Browne Leadership Fellows Program Impact Report

UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH SCHOOL OF SOCIAL WORK

BROWNE LEADERSHIP FELLOWS PROGRAM

IMPACT REPORT

2013-18 JONATHAN E. LIVINGSTON, PHD CONSULTING STRATEGY ⊹ RESEARCH ⊹ EVALUATION ⊹ CO-CREATION

WHAT IS THE BROWNE LEADERSHIP FELLOWS PROGRAM? The Browne Leadership Fellows Program is an interdisciplinary fellowship aimed at preparing students to be engaged civic leaders working for economic and social justice.

PAGE 01

PROGRAM MISSION The fellows program in social work reflects our mission: to advocate for social policies and resources to meet basic human needs; to create accessible, responsible, and accountable human service programs; and to deliver quality services to those in need of support.

PAGE 02

METHODOLOGY

CONCEPT DESIGN

PARTICIPANT INTERVIEWS

IMPACT ASSESSMENT

This impact report is the result of conducting and analyzing semi-structured interviews with key actors involved in the Browne Leadership Program: Browne Fellows, Partner Agency/Community Leaders, Educators/Administrators involved with the program at the University of Pittsburgh.

This approach was employed to triangulate perspectives among the three stakeholders that comprise the program.

The semi-structured interview protocol for this study was informed primarily by the core goals, values and principles that guide the Browne Leadership Fellow Program’s mission.

PAGE 03

PROGRESS BY THE NUMBERS

RESULTS OVERVIEW

41/58

70%

41 of the 58 Browne Fellows participated in the semistructured interviews that inform this study, yielding a response rate of over 70%. Respondents all cohorts from 2013 – 2018, with each cohort reporting a minimum of a 50% response rate.

3/4

75%

3 of the 4 Partner Agency/Community Leaders sought for input participated in the semi-structured interviews that inform this study, yielding a response rate of 75%.

4/4

100%

4 of the 4 Educators/Administrators sought for input participated in the semi-structured interviews that inform this study, yielding a response rate of 100%.

PAGE 04

WHAT WAS LEARNED Browne Fellows, by gaining a better knowledge of the social norms and values that inform our systems of social welfare, are empowered to more clearly identify what works and what doesn’t work in a community development setting.

Browne Fellows, through their respective experiences, gained a better understanding of social and economic justice issues, as well as diversity issues.

Browne fellows were able to critically think about the complex process of applying evidence-based solutions to community problems in unique settings.

The Browne Fellowship has had a transformative impact on the majority of its participants.

The Browne Leadership Program creates empathic leaders and reflexive

The Browne Fellowship has had a transformative

practitioners. impact on the majority of its participants

0 9P A G E 0 5

BRO W NE FELLO W PERS PEC TIVE

“I think a lot of times when I think or react given people's social backgrounds, I didn't always think of it as being linked to location quite as heavily as it is. I think getting to really dig into a specific community really made me think more about the within and the without variables.” —— Pietra Bruni, Browne Fellow 2013 “The bigger impact on me was understanding how a community works, then understanding how, really, it's everyone's job to get involved in that. You think other people are taking care of it, then you go to these community development meetings and work on some of these initiatives, and you realize it‘s mostly volunteers. That did change my values towards those things, and helped me to understand what I need to be ... If you want change in the community, you don’t have to have a job that involves changing a community, you just need to step up to the plate. That's one of the reason why I actually even moved to Milvale after being placed there with the fellowship. I would say it‘s changed a large part of my life, including where I lived for four years.” —— Dominique Dove, Browne Fellow 2013

PAGE 06

BRO W NE FELLO W PERS PEC TIVE

“I think it's easy to say, 'people can't get food, let's just build a grocery store,' And things aren’t really that simple…..Throughout, since your sort of in charge of creating our own projects, I think it really challenged us to try and to sometimes fail. But also to take away from what might be deemed like a failure, what lessons were learned, and why it failed, and to look at that critically. And I think it also encouraged us to act why, to know that things weren't the way they were just because. So if there's a reason why things are the way they are, you have to then think critically about, well, what can we do to address this that's specific to this circumstance of a problem, cause not every problem has the same root cause.” —— Kimberly Goldstein, Browne Fellow 2015 “I work in a brain injury research lab…these people …go through inpatient rehab and they'e put out into the community. We do long term follow-up looking at what their community reintegration looks like. There's a lot of different priorities, even within our research lab. And I found myself really interested in this idea of community reintegration. Because you think of this unmeasurable cost of someone who has cognitive or physical disabilities and trying to reintegrate them into a community…….not only is it a cost to themselves, it's a cost to the community at large of what they were able to do productively before they came now. And to think of ways to do that, or think of ways to catalyze their recovery. And not only is it going to directly impact themselves in terms of their income or the community in terms of this productivity. But it also impacts the person's mental health, their quality of life. I feel really fortunate to be in a lab now where I can look at people's employment and people's quality of life and people's community reintegration later. And I don't think that's something I would have been interested in at all without being a Browne fellow.” —— Dominic Disanto, Browne Fellow 2016 PAGE 07

