Category: Global Poverty & Practice

Growing up in Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley without a backyard, Yesenia Casillas Rios would turn to local parks as a way to get outside, play, and explore her neighborhood. 

These communal open spaces “were very crucial to the way I grew up,” she says.

In her senior year of high school, Casillas Rios became more directly involved in her local public spaces when she started doing a volunteer youth program at Black Thumb Farm, a community farm a couple blocks from home. Her end-of-the-year project tracked the impacts of weather on plant growth.

“They taught me a lot about food justice, food sovereignty, and environmental justice in terms of where we lived and how our environment had a lot to do with how we experience our day-to-day lives as low-income, first-generation students,” she said. 

The experience set her down a path to UC Berkeley, where the landscape architecture major graduated this month from the Global Poverty & Practice minor, or GPP, which allowed her to stay involved with Black Thumb Farm during college. For the past three years, Casillas Rios has also served as a Fellow at the Blum Center, where she has provided essential administrative and event support for the Master of Development Engineering program. 

While looking at colleges in high school, Casillas Rios discovered a Berkeley program that spoke directly to her experiences and interests.

“I found out about landscape architecture and how, as a landscape architect, you could design parks or you can design green spaces,” she said. “That fascinated me.”

It’s an interdisciplinary field, and, once on campus, Casillas Rios looked for other opportunities to interact with people from different disciplines. Landscape architects “care about energy, they care about water, they care about communities,” she said. The Blum Center, she found, fit that description, too.

In her student associate role, she worked closely with then–Assistant Director of Student Affairs Valerie Moss, who introduced her to GPP. The minor had clear parallels with Casillas Rios’ passion for community development.

“I’ve always liked to learn as much as I can,” she said, “and GPP also has to do with students from all sorts of different interests and backgrounds who are also interested in change, are hopeful for change, and want to learn how we can create that change.”

Her first GPP class, “Global Poverty: Challenges and Hopes,” doubled as one of her major requirements. “‘I’ll give it a shot,’” she remembers thinking. “And I fell in love with the class.” Prof. Sai Balakrishnan’s passion for understanding global poverty inspired her to officially pursue the minor.

Casillas Rios returned to Black Thumb Farm during school breaks to do her practice experience. And this time, she led the high schoolers. 

The farm had a community-supported agriculture (CSA) model, and Casillas Rios led these youth in growing a variety of vegetables they would then sell to locals participating in the CSA. On weekends, she taught them what kind of flowers could grow in what conditions and how to arrange the flowers for selling. She also led workshops that the farm put on. 

The farm also asked their resident landscape architect to help design a new plot of land they had, two blocks from Casillas Rios’ childhood home. This included interpretive landscape maps to engage the city on the farm’s expansion plans.  

The full-circle nature of her journey isn’t lost on her.

“It’s such a beautiful thing,” she said, “I first came in just wanting to have a green space in my community, and now they’re bringing so much back to us — providing so many community workshops, community engagement.”

Earlier this month, Casillas Rios finished up her three years supporting the Blum Center’s programs and activities, and on May 19, she and 32 others from 18 different majors graduated from the GPP Minor.

She credited Moss and one of her GPP professors, Clare Talwalker, with encouraging her to reflect more on her interests, what she chose to do during college and why, and to be more open-minded about what she could pursue academically and professionally. 

“It was a pleasure having Yesenia in class!” Talwalker said. “She brought to discussions her investment in understanding how our access and uses of built spaces, including green spaces, intersect with poverty and inequality, and how the design and shaping of landscapes might be socially transformative. 

“Her contributions were unique, valuable, and inspiring.”

Over the years, Moss and Chetan Chowdhry, the Center’s Director of Student Programs, had also helped build a feeling of community at the Center by approaching Casillas Rios as more than just a student worker. 

“I’ve become so close to them after these three years. It helped me a lot in not feeling so alone in this journey as a first-generation student and going to college,” she said. “I’m not just doing it to do it, like many of us are, but I’m here to do it for a purpose. Feeling reminded of that purpose with those reflections that I was able to have with them was something I’m truly grateful for.”

