple yet powerful solution—gratitude. Being thankful is more beneficial than being optimistic, hopeful, or even compassionate when it comes to mental health and satisfaction, he said. Studies have shown that when people practice gratitude through everyday activities like journal writing, they tend to fare better than those who don’t. They cope better with stress, recover from illnesses faster, and view life through a rosier lens.

After the mini-meditation session at the beginning of class, he asked the students to review their homework assignment—a written reflection of four things they’re grateful for—with their peers.

Chantal Chevalier, FCRH ’20, said she was grateful for her 19-year-old sister and her mother, a woman she calls her “best friend” who single-handedly raised two daughters.

“If I don’t tell her I love her before I leave [the house in the morning], something’s wrong,” Chevalier said.

The student sitting behind her, Calli Prifti, FCRH ’19, said she was grateful for her health after almost losing her “second mom.” Last winter, her mother’s best friend suffered a brain aneurysm. She was unresponsive for 10 hours and nearly comatose for a week. Doctors said she might not survive, Prifti recalled. But a year later, she’s alive and well.

“We’re on autopilot so much of the time. We don’t think about what could go wrong,” Father Marcotte told the class. “A car accident an hour from now could paralyze us from the waist down—or neck down—for the rest of our lives. It’s pretty terrifying if you stop and think about it for a second.”

In an open class discussion, students shared the little things they were grateful for: pillows, hot water, the ability to attend college, getting advice on a research proposal, being alone in a normally crowded subway car. But when Father Marcotte left the classroom, the students spoke more candidly about their final thoughts on the new psychology course.

“Before I took this class, I always felt like I was kind of alone in my problems,” said Allie Rutter, FCRH ’19. “That everyone else is so put together and has their life figured out, and I don’t. [But] everyone has been really open, and we’ve all gotten very close as a result of the class,” she concluded, as several students nodded their heads in agreement.

Chevalier called it a “safe space” where students receive helpful, day-to-day strategies supported by something that made a difference to her—empirical data.

“It’s not like a self-help book,” she said. “It’s actual research that has proved that we can improve our well-being and our own happiness.”

Perhaps most important of all, the class—which is also being taught next semester—inspired a new outlook on life for many of the students. Isabella Russo-Tiesi, FCRH ’19, said she used to complain about little things to her friends: presentations, upcoming papers, school. But after everything she experienced this semester—taking the LSAT, spending time with a little girl battling cancer, and learning strategies to improve her well-being—her mindset has matured.

“Without taking this class,” she said, “I would be reacting in the negative ways that I did before.”