MSW Student Profile: Stephanie Longmire

STEPHANIE LONGMIRE: A SOCIAL WORKER IS BORN

We think of scholarships as paying primarily for tuition, and of course they help enormously in this area. Students say, “Without my scholarship,

I couldn’t even dream of being here.” So said Stephanie Longmire, MSW ’21, and yet she also called attention to a nuance that applies to many students: they get here, their tuition paid, their dream realized, but still they must go without. Every day you go without something else: your own printer, a book for class or a networking dinner with friends. You are at the University of Michigan but living in a shadow world, just making do, not feeling like you belong. Longmire is able to be here, and to feel like she belongs, thanks to her Kristine Siefert and Kalyan Dutta Endowed Scholarship and her Rosemary Sarri Endowed Scholarship. The Siefert/Dutta Scholarship supports students from Detroit; the Sarri Scholarship supports students interested in community organization. Longmire grew up knowing financial insecurity—and worse— in the Livernois section of Detroit, often ranked among the nation’s most dangerous neighborhoods. “When I was a teen, it felt like people died every two seconds,” she said. “It was always, who died yesterday? Who was shot last night? As a child, I kept a plastic bag of shell casings from shootings.” Longmire wanted to join the police or the military. Instead, she headed to Bowling Green State University in Ohio. Not that she wanted to. Or that she even applied. Her mother applied for her, got her in, then told her she was going. “I partied for the first three years,” Longmire said, “and I just passed.” Then she found Common Good, an interfaith residence. “We never locked our doors except for bedrooms. You could come in, make a sandwich, borrow a book, sleep on the couch, attend free community dinners, whatever you needed.”

Common Good’s open doors encouraged Longmire to explore new experiences. “I never had a white friend until college,” she said, “and a lot of my white friends were meeting Black people for the first time. They were asking me ‘Black questions.’ They were not offensive; they just didn’t know.” So she and a Black male friend assembled a circle of white community members at Common Good, and set about answering those questions. And a social worker was born.

She facilitated other groups, and she took a class called The Listening Post, about learning to listen. “That course was profound for me,” Longmire said. “I would love to teach nontraditional classes like that, and to work with professors creating trips, so students could be immersed in the cultures they learn about. That would be my dream job.” After college, Longmire endured a few years of non-dream jobs. Then she came to the School of Social Work with a field placement at Michigan Medicine’s Maternal Infant Health Program. She has started writing legislation on prison pregnancy, including the practice of shackling women to their beds. That’s a lot of writing and printing. A lot of books and networking. That’s how Longmire came to appreciate her Siefert/Dutta and Sarri Scholarships all over again: she was grateful for the tuition help, and also grateful for those smaller things — like having your own printer when you need it — that make you feel human, that make your work and your goals feel worthwhile and that make you feel you have finally arrived at the University of Michigan.