Community Engagement

Co-Curricular Engagement on Campus

Since the beginning of my freshmen year, I have been involved with a club on campus called Pitt Prison Outreach (PPO), serving as the President for the past two years.

The goal of our club is to use our unique and often privileged status as university students to work towards making meaningful change, in this case mobilizing around ending mass incarceration through connecting students to other organizations and efforts locally.  Through PPO, I have led meetings, mobilized book drives, held an academic conference surrounding the intersection of education and mass incarceration, and more.

My experience with the club has demonstrated truly how much political and social power that we have as students, along with a capacity to truly do good on our campus.

Local/Global Community Engagement

In the Summer of 2018 and the Spring of 2019, I had the opportunity to work in the DC and Pittsburgh city school systems, respectively to tutor ESL students.  With my knowledge of Spanish, I was able to communicate with students whose families had recently moved to the United States when few others were able to speak with them directly.

These experiences proved to me the importance of knowing a foreign language, and further showed me how language can bring people together.  While I was clearly in these classroom settings to assist the students, I feel that they taught me just as much as I did them, learning how to effectively work with my peers only a few years younger than me and learning how to better teach between two languages, Spanish and English.

It will be increasingly important in Pittsburgh and beyond to further support our immigrant populations as immigration continues to grow, and overcoming language barriers is a huge first step in doing so.

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