Together, Harris and AmeriCorps Turn Students into Change Agents: Just Ask Wright, McGriffin

Two years ago, the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy became an AmeriSchool, building a strategic connection with the Corporation for National and Community Service, the federal agency that runs AmeriCorps and other service programs, by encouraging alumni of the National Volunteer Service to apply and matching scholarship money.

When the announcement was made, Assistant Professor Austin Wright and Director of Career Services Adam McGriffin were especially pleased.

That’s because both are alumni of the volunteer service. Wright spent two years in the Teach for America program, teaching freshmen and sophomores at a charter high school in post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans. Meanwhile, McGriffin, a former fireman and paramedic in Chicago’s south suburbs, did a year of VISTA service as part of a fire safety education program with the American Red Cross in six Chicago neighborhoods and three suburbs, all economically challenged.

Thirty AmeriCorps alums are now enrolled as students at Harris Public Policy, including three at the Evening Master’s Program.

“AmeriCorps alums are fantastic students,” Wright says. “They work incredibly hard, they’re invested in the core mission of our school, and they seem like obvious people we should want. They bring a different, unique perspective to classroom discussions.”

“They’re students who get things done,” McGriffin adds. “They’re ideal candidates to consider for Harris.”

Wright attended Memorial High School in San Antonio, located in one of the poorest school districts in the state of Texas. With a supportive parent, and despite the school’s low overall funding levels, he had the opportunity to take Advanced Placement classes and participate on the debate and Academic Decathlon teams. “I fortunately fell under the tutelage of some really committed people at an otherwise bad school, and they, in my mind, changed the course of my life, in fundamental and transformative ways,” he says.

Upon graduating from the University of Texas at Austin, Wright applied for Teach for America, following a path laid down by earlier alumni from the university debate team. But his high school experience also played a role. “There is this ontological reckoning you have, when you come to the end of your time in undergraduate, and life has given you so many opportunities,” he says. “And then you sit back and reflect on, how in the world did I get those opportunities? Well, I only got them because there were people who put their lives on hold and made some really tough decisions.”

Although his undergraduate advisors told him to apply for graduate school, Wright decided instead to put his own education on hold to do the same, with the hope of providing others with the opportunities he was given. His first year in New Orleans proved challenging and frustrating, figuring out how to manage his classroom, get his students invested, and teach them effectively.

“And then second year happened, and it was this moment of clarity, when all of the frustration that I had gone through the first year yielded all sorts of benefits,” he says. “Students entered with essentially the same level of performance, but we ended up having one of the highest end-of-year-exam passing rates in the city.”

When Wright entered his PhD program at Princeton University in 2011, he felt torn. “I was finally reaching a point where I could change lives, and then I was leaving,” he says. “That being said, having spent a lot of time in the classroom now, I realize that even in college, there are still ways you can change people. You can move someone from feeling overwhelmed and uninspired, who can’t quite articulate what they want as a career, and you can help guide that choice.”

At Harris, Wright has taught courses in statistics and in his primary research focus, counterinsurgency. One current classroom project focuses on the Burmese military’s use of village burnings as a means of ethnic cleansing. “It is so heartening to have so many students who are interested in understanding conflict: what are its root causes? How can we build peace?” he says. “It floors me to think about the kind of student engagement we have here.”

Looking back, Wright credits Teach for America with teaching him important life lessons. “If I hadn’t gone through TFA, I wouldn’t know what ‘heart’ means,” he says. “I thought I knew challenges, and obstacles, and difficulties.”

“Lived experiences alter what you do,” he adds. “People who have gone through AmeriCorps, you’re doing something incredibly meaningful, and so difficult—you’re fire-hardened, if you will, by that experience.”

That metaphor would apply literally to the work McGriffin undertook in Chicago neighborhoods and nearby suburbs, working in a VISTA program for the American Red Cross and funded through the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to educate people about fire safety. “The Red Cross responds to four fires a day in the Chicagoland area,” he says. “If you’re living paycheck to paycheck, getting displaced by a fire can put you in a position of homelessness quickly.”

McGriffin says his AmeriCorps experience has opened every career door he’s walked through since then, which included serving as director of the AmeriCorps program at the Greater Chicago Food Depository before coming to work at Harris, where a number of food depository “alumni” who once served for McGriffin had enrolled as students.

As a result of his volunteer service, McGriffin was also appointed by the Governor of Illinois to be a commissioner with Serve Illinois. The Serve Illinois Commission is a 40-member bipartisan board that oversees all aspects of administration and training for the AmeriCorps program.

“When I decided to apply for a position at Harris, that was one of my deciding factors—I got a great opportunity to know some Harris students first-hand,” he says. “I felt like I understood who the Harris student was. They were change agents. They had dedicated their lives to improving the status quo, and they had dedicated a year of their life to do volunteer service.”