This summer, Casillas Rios will finish up an internship at a landscape architecture firm and another energy-focused internship at a consulting group. Her plans beyond that aren’t settled, but she knows she wants to eventually attend graduate school and gain more hands-on experiences in and around the landscape architecture space.

She will also be heading back home soon to the San Fernando Valley, and to Black Thumb Farm.

“Every time I’ve gone back on breaks,” she said, “they’re like, ‘You’re going to come back once you graduate; you’re going to take charge of this.’”

Would she?

“Imagine,” she said with a laugh. “You never know. I really don’t know where I’m going to be. But I’ll for sure still be helping them out as well.”

As this year’s Global Poverty and Practice (GPP) graduates stepped onto the stage to receive their diplomas, they carried with them a hard-earned insight: the injustices they spent years studying weren’t distant or theoretical — they were urgent and unfolding all around them. Their time in the program has prepared them to enter the world beyond Berkeley with a strong sense of purpose, ready to confront poverty in a time of growing global uncertainty.

Earlier this month, friends and family filled Sutardja Dai Hall’s Banatao Auditorium to celebrate the commencement of the GPP minor’s Class of 2025, the 18th cohort of students to tackle poverty by studying the global systems and power structures that sustain inequality.

Director of the Global Studies Program and Chair of the GPP minor Elora Shehabuddin spoke to the significance of this historical moment, with graduates completing their coursework, she said, amid escalating climate disasters, emerging armed conflicts, and the first livestreamed genocide, carried out by the Israeli state against the Palestinian people.

“In every case, you learned to read and think beyond the headlines of mainstream media, to consider the histories of these conflicts and the power dynamics that shaped them, and to center the history of the human beings affected,” Shehabuddin said. “These graduates inspire all of us as champions for social justice, and they represent the best of UC Berkeley.”

This year’s graduating class includes over 30 students representing more than 20 majors. As part of the minor, students completed a personalized practice experience that involved interning or volunteering with a government agency, nonprofit organization, or community group working on poverty issues.

A defining element of the program, the practice experience is designed to help students bridge theoretical frameworks with real-world poverty action, and it held particular meaning for student commencement speaker and legal studies major Johnna Spikes.

With a family history rooted in public service, Spikes spent much of her early life engaged in similar work. She pursued a career in law, working as a paralegal and office manager at the law firm of Haddad and Sherwin. At Berkeley, she deepened her commitment to justice through internships with Legal Services for Prisoners with Children and the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights.

She joined GPP to continue her work in public service, but what she learned reshaped how she approaches that work.

“I entered this minor with an idealistic desire to serve, as I believed that by helping those who are suffering, I’d be fulfilling some noble mission,” Spikes said. “I’ve come to realize that service without connection can become charity. True compassion doesn’t come from a place of distance, it comes from standing shoulder to shoulder, seeing the humanity in each other, and walking forward together.”

She volunteered with Old Skool Cafe, a San Francisco restaurant run by formerly incarcerated, foster care, and at-risk youth. More than just a place to eat, the cafe operates as a violence prevention program, offering job training and meaningful employment.

At Old Skool, she saw firsthand how young people often pushed to the margins weren’t treated as problems to be fixed, but as leaders — shaping the menu, helping run the restaurant, and building the kind of community they wanted to see.

“That’s what love looks like when it is rooted in justice,” Spikes said. “In this work, compassion isn’t a gesture of service, it’s a radical act of kinship grounded in the belief that there is no us and them, only us. The fight against poverty and injustice isn’t just something we choose to do, it’s something we’re here for.”

Similarly, the minor challenged student speaker and civil engineering major Anahita Banerjee to dig deeper in her search for solutions to global inequality. She has extensive experience in global water access, and her fieldwork spans rural India, Peru, and California, where she’s partnered with local communities to develop clean, dependable water infrastructure.