PARTNER AGEN C Y PERS PEC TIVE

“I've felt that the students have really dug in and tried to shed their own perceptions of what is and what isn't and really dug in to experience other people's experience of the world and I think that that's not only been phenomenal for them but I think it's helped our staff really think about maybe some of their own conceptions and maybe some of their own stereotypes that they didn't realize that they were embracing because they could then see the community through a new set of eyes."

—— Adrienne Walnoha, Chief Executive Officer, Community Human Services “I really saw the Browne Fellows enmeshed and immersed with the groups of people we serve, who can be so marginalized and disenfranchised. And I was really able to see them understand the humanity that was at the base of these problems and why people might have been outsiders or insiders and how they could really impact that, not only through their projects but also personally.

How they could engage the world and people in it in a very different way." —— Adrienne Walnoha, Chief Executive Officer, Community Human Services

PAGE 08

PARTNER AGEN C Y PERS PEC TIVE

“They're immersed in the good, the bad, the joy, the ugliness, everything that we all face in our organizations and as a neighborhood. They're immersed in it, and I would have to say you have to try to not really walk away with that part of the experience…….Solutions are complex. Sometimes trying to get people to understand that sometimes success looks like holding the line on not going backwards today, depending on what the challenge is and what we're facing, and trying to help people understand that small community organizations are bootstrapping efforts with not enough of anything. Not enough resources to make it happen and too much need, that they can have an impact and that they can help push the needle in the right direction." —— Brian Wolovich, Milvale Community Partner “…they're learning too…. we know that we're always learning all the time, and we learn from each other. There's always these unique combinations of what is being shared. And it's added value to not only what can be shared. Just because the student share such unique perspectives and they're studying many different topics. But the way that they grow to juxtapose those in the future, it's been great to watch as well as to see the interactions and the seeds grow within the relationships built with our students and our staff.......there's just so much love that is shared through this program.“ —— Nina Barbudo, Director, Assemble Pittsburgh

PAGE 09

ED U C ATO R/ AD M I N PERS PEC TIVE

“What I like most is when they go from the process of sort of being idea people who have brilliant ideas and realizing that even the best of ideas need community buy in for implementation and realizing that, in many ways, that's where the real talent lies. And sort of negotiating all of these different groupings, whether it be community residents, whether it be business leaders, whether it be policy and politicians. I think many of them come in with an understanding or a belief that within these systems there's sort of core centralized power. But residents and neighborhoods vote with their feet. I've seen first-hand what it takes to get buy in and build authentic trust with people. It's something that when I see that happen, it's one of my favorite parts of the program. And sometimes in the simplest of ways.“ —— Keith Caldwell, BASW Program Director and Browne Leadership Fellows Program Coordinator, School of Social Work, University of Pittsburgh “I think it helps them understand why a community might not immediately respond, 'Yes, please plant more trees in our community.' Which, who could argue with that? And it has a public good, and will reduce the air ... will improve the air quality in that community without also understanding that that may affect people's sidewalks, as the roots grow and suddenly the ... and people become concerned about it so I think they better understand ... they grow to understand that there are reasons why ... and this is what we try and teach in social work, is you have to listen and try to understand things from the viewpoint of the person who's expressing it.” —— Rafael Engel, Associate Professor, School of Social Work, University of Pittsburgh PAGE 10

ED U C ATO R/ AD M I N PERS PEC TIVE

“I think when they go into the program, they're naturally already wired to take a chance, but the program pushes them even more to say, 'Put yourself in this, and don't have any barriers. If barriers come, there's ways to jump over those barriers because there are people and there's community that's relying on you, and there's people in the background who are pushing you to do this thing to make life better for everyone." —— Yvette Moore, Pitt Excel Director, Swanson School of Engineering, University of Pittsburgh “ (The Browne Leadership Program) I has actually been a driver in some of the curricular decisions that we’ve made the undergraduate social work program. It opened my eyes to the nature of interdisciplinary education and what we could make more possible for students.“ —— Keith Caldwell, BASW Program Director and Browne Leadership Fellows Program Coordinator, School of Social Work, University of Pittsburgh

PAGE 11

CREATE LASTING CHANGE AS AN ADVOCATE FOR SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC JUSTICE