Courses

In Fall of 2019 and Spring of 2020, I took the foundational courses for the Community Engagement Scholars Program, which were Introduction to Civic Engagement and then Changing the World through Public Policy. Introduction to Civic Engagement gave me and my peers the opportunity to learn what it means to be part of a community, and what it means to serve and engage with said communities. We got the opportunity to learn about the communities our peers were already apart of, such as where they came from and what career paths they were going into, and we also got to form a more cohesive idea of what the community of Community Engagement Scholars looked like. As a policy and political science student, I got an immense amount of benefit from this course in that I was able to broaden my understanding of the ways people could be of service to their communities. Meeting other scholars in majors such as medical diagnostics, nursing, education, and human services allowed me to recognize the wide variety of ways a community service mindset can take form, and showed me that in order to best serve the community in government and policymaking, it will be imperative for me to seek out and facilitate conversations with experts in the areas I seek to serve rather than to try and become an expert on everything on my own.

The following course, Changing the World through Public Policy, was a much different experience in that it was not limited to community engagement scholars. This was my first policy course, and though Introduction to Civic Engagement showed me that maintaining a community service mindset was possible in all fields, Changing the World through Public Policy assured me that public policy was the correct field for me. Where the first course showed us the importance of working within and between communities to facilitate discussion in problem solving, this course showed us the avenues through which that can be accomplished, specifically in America. All of my policy courses since Changing the World have continued to expand on what I learned in Spring of 2020, but I am grateful for the coordination of both courses in aiding my development of what a community service study mindset looks like for me.

My primary goal as a community engagement scholar has been to develop a thorough, well-rounded understanding approach to policy issues in order to understand the broader connections between inequities, and thus develop more sustainable, effective, and equitable policy solutions. All of my courses for all three of my majors presented opportunities to explore social and economic inequities and how to address them, but I felt the most connected with my goals as a community engagement scholar in my public policy courses.

The first course, UAPP225: Crafting Public Policy, was very similar to Changing the World through Public Policy in its broad overview of the functions of the US Government and how policy is made. However, as an honors student in this course, I had the opportunity to select a policy issue within a specific country to research in order to develop potential policy solutions. I researched Mother to Child Transmission of HIV in Nigeria, culminating in a 15 page research paper and 20 minute presentation. This project and everything I learned in the course along with it connected to my goals in community engagement by showing me the ways in which many policy issues can be connected to one policy problem, thus allowing me to see how addressing one area could impact others, as well as how neglecting one area can be detrimental to others.

The second course, UAPP330: Public and Nonprofit Administration, gave me the opportunity to use what I was learning in class about management and administration to solve problems presented to me weekly in the form of case studies. These case studies presented problems within cities, nonprofits, etc. that needed solving with consideration for multiple stakeholders and points of view. What I ultimately gained from this course was a deeper understanding of the importance of seeing the bigger picture of policy issues when trying to develop solutions, as well as a sense of confidence in my abilities to work within policy framework to solve problems of social and economic inequities. It was this class that inspired me to apply for the 4+1 MPA program, which I have since been an engaged and enthusiastic participant in.

The third course I chose to highlight is POSC456: Social and Political Movements through Fiction and Film. In this course, we examined works of fiction about real social and political movements to understand what leads to such movements, and how media can impact them. In a way, this course culminated the vast majority of what I studied in political science, english, and public policy, in that it explored what has happened in history that ultimately led to policy reform and the forms of art and media that impacted the movements then and our perceptions of them now. In works such as Storming Heaven and Small Great Things, we connected with personal stories to understand the communities at play, the forces acting for and against them, and the lengths they needed to go to to accomplish meaningful change. This course and many others like it have encapsulated exactly what I've aimed to do in my studies as a community engagement scholar, which is use community engagement to center my learning around the people affected by policy issues and keep myself grounded in seeking to serve those communities in the work I eventually do.

My capstone experience in the course UAPP440: Public Policy Senior Capstone allowed me to pull everything I had learned in my public policy studies over four years together into an actionable client-based group project. My group worked with DANA: Delaware Alliance for Nonprofit Advancement, and we were tasked with researching the current state of nonprofit contracting policy in reform in Delaware and nationwide in order to then develop a legislative advocacy plan for DANA and its member nonprofits to use to advocate for higher pay in contracts with the state. Over the course of the semester, our group worked consistently together, separately, and with our clients in weekly meetings to meet their expectations and provide DANA with final products that would help inform Delaware legislators of the issue and persuade them to support DANA's cause. For our final deliverables, our group developed a detailed policy brief, a one-pager, and a legislative advocacy document, all of which can be found in our final report below.