As a GPP minor, she said her daily assignments challenged her to confront global issues by asking tough questions like, “Why is there a housing crisis in the Bay Area? Why does the U.S. have the highest incarceration rate in the world?”

She added that simple answers—blaming things like lack of wealth, infrastructure, or education—wouldn’t cut it. Instead, the program pushed students to keep digging until they uncovered the deeper systems behind these problems: a prison system profiting from forced labor, or policies that force formerly colonized countries to prioritize debt payments over vital infrastructure.

“Yet, I would still call these B+ answers at best, because our homework is incomplete if it remains passive,” Banerjee said. “The most important question that this minor instills in us is, ‘What are we going to do about it?’”

Driven by that same sense of responsibility, she plans to work as a reporter for a nonprofit covering water issues, and then pursue a master’s degree at the University of Oxford in Water Science, Policy, and Management.

Facing her classmates, she expressed confidence that they will all continue to ask these critical questions and strive to “earn that A+.”

“Some of us may continue working with nonprofits, while others will work as doctors, teachers, or social workers,” Banerjee said. “However, all of us will go on to be outstanding members of society and not allow ourselves to turn away from the injustices around us.”

The ceremony concluded with a speech from GPP alumnus Jamal Khan. He graduated as part of the second cohort of GPP students in 2009, and went on to attend Harvard Law School. Since then, he has held positions in both the federal government and politics, including the Obama White House and Kamala Harris’s Senate campaign. He currently serves as an attorney for The Homeless Action Center.

Drawing from his experiences in legal advocacy and direct support for unhoused individuals, incarcerated people, and those facing mental health challenges, he emphasized that dehumanization—whether in the language of war or in the bureaucracies of everyday life—is often the precursor to violence and neglect.

Khan left graduates with a powerful closing message:

“No matter the vantage point from your organization or your role, if you find yourself feeling uncertain or confused, the most important thing you can do with regard to those you’re trying to help, is to remember humanity,” Khan said. “Conågratulations, I wish you all the best. Go out there and do big things, go-getters.”

Samyukta Shrivatsa arrived at Berkeley knowing the huge privilege it was to receive an education at Cal — indeed, what a huge privilege it was to even afford the flight all the way here from India. She came in wanting to change the world for the better, and do so “with an A-plus.” 

Then the pandemic hit. The magnitude of the problems it caused and revealed left Shrivatsa, a peer advisor of the Global Poverty and Practice minor who graduated last week, feeling ready to throw in the changemaker towel. 

But that was when she discovered the GPP minor — “or perhaps,” she mused to her fellow graduates, “when GPP found me.”

While the paths taken by the 60 newly minted GPP alumni to and through the minor differed greatly, they ultimately converged May 15 at Sutardja Dai Hall’s Banatao Auditorium following classes on poverty alleviation, a hands-on “practice experience” combining theory with practice, and deep reflection on what they learned. GPP’s 16th graduating class drew from 25 different majors and has joined an alumni community numbering over 1,000.

“We went into this thinking we were alleviating poverty for others,” said Shrivatsa, who is preparing to start an environmental engineering PhD at Stanford, “but we came to understand that we were really doing this for ourselves and that there is infinite hope in recognizing that, thankfully, none of us are alone in shouldering this responsibility. 

“There is so much power in recognizing the process of working for change as its own reward: All one has to do is stay the course, regardless of where the path leads.”

Prof. Dan Fletcher, faculty director of the Blum Center, which houses the minor, pointed out that the graduating class weathered pandemic disruptions in the classroom, during their practice experiences, and in their personal lives — not because the GPP program was required of them but “because of their commitment to these ideals.”

“As champions of social justice,” Fletcher said, “they represent the best of UC Berkeley.”

Keynote speaker and anthropology professor Aarti Sethi marveled at students’ ability to accomplish all that while having to do so much to take care of themselves, their families, and others. “Thank you for teaching us about resilience,” she said.

