For the duration of my Leadership-in-Action project this summer, I coordinated with a team from Georgetown University's McCourt School of Public Policy and the National Catholic Educational Association to perform research related to Catholic school closures. While this research has a broader national focus, I specifically spent time examing school closures within the districts under the authority of the Archdiocese of Washington. Another facet of my leadership project focused on volunteering in person and engaging with specific community in Washington D.C. This experience served as the groundwork for my ability to understand the unique context in which Catholic-affiliated organizations provide services and community centers. 

My six weeks began with initial;y volunteering in the Mt.Pleasant area where the DC Spanish Catholic Center is located and currently operates. During my research, I determined that the Center served a variety of neighborhoods ranging from Adams Morgan and Columbia Heights. Geographic data was one of my primary research points with the McCourt team and visualizing the reach of the Center was incredibly helpful when conceptualizing my own impact and the utility of my community engagement on the ground. In the early weeks, I put in the hours working within the Center's food program while concurrently conducting literature reviews on the primary causes of Catholic School closures. I learned that a unique blend of trends related to school mergers and facility demographic change heavily impacted enrollment numbers in the Northeast United States. While examining the macro-level changes, I narrowed on a specific case example within the regional Archidiosece district as part of my task to collate a large repository of data related to historical school closures.  

While this research was incredibly fascinating and engaging, I found that the community at the Center captured most of my interest - especially when considering and reflecting on leadership and what it personally meant to me. Working within the Archdiosce’s proverbial net of aid-related organizations exposed me to critical support services that the community relied on. It showed me how individual volunteering paired with consistent work can tangibly improve the quality of life for a family - and community. In this aspect, I can summarize that leadership, both within research and relations-building, starts with an individual but ends in a community. 

This was impressed upon me while working with numerous individuals, program managers, and staff that demonstrated the value of being a part of the community that you serve. This means communal work, mutual comprehension, and an attenuated sense of community need. This type of experience was incredibly valuable, particularly given my first summer research topic exclusively focused on the impact of cash transfers and their ability to mitigate food insecurity. It was very fortuitous that I could actualize both my research from my first Laidlaw summer alongside the research from my second and final one. 

Moreover, my work at the Center has broadened my ability to successfully operate in numerous other contexts not directly related to my work with the Center's food program. This encompasses immersive work experience within a bilingual environment and the initial stages of forging deeper relationships and connections that will hopefully prove useful for the McCourt and NCEA teams as I continue to engage with religious members to schedule informational interviews regarding local Catholic schools. This aspect of my LiA project combines the educational and empirical learning processes associated with research while, in effect, grounding it within the reality of community-driven work. As I continue to work both at the Center and with the research team moving past my six-week project, the full scope of my work and its impact on me continues to show itself in new and surprising ways. I feel that this is evident in my increased knowledge base surrounding the research topic, the numerous sources I have collated to support my observations, and the knowledge that I will always be able to evaluate and apply my