A (Sort of) Homecoming: Returning to My Higher Education Roots

After a 15-year hiatus I am back working in higher education. Although many things have changed, much has stayed the same. And it feels like coming home.

I spent my twenties working as a fundraiser for a series of universities, including my own alma mater, Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas. Southwestern is a small liberal arts college, nestled in the suburbs of Austin and much-beloved by its alumni.

Image credit: Southwestern University

A cornerstone of Southwestern’s alumni relations and fundraising program was (and continues to be) Homecoming Weekend.

Homecoming Weekend has taken many iterations over the years but is always marked by reunions, fancy dinners, and random events like the year the chair of the Board of Trustees had a live steer visit campus to welcome a “Yankee” donor. (This is Texas, mind you.)

Working at Southwestern, I selfishly looked forward to Homecoming as a time to get paid to party and hang out with many of my old friends. It was a long weekend and we were always exhausted at the end, but I loved it. When I left Southwestern it was the thing I missed most of all.

Fast forward many years later. I left higher ed, took a series of writing and communications jobs at small nonprofits (all of which I loved), had three kids, and built a life in San Francisco. Then I decided that I missed the energy of being on campus and I wanted to return to higher education. I found the perfect fit in my current job at the University of San Francisco.

The University of San Francisco (USF) is a Jesuit university with a beautiful historic campus, hidden in plain sight in the middle of San Francisco. Like Southwestern, it has a rich history, rigorous environment, and loyal alumni base.

Although I am still in the honeymoon phase, my new position at USF feels a bit like coming home. Granted, the urban location is in quite the contrast to Southwestern’s country setting. But the energy here is warm, welcoming, and values-centric. It just feels right, like the perfect place and time to reenter the university environment.

My team is hardworking, smart, and fun. We are already making plans and building strategies to help the university achieve fundraising goals and help even more students. We even get to do the marketing and communications for USF’s own version of Homecoming Weekend.

Managing a Student Enrollment Communications Crisis from the Soccer Field

On a Friday evening my team and I prepared to leave the office to attend an annual Parents for Public Schools of SF (PPS-SF) fundraiser.

I got a call on my personal phone from the personal mobile of an administrator at the San Francisco Public School District. There had been a delay in letters that notified families of their public school placement, which were due to be mailed that day.

This is a big deal.

San Francisco public school enrollment is a notoriously complex system, sending the calmest parents into tailspins of anxiety as they sit in limbo to learn where their child might attend kindergarten, middle school, or high school.

Although the schools are excellent, the enrollment process is flawed and confusing, causing unnecessary family stress and favoring families with time and resources over under-resourced or non-English-speaking families. Part of our job at PPS-SF was to share information about the complex student assignment system, so that all families could make the best choices for their children.

And now the letters that told families their assigned schools were indefinitely late. It was my job to drop everything and help disseminate that information with thousands of families across the City.

My team sprung into action. We had just launched a new website and coordinating communications platforms (thank goodness). I started drafting copy as soon as I got off the phone.

Thirty minutes later I was back on the phone with SFUSD as they updated their own website and social media. They asked if we could wait one minute to post until after they went live.

I had the blog post drafted and links were ready to push out. My colleagues sat next to me, creating parallel communications in Chinese and Spanish.

“Ok go",” the district administrator said.

I hit send and emailed 10,000 English-speaking parents on our newsletter list. I texted an additional 2,000 in English and manually posted on all our social media sites in hopes of reaching as many families as possible. My colleagues notified several thousand more via WeChat in Chinese and released Spanish copy via a targeted text-messaging app.

Then my team packed up and left for the fundraiser.

I spent the next 48 hours, over the weekend, in constant contact with SFUSD.

I had only just added apps for our new website and text platform on my phone the week before. Instead of running to the office on Saturday for constant updates I went to my kid’s soccer game. I updated the changes to student assignment letters live from the soccer fields, knowing that anxious families were surely checking their own inboxes from their own weekend activities.

Grateful for professional collaboration with SFUSD and our team at PPS-SF. We had an emergency plan in place and we used it. Although many families experienced stress and anxiety at not knowing where their children would go to school, they were able to turn to our organization as a source of information and comfort.

Callisto Press Highlights

A few press engagements that I have coordinated during my time at Callisto to date.