Sethi asked students to consider the “heart of the liberal university”: libraries — those “spaces of autodidactism” where one could discover the world’s vastness and interestingness, be transported to new places, find intellectual freedom, and wander without purpose. In a world where the uneven distribution of power and resources divides us into those who must “live in need” and those with the privilege to “live in desire,” it’s the latter — a cultivation of “impractical pleasures” — that is a worthy goal to pursue not just for ourselves but for others. 

All people have a right to to build an “impractical relationship to the world,” Sethi said. “What an education here can do and should do is to question this division and to create conditions in which everyone can live without purpose in some aspect of their life.” 

Thomas Kouyate, a molecular and cell biology major preparing for a position at Boston Children’s Hospital, recalled the minor as one of Berkeley’s biggest draws. He grew up in Senegal and remembers seeing poverty everywhere while he and his friends had the latest material goods. For a time, he accepted that reality. 

Understanding the roots of poverty came through interactions with his classmates, faculty, GPP staff, his parents, and “debunking those lies we were taught” about what causes such stark inequality. “We’re not here to solve poverty in a single day,” he discovered, “but rather that we’re here to understand that it starts with us, one day at a time, at a small scale.” 

Kouyate took that wisdom back to Dakar, Senegal, where he did his practice experience at a hospital and with the country’s National Tuberculosis Control Program. He implored his classmates not to become inured to the giant, complicated issues they’ve committed to grappling with: “My hope is that we keep serving and loving those in need, knowing that they will not be able to pay us back.” 

That kind of optimism was what alumna speaker Peyton Provenzano most liked about being a student at Berkeley — that students could make their campus and the world a better place. 

“The challenge for all of you will be translating that optimism and spirit of the Berkeley campus into your lives beyond the university,” said Provenzano, who just finished her JD at Berkeley Law. “It’s not naive to believe in the prospect of a more just, equitable, and kind world.” The students before her, she added, are uniquely equipped to be the change they want to see. 

But progress won’t be linear, Provenzano warned; the inevitable setbacks can’t be cause for discouragement. “Contributions large and small do make a difference.” 

For Shrivatsa, these large and small impacts, as well as how the graduating class arrived at them in the first place, form the stories that shape how we see the world around us.

“GPP has been a process of tearing down everything we thought we knew about the world and rewriting the stories we tell about it,” she told her peers and commencement attendees. And the story that GPP tells “is one of audacious hope in the world and each other.”

The Global Poverty and Practice minor was the reason Grace Elam ended up at Berkeley in the first place. The university was “way too close to home” for the San Franciscan, and she felt skeptical that Berkeley’s reputation for real-world change had continued to live up to the 1960s’ Free Speech Movement. After receiving an admissions letter, she snuck over to Cal Day to scope things out. She only remembers attending one event: a GPP alumni panel that “shared their experiences building a schoolhouse in Ghana and working in carceral reform in California.” She knew where she wanted to go for college.

The fourth-year, who’s majoring in rhetoric and minoring in both GPP and public policy, has spent the past two summers working full-time in the legal office of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Pacific Southwest region, and continues working there part time. Much of her work focuses on the EPA’s engagement with other governments, including those of Navajo Nation, Guam, and California, as well as tracking civil rights compliance of grant recipients, processing the public’s requests for agency records, tracking citizens’ environmental lawsuits, researching the history and cultural practices of Native nations, and looking into the community impacts of polluters. 

Through “tricks of timing and my own desire to make the most of GPP’s foundational praxis,” the EPA job became her GPP practice experience, the hands-on component of the minor where students apply in the field what they learn in the classroom. Elam is also one of seven GPP peer advisors who use the experience they’ve gained in completing most of the minor to counsel their newer peers.

“I found that GPP was the most welcoming community I had come across at Cal,” said fellow peer advisor Samyukta Shrivatsa. “From the staff to the faculty and students, I owed so many of my best experiences to the encouragement and warmth extended by them. Finding meaning in one’s college experience can be a lonely journey, and I wanted to pass on the support I received to other similarly lost students!”

