Recently, 2nd-year HESA student Emily Fiagbedzi presented two workshops at the 2018 National IMPACT Conference. According to the conference website, IMPACT is the “largest annual conference focused on the civic engagement of college students in community service, service-learning, community-based research, advocacy and other forms of social action.”  This year’s conference was held at the University of Dayton in Ohio.

Emily’s first workshop was entitled “Doing well and doing good: Supporting students in their pursuit of social good career paths,” and it targeted administrators and professional staff.  The workshop shared the history, structure, and activities of UConn’s Careers for the Common Good initiative in an effort to inspire similar collaborations at universities across the nation. It included a planning and group sharing component that allowed participants to create concrete plans to take back to their institutions.

In her second workshop, “Design Thinking with the Community: Creating more effective programs and initiatives,” Emily shared how the design thinking framework (also known as “human-centered design” or “empathetic design”) can be used to develop and co-create programs alongside communities, centering community voices in order to more effectively address community needs. The workshop not only introduced the framework of design thinking, but provided resources and activities that students, administrators, and professional staff could take back to their communities and implement in their programs.

The HESA program congratulates Emily on her recent conference success.

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