Katie Rose Brosnan at YWCA for her CPP internship
Year of Graduation: 2013
Major: Political Science
Current Address: Chicago, IL
How were you engaged with ARC? Not just the seminar/internship/fellowship but describe the type of project.
CPP intern who focused on culturally competent early childhood education and board member development at the YWCA, strategic planning for the initial stages of the Tool Library, grant reader for a few semesters
Where are you now?
The Associated Colleges of the Midwest, a consortium of private liberal arts schools who do collaborate and community based learning. A lot of IWU’s peer and member institutions are part of the ACM.
Where did ARC take you professionally? Are you doing work that connects back to ARC in some way?
I am! The focus of the consortium is very ARC-like, and I do a lot of outreach work to students working on independent study projects rooted in their communities (either their campus community or while studying abroad). Additionally, I’m also in the process of applying for graduate schools with an emphasis on community based development programs.
Where did ARC take you personally? Are you engaged in community work that is ARC-like?
I am! I was already pretty engaged in racial justice issues in Chicago before ARC, so in a lot of ways ARC was about enriching and expanding my horizons to incorporate people from different backgrounds and recognizing the value of those different skillsets. I currently volunteer twice a week doing urban farming, donate to several community-based entrepreneurship startups, and am directing the trajectory of my career and higher education in ARC-like directions.
On a more personal level, I met some of the best friends of my life through ARC. Some people in my ARC cohort were men and women I had known for years without engaging with them on a deeper level, some where totally new to me and provoked a very cliched “where have you been all my life?” reaction when we got into the deeper work of exchanging ideas and making change happen. I’m attending an ARC alumni wedding with some ARC alumni friends in two weeks, and couldn’t be happier about it.
Did ARC teach you what we were supposed to teach you? Did we teach you anything that was a surprise or outside of the learning objectives?
I certainly thought ARC taught us way more than we thought we were getting into. For me, the biggest surprise from ARC was the way it taught me to love Bloomington, a community which I am ashamed to say I didn’t see for its gifts and strengths and talents for the first few years that I lived there. Even aside from all of the (many) skills that I developed while in ARC, my biggest takeaway was the way it altered my viewpoint. That, and the importance of a nice session of good-better-best.
Share a great memory about ARC/IWU.
Carpooling home with Lizzie Egan when it was horrifically hot out and going immediately to the peace garden to try to save the plants from a combo of heat exhaustion and squash bugs.
Emailing Matt Lalonde with info about the Philly tool library and having him show up two days later and say “well why can’t we do that?”.
Wednesday evening seminars with cookies from Kelly’s bakery.
That time I yelled at Danny about racism and actually *saw* him comprehend his privilege and check himself – talk about a lightbulb moment!
The first West Side 5k.
Manning the book bike during the fall after my CPP internship.
Staying on as an intern at the YWCA and working on grant applications.
Low-key competing with Cameron to see who could be the funnier self-deprecating storyteller.
Coming back and seeing the ARC tank in all its whiteboarded glory.
Getting shit done.