“Expanding how I look at the world”

Mahima Sinha’s passion lies in increasing access to healthcare in communities. It drove the fourth-year, pre-medical track public health student to take GPP 115, “Challenges and Hopes,” in the first place. What stuck out to her was how the program could be tailored to students’ personal experiences, combined theoretical frameworks with real-world action, and promoted reflection on learnings and experiences. “I learned to think critically about poverty and inequality in a way that I had never thought of before,” Sinha said.

But it was the program’s community that also drew her in. “I loved how supportive everyone was of each other and how inclusive it felt.”

Sinha has stayed close to home with her practice experience, which can take students around the world. She continues to work remotely with Transitions Clinic Network, a San Francisco–based nonprofit providing healthcare services to those transitioning out of incarceration, doing data analysis of patient demographics, designing a manual for the TCN’s healthcare hotline, writing articles for San Quentin Prison’s social justice–oriented news site, and interviewing TCN’s community health workers — folks who have been incarcerated whom TCN hires to “create a supportive healthcare experience for patients and support their autonomy,” Sinha says.

“I have been able to learn so much about the effects of mass incarceration and how that impacts health specifically,” she said. “It has been challenging because I have never worked with the reentry population before and I am learning a lot as I go, such as the proper language to use, the harmful stigmas associated with incarceration, and the increasing need for reentry services in the United States.”

Expanding her perspective has been a key element of her overall GPP experience, which is open to all majors, allowing for a wide array of outlooks and frames of reference.

“This has really expanded how I look at the world and analyze what I see in the news,” Sinha says. “The minor has also offered me a lot of insight into how I can incorporate these frameworks into my future career, regardless of what I end up doing.”

“A lot of ownership for this project”

Also a fourth year, Samhita Bhat studies public health and molecular and cell biology. 

Over this past summer, she worked at Public Health Research Institute of India (PHRII), a nonprofit in the southern city of Mysore that researches women’s reproductive health, runs education and screening programs, and offers health services. As her practice experience, Bhat evaluated the impact of PHRII’s cervical cancer screening program through interviews with local community health workers, who were often overburdened managing the health of thousands of rural community members. She brought with her fluency in Kannada and, “as the daughter of immigrants from the state of Karnataka, a lot of personal knowledge and deep-rooted connection to the poverty that community members experience there.”

Her internship work resulted in a research abstract she presented at a conference and will be published soon in Annals of Epidemiology. “I felt a lot of ownership for this project as I was able to conduct interviews on my own,” Bhat said.

What’s helped cement her interest in continuing to work with healthcare-oriented grassroots organizations, she says, has been a curriculum that’s allowed her to better confront her own privilege and recognizing “the harm that my own actions may have in conducting poverty alleviation and how to mitigate that.”

“GPP has been a really special and unique part of my Berkeley experience, and I felt like I found a really strong community within my GPP classes and cohort,” Bhat said. Being a peer advisor, she added, allows her to transmit that experience to others while connecting with peers who have similar interests to hers. “I love hearing about the various passions and experiences that such a diverse group of students have within the minor.”

“Challenging these systems in my professional and personal life” 

“I was very aware of the privilege that an education at Cal gives me,” recalled Samyukta Shrivatsa, a senior studying environmental engineering science, “and was interested in understanding the education system I grew up with, the role education has to play in social and economic mobility, and how we can better serve students who go through the system.”

Shrivatsa came to the US from Bangalore. “Navigating college as an autistic student during COVID-19 was very challenging.” But it brought with it an awareness “of the complexities of privilege and power omnipresent in my life” and the desire to find a way to leave the world better off than how she’s found it. GPP 115 convinced her that “engaging in meaningful activities of solidarity” was where she wanted to be.

To these ends, she returned to Bangalore this past summer with Parikrma Humanity Foundation, which provides a holistic education to students from marginalized socioeconomic backgrounds. She had been intrigued by the way the school supported its students emotionally, medically, and financially since meeting some of those students in high school.

