Everyone in nursing has a story that changes them. Diane White’s happened at the Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta in the nineties. While she was working the night shift in the trauma unit, a police officer was brought in who had been shot in the head. He was young, around 24 years old. “I didn’t figure he would last long,” White says. “But the parents weren’t ready to let go, so we just kept moving with what we’re doing.”
Sitting in a lecture hall in 2007, one thing Stephanie Fox didn’t want to hear when she started studying to be a therapist was that many people leave the field after 18 months. “I experienced that as quite shocking,” she says. Just a few months into a three year program, the math wasn’t adding up to her if that was true. At the time, she wondered, “If I’m going to be in school longer than I might actually be in the field, how is this worth it?”
“Two days ago, I made a decision to send 15,000 people home,” says David Lawrence. There was a tornado on the horizon, but still, calling off class for an entire school district was a hard decision to make. Lawrence, a graduate of the PhD in Leadership and Change program and the new superintendent of Dayton Ohio Public Schools, had to consider the impact on students, parents, and the staff that he now leads.
In 2018, Chanté Meadows stood on a TEDx stage and addressed a problem that’s central to her career: why isn’t mental health treated as being equally important as physical health? In this instance, she was speaking specifically about how this pattern affects the Black community that she’s part of. Meadows outlined stigmas she often heard associated with mental healthcare. Friends and neighbors would say, “I’m going to just go to Jesus and pray about it.”
The image we have of climate activism is often one of direct action: scientists chaining themselves to the doors of a Wells Fargo branch to encourage the bank to divest from fossil fuels; Greta Thunberg leading a school strike. But that’s not the extent of what climate activism can be. If we look closer, individuals and communities across the nation and planet are regularly making decisions in their day-to-day lives that impact climate change both today and in the future.
This is the second in a five-part series on how alumni of Antioch’s Graduate School of Leadership and Change are advancing healthcare in service of the common good.
“For somebody with substance use disorder in the U.S., there is only one story,” says Kathy Eggert. “That we believe people are not capable of self-agency and decision-making in a healthy way.” Eggert doesn’t believe that story, though, and she’s spent her career working against this narrative to provide care to people who use opioids through methadone maintenance treatment in ways that respect their humanity.
How do you tell the story of land that was shaped by a house—when that house no longer exists? When all that’s left is a field and an old barn, with the low peaks of Mount Monadnock in the distance?
“We live in a difficult, destructive, and oftentimes very limited, oppressive society. So how are you supposed to be healthy?” asks Cece Briggs. This isn’t, however, a question Briggs is directly answering in “Anxiety in Literature,” a class she is teaching in the BA in Liberal Studies on Antioch’s Seattle campus.
Business is always about profit. That’s the bottom line. Unless you’re talking about Ken Baker’s class, “Strategy, Innovation, and Resilience,”—then it’s time to think bigger. This class doesn’t have one bottom line, but three. “The triple bottom line is not about regular ‘business as usual,’” explains Baker. “It’s about taking a more holistic approach, where we talk about people, the planet, and profits.” This framework is changing how students conceptualize what it means to be successful.
Between 2015 and 2019, there was an almost 20% national loss in the number of full-time school librarians.
This trend represents an ongoing evolution in the structure and capacity of schools, and one of the few groups researching this change is Antioch University’s SLIDE project: ”School Library Investigation – Decline or Evolution?”
When MaiLinh Hartz, a master’s student in the Couple and Family Therapy program, was younger, people often said she had an old soul. “I was very introspective and had time to listen and absorb people’s stories and emotions,” she explains. It’s a common narrative heard among people who work in the mental health field that they were always, in some way, drawn to care. As a student, she is expanding what it means to take care of others—not just as a therapist, but as a peer.