Hi everyone! My name is Grace Liu and I’m a rising senior at Vanderbilt University studying Human & Organizational Development with a concentration in Community Leadership & Development.
As a Novel Hand contributor, I’m interested in exploring best practices for social change and how to measure progress in a variety of fields, from organizational development to collective impact to philanthropy. I’m passionate about the mobilization and equipping of diverse peoples within and across organizations and sectors to empower the marginalized and the vulnerable.
It wasn’t until recently that I began to realize that these “wicked problems” like poverty, poor education, and homelessness stem from deeply rooted and complex issues that require more than our typical conception of “community service” to address. A high school paper on religious persecution in the Middle East and a book on the European refugee crisis first opened my eyes to the reality of social injustice on a global scale, and my interest in issues like these continued with a college sociology class in race and racism and another class in community psychology. After that, I switched my major and focus to community development, a field which merges my heart for underserved communities with the theories and research to understand and address these cross-sector, global problems.
This past spring, I interned at Siloam Health, a whole-person health care ministry that serves the uninsured and culturally marginalized in Nashville, Tennessee. I worked with the Community Health Workers (CHW) team, helping address the social determinants of health for four different immigrant and refugee populations, and my semester culminated with a design project to compile and share COVID-19 response resources among the many Nashville agencies and organizations serving these communities. This project in particular, along with a literature review on CHW program evaluation, furthered my interest in the systems affecting immigrant and refugee communities and led me to consider issues including health policy, education, and program design and evaluation. I hope to dive deeper into community and global health during my time with Novel Hand.
My exploration and career aspirations are driven by my Christian faith, which compels me to not only learn and discuss the real problems facing our world, but to live my life with the humility, empathy, and courage required to do something about them. It’s why I was so excited to discover this Novel Hand community, where these values are viewed as vital to the process.
I’m grateful for the opportunity to join the team, and I hope you will come along for this journey of growth and exploration. Because it is a journey, after all—one that none of us can do alone.
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- What You Should Know About the Uighur Human Rights Crisis - July 28, 2020
- “Slacktivist” to activist - July 13, 2020