“I realized very quickly that my role as a temporary volunteer was miniscule, and that I had to think carefully about what kind of work I could do that would be most helpful to teachers with decades of experience,” she said. Shrivatsa observed the love with which the teachers approached their students’ difficulties. Her own days varied widely: playing football with students one day, talking K-dramas another day, introducing them to parliamentary debate yet another day, and all the while hearing out their backstories, hopes, and dreams.

For Shrivatsa, the practice experience and her classes have been a source not only of extensive knowledge, a realization of how much she doesn’t know, and how to be critical of “the systems and rhetoric surrounding issues of poverty and development,” but has given her the tools to “challenge these systems in my professional and personal life.” 

“Celebrating the importance of their work and passion” 

“I’ve landed in a front-row seat for US federal environmental governance, which is fascinating to watch, and extremely complex to be a part of,” said Elam of her EPA job. Some of the public’s preconceptions about the federal government, she found, aren’t far off, like dense bureaucracy and “high-level political indifference” slowing the pace of the government’s justice work. But that front-row seat also hit home that the EPA and its sibling agencies are made up of people at every level, who do good work and bad, “occupying different roles and having different impacts, and most importantly, responding to different pressures as ordained by their roles.”

In her second year, in an unrelated campus organization, she got to know a peer advisor, who became a mentor not only in GPP but for her whole Berkeley experience and work in social change. “I missed her when she graduated, and thought of her immediately when last spring I received an email from the GPP minor suggesting I apply to be a peer advisor,” she said. “Partly in her honor, and partly because I was flattered by the anonymous nomination, I did so and applied, and now I’m here!”

During advising sessions, Elam continues to draw inspiration from the peers with “their passion, drive, and ideas for their own GPP trajectories.”

“I believe in those students, and I want to celebrate the importance of their work and passion, and to set them up as well as I can  to have their desired impact on the world and their issue of choice,” she added. “I’ve found that I leave every advising appointment I have with a smile.”

As the Campanile rang twice, indicating 2 p.m., students wearing blue and gold stoles over their formal attire found their seats below the iconic clock tower. It was a beautiful, warm day, with the sun shining down to highlight the sight of smiling faces and students mingling. After months of remote sessions, followed by masked-up classes, the 70 graduates of the Global Poverty and Practice minor finally got to experience a physical sense of community. Being the first in-person GPP graduation ceremony in three years, it was only appropriate to have it at the most quintessential UC Berkeley location. “After so much time having passed since we had a graduation, we returned to the heart of the campus,” recalls Chetan Chowdhry, director of student programs at the Blum Center for Developing Economies and GPP’s lead advisor.

The Global Poverty and Practice minor is an interdisciplinary program that provides students with theoretical frameworks, methods, and practical skills necessary to engage with global poverty and inequality in effective ways. This valuable program certainly deserved an exciting ceremony. Alice Agogino, education director of Blum Center, the home of GPP, welcomed attendees, followed by a speech by Electrical Engineering and Computer Science professor and Vice Chancellor for Research, Kathy Yelick. A special part of this year’s ceremony, though, was honoring Richard Blum, founder of the Blum Center, who passed away earlier this year. Agogino, Yelick, and Annette Blum, daughter of Richard Blum, recognized Blum and his family for his contributions and dedication to the center. Following these emotional parting words were two student speeches, both impactful and touching — a clear sign that the community cultivated within the minor is unlike any other.

“One of the things I always loved about being in GPP — we could always count on each other to care,” said one of the speakers, Madison Luzar, a molecular environmental biology major. “We knew that, at the very least, we could rely on each other to work together to try to overcome these obstacles and not just give up on the world.” 

