Video 5:  Social Sciences
Advocacy & Civic Engagement

Question: What advice would you give to students seeking to make a change in their communities?
Speaker: Megan Deaton
UMUC Honor Society President, Pi Gamma Mu
Maryland Theta Chapter

The advice I’d give to students is pick something that’s meaningful to you. If it’s something you don’t have any interest in, you’re going to hate it. So for example, Habitat for Humanity, I know that’s super popular, but if you’re really not into building houses or doing different things like that that are associated to Habitat for Humanity, you’ll probably will have a miserable time doing it.

But let’s say that you really enjoy cooking. You can help volunteer in soup kitchens and things like that. So find something that you’re interested in, and then you can definitely find a way to help others by using what your interests are.

Speaker: Joshua Graf, BS
UMUC Alumnus
Gerontology ’13

Clients would sit down after we did the duties and they would share stories of them growing up in the '40s, '50s, and '60s, and the young volunteers were so eager to listen to their stories. And then the young people would share stories of what they’re dealing with in their lives, and that was important for the older adults. Most clients lived alone, so it was very important to have that interaction that they so desired with the young volunteers.

Speaker: Blair Hayes, PhD
Adjunct Assistant Professor, UMUC
Ombudsman and Vice President of Diversity Programs, UMUC

I think the most important thing to remember is that it is always about the people, and you can’t overlook the fact that even on an individual level we have the ability to affect people’s personal lives in a way they experience not only the workplace but also their home lives. And so we think about just the one-on-one interactions that we have with people, when then they leave us, they are interacting with other people and so who—it passes on from one person to the next. And so understanding that we are impacting people at the smallest level, that then can affect the larger group setting as well. And that’s the most important thing, I think that comes from social science as in gerontology as well.

Speaker: Jean Accius, PhD
Adjunct Associate Professor, UMUC
Director, Health & LTSS, AARP Office of Policy Integration

My first advice is to think about this as a continual conversation. And what I mean by that is the fact that clearly we are going to need your skill sets, we are going to need your experiences, but we’re also going to need new thinking. We also want to deliver and design systems that you would want to be involved in as you age, or you would want to be involved in. So we need to think about, you know, what are the systems that we are creating and advocating for and designing for the future, and will I want to be a part of that? That’s the gut check reaction, right? Will I want to go to this Meals on Wheels site? Will I want to go to this community health clinic? So those are the things that we have to think about. I think that, you know, there’s a great deal of lessons we can learn from the other disciplines. And we need to start thinking about this as a cross-functional team, in a sense. Look at Apple. Are there innovations? Are there different features or different things that we could be doing to evolve our field in a meaningful way because we’re dealing with new people, we’re dealing with new generations. And I think that that’s something that’s extremely important as advocates to think about—you know, what am I advocating for, and for whom?

Speaker: David Hale, JD
Adjunct Assistant Professor, UMUC
Vice President for External Relations, Planned Parenthood

The field of gerontology helps us place our advocacy efforts into a historic context, so what you have is the ability to learn from our living elders how the civil rights battles and issues that were fought before us have played out. And that gives us an opportunity, especially for young people as they’re looking at the issues that they care about to learn from past mistakes and past successes in terms how you organize people, how you create change, where the points of leverage are that are most effective for creating the type of change they want to manifest in the world. So the students who are in behavioral science, especially those focusing in gerontology, I think are doing themselves a great service in becoming lifetime advocates.