Staff Profile: Julie Reed
Director of the Office of Service Learning and Community Action,
McCarthy Center for Public Service and Common Good

ZPB: What is your background and how did you get involved with service learning?

JR: I was initially a clinical social worker and I worked in forensic mental health working with people who are mentally ill within the criminal justice system. It was amazing and I loved it, but in my work I kept recognizing that no matter what I was doing, education was failing people. Rather than being a resource to rise out of poverty and all the things associated with poverty, it was an obstacle, so… it wasn’t helping those who could be using it. On the other end of the spectrum, I was working with college interns from some of the best universities in the country who had no experience working with the community. When they did finally end up in the community, right before graduation, they were completely inappropriate. When I decided to go back to school, I knew that it had to be in the field of education.
Though I didn’t know the term service learning at the time, it was basically what I was talking about. We had to get people to try out the theories they were learning in the classroom. From my experience, when you add social work plus education, you get service learning.
The challenge with global service learning is that I believe, and our community partners believe, that our first priority is to the local community. The university is here for a reason, supported by the local community, so the bulk of the programming is going to be local. But the reality is that it’s a global environment that we’re all now in, so there should be some experience and global context for those that want to pursue it. Ideally it’s both [local and global] – you’ve done some service learning in the Mission and then you go to Nicaragua.
The field of global service learning is definitely evolving, and it’s nice to see a spectrum of opportunities at USF. There are shorter experiences and then you can move into a semester or year long program.
However, as the field evolves, there are many challenges: Are the outcomes for participants balanced? Do those in the developing world get more out of it than just educating our students? In a perfect world, the communities on the other side of the oceans would come over to USF. We’re not quite there yet, but that’s the growing challenge - the length of time, the type of engagement and the significance of the role that the community gets to play.
I am almost at the end of my fifth year at USF and I love it. People here, because of the social justice part of the mission, are philosophically open to service learning. People here believe in this way of teaching, learning and being.

ZPB: What have been your interactions with Latin America or the Latin@ community here, through travel, service learning or otherwise?

JR: I was once fluent in French, and it has helped me pick up some parts of Spanish, but it’s interesting that I’ve had the interactions that I’ve had without being a Spanish speaker. At my last job, the city [Gettysburg, Pennsylvania,] I was in had a sister city relationship with León, Nicaragua. And so it was a sort of grass roots organization on both ends, and there were a number of activities going back and forth. Within my role as Director of Service Learning, I wound up becoming involved with that and being on the board of that organization and that led to my first trip to Nicaragua. It was right as we [the United States] began bombing Afghanistan and I remember debating whether or not it was the right time to be out of the country, and it occurred to me that we were probably safer there than in the United States. I remember it fondly because, as much as I had been doing service learning and been in the community as a social worker, global service learning will rock your world and there I was in that role, going into a country I had not been in, where I didn’t speak the language, where the poverty was overwhelming, and knowing the Americans had something to do with the war that had just recently ended.
I went back several times to Nicaragua and specifically to León, learning more every time I went, and being exposed to all different issues. At one point, I went through another program specifically focused on fair trade coffee and I was in Matagalpa, in the mountains. I was seeking out the different social justice issues that are relevant in Nicaragua and the organizations that are working to address them.
In the process, I really felt like León became kind of a home away from home. I thought I was going to visit this place and the place really ended up being within me. And still, I go back now, and it’s not rational because I don’t speak the language and I’m not from there, but León, and Nicaragua more broadly, feels like home.
I also had the opportunity to go to Peru two or three years ago through USF’s computer science program, that [the trip] is now multi-disciplinary, so I was able to sort of shepherd that into being a broader trip that more departments can be a part of.
Every time I go [to a Spanish speaking country], I try to learn a little bit more Spanish, because I would really like to be able to fully function in Spanish speaking countries. But, that’s also part of the interesting thing: as an educator, it’s great for me to go and be dependent on other people; I’m not the teacher, it’s the students who are my teachers because they’re helping me take a bus or order off a menu and for me, that’s a great way of temporarily reversing my privilege and saying that I’m actually the outsider here and I [also have to] rely upon the wisdom of the local Nicaraguans.

This summer, Julie hopes to travel to Uganda, where five students from USF will be working through the Foundation for Sustainable Development in a program similar to the one in place in Nicaragua.