Abigail Lomibao, the other student speaker, delivered a spoken word speech, poetically recounting how GPP students and faculty shaped her experience at Cal. The ceremony, too, strengthened relationships built within the minor; as each student walked down the Campanile Esplanade to receive their certificate, they read a statement for the following student. Rounding off the ceremony was a keynote speech from 2011 alumna Natalyn Daniels reflecting on the minor as a formative experience that shaped her commitment to activism and advocacy. “This campus and the world are lucky to have felt your presence and impact!” Daniels told the graduating class.

Students from all backgrounds and fields participate in this program; this year’s graduating class spanned 30 majors, ranging from architecture to public health to environmental economics. While there are only a few required classes, the program revolves around a student-arranged practice experience, where students connect poverty theories learned in class to tangible experiences by working extensively with organizations addressing poverty. “The practice experience is what many students find significant to them,” Chowdhry says. “It’s why the program even has its own graduation.”

But prior to fulfilling one’s practice, students must take two mandatory classes: GPP 115 and then GPP 105. In the former, students examine and critique popular ideas of poverty alleviation in the 21st century. By understanding 20th century development, students grasp the institutional framework of poverty ideas and practices. GPP 105 specifically prepares students to undertake their practice experience by learning the ethics of global service as well as methodological frameworks to work with organizations.

To formulate a practice experience, or PE, students are guided by their own interest and curiosities to identify a facet of poverty alleviation — from healthcare accessibility to food security to economic justice — that they want to focus on. With the assistance of the Blum Center’s network of connections, they then locate an organization, such as an NGO, a government agency, or a social movement which can foster hands-on community work. PEs can be arranged domestically or internationally and must be done for at least 240 hours over six weeks, although most students engage in their PEs much longer than this minimum. Graduates in the class of 2022 completed their PEs across the world, focusing on a variety of disciplines. Rhea Manoharan, a data science major, completed her practice experience in Moorea, French Polynesia working as an invasive species and pesticide management researcher with the French Polynesian government. Using data science and field research, she advised on environmental policy to find the safest and most equitable pesticide practices. Eniola Owoyele, an integrative biology major, worked on a USAID-funded research project focused on postpartum hemorrhage management and respectful maternity care for the Fitovinany and Atsinanana regions of Madagascar.

Following their practice experience, students take a course in which they reflect on their PE and learn to utilize the knowledge beyond the confinements of the curriculum. Students identify lessons which can be applied to public discourse and civic engagement by exploring the tensions between power versus privilege, tourism versus travel, and community service versus engagement.

Completing the practice experience did not come easy for the class of 2022, though. With many having practice experience opportunities lined up, only to be canceled due to the pandemic, they were forced to adapt to abnormal circumstances. While some were able to pivot and arrange for their PEs to be done remotely, others did not have that option. For example, while many students originally had work arranged within the healthcare sector, addressing COVID-19 dominated the interest of those organizations. These organizations could no longer manage hosting students, as their priorities completely shifted. The GPP program, too, worked to be as flexible as possible to ensure students were able to complete the minor. In the summer of 2020, students were able to do slightly fewer hours or work remotely if needed. For students who weren’t able to do the full amount of time, they were given the opportunity to do an optional summer study, which allowed them to address the problem they had originally wanted to study in their PE by conducting research around a question they came up with themself.

The class guided them through exercises and methods to help them explore an area of interest centered around group disparity. Questions ranged from, “How might we decolonize and increase Indigenous sovereignty in environmental science and environmentalism?” to pandemic-related questions such as “How might we harness the catalyzing power of COVID-19 to radically reconstruct our social welfare policies and programs?” Students used these questions as a jumping off point for their topic of study, then identified and interviewed community members to obtain various perspectives and complete their practice experience in this unique manner.

Despite adversity making completing the minor much more difficult, students remained dedicated to the cause.

“Students were willing to take this opportunity as a way to learn. That is one of the things I greatly appreciate about the minor — students are coming into this program seeking to learn,” says Chowdhry. “In the face of such challenges, everything falling apart, it could’ve been really easy for a student to no longer want to take on this minor. But these students did whatever it took to complete it.”