NBC Nightly News with Kate Snow: “Growing Number of Tech Tools Aim to Empower Survivors to Report Sexual Assault”

The Wall Street Journal: “An Online Tool to Catch Workplace Sexual Predators”

Forbes: “These Founders Killed It In 2018, And Their Returns Are All Impact”

Forbes: “Callisto Supports Survivors And Keeps Communities Safe”

Forbes: “So You Want to Start a Movement? Read This First”

LinkedIn Blog: “The Most Overlooked (and Effective) Step to Fighting Workplace Harassment”

i-D Magazine: “How Technology is Tackling the Stigma Around Sexual Assault"

Asana Blog: “10 Standout Women Who Are Changing the World with Asana”

Creating The Callisto Survivor's Guide

The Goal

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I took on The Callisto Survivor’s Guide as my first big project at the organization. We had a six-week turnaround with a goal of creating a comprehensive, public-facing resource to support survivors of sexual assault, rape, and professional sexual coercion. It had to be simple, easy-to-read, inclusive of all identities, and, above-all, focused on survivors.

Callisto was set to launch a new repeat perpetrator detection platform to members of the founder community, and The Survivor’s Guide had to be ready for inclusion in the launch.

I had the good fortune to work with a talented team of professionals, and we made something terrific.

A Survivor Centric Approach

Our team included a social worker graduate student/survivor advocate , Miriam Joelson, who built our initial content outline. We then tested the proposed content internally with other staff members at Callisto. Many of the Callisto team are survivors themselves, and their feedback was invaluable as we decided which information was most essential to include in a minimum viable product before launch.

We decided to focus on the following sections:

• Understanding the Language

• Practicing Self-Care

• Getting Emotional Help

• Reporting the Incident

• Navigating Professional Sexual Coercion

• How Callisto Can Help

Stef Angeles, Director of Product Design at Callisto, used her training in Forensic Experiential Trauma Interview (FETI) to build a product with complete focus on the user experience every step of the way. Each decision we made about the look and feel of the guide passed her rigorous review for trauma-informed design and seamless user experience.

Our legal team, Eve Charand and Ellie Dehghan, offered invaluable advice on legal definitions and options for survivors moving forward, which rounded out the content.

Before handing a final version off to the engineering team, we conducted an audit to ensure that all language and external resource links were inclusive of all genders and identities, with resources especially targeted toward marginalized groups. We tested iterations of the draft with volunteers in-person, and via user-testing sites, and we revised areas that were unclear or incomplete.

The Final Product

The final product was ready to go in time for launch. We included a version of the content behind the login for survivors who create accounts with Callisto. We also made a PDF version that is available to anyone who needs it. I look forward to collecting user feedback for improved future expanded versions of the guide, so that we can support even more survivors.

From Dreamweaver to a Dream: Rebuilding the PPS-SF Website

When I started my job as Director of Communications at Parents for Public Schools of San Francisco (aka PPS-SF) I inherited a ten-year-old website. The site used Dreamweaver and it lived on a desktop in the home of (a very nice) contract design consultant that I had never met in person.

The site was full of outdated text, complicated links, ancient pictures, and too many drop down menus. Our executive director joked that she didn’t like to give out our URL because it was too embarrassing.

However, our work depended on the clear dissemination of information and resources to San Francisco families. Clearly, we had a problem to solve.

We needed a tool to help us take lots of complex policy information and make it accessible. We needed to upgrade our platform and our information security. We needed a brand overhaul. We needed translation into Spanish and Chinese. And we needed it to be incredibly affordable to create and maintain because we had a budget of zero dollars, being a scrappy nonprofit.

So we rolled up our sleeves and solved the problem in true scrappy nonprofit style.

Our then executive director, Masharika Prejean Maddison, wrote a stellar grant for $80,000 for a website overhaul and brand refresh. We were awarded less than half.

So we scaled it back and put out a call for bids. We Are Licious, a high-end, innovative production team, came in well under budget with a special “nonprofit rate.” It helped that two of their team members were public school parents and felt an affinity for our mission.

The We Are Licious team managed the product design and I furiously spent three months writing and editing copy. It was a challenge to make thousands of words on the notorious SFUSD student assignment system fit into our clean and tidy new site. We user tested with our own staff who patiently sat through many impromptu focus-groups, before getting feedback from other public school parents.

We also overhauled our newsletter, social media, presentation decks, and other collateral to match the design and branding on the new site. We had to do all of this in-house, with no graphic designer, as we had burned through our grant budget.

Finally we launched. Just in time for families to receive school assignment letters and for a school district communications crisis on the eve of our annual fundraiser. The site was polished and ready to go. And our social media, text messaging, and email communications all came together so that we could manage the crisis remotely from the event.

None of this would have been possible a mere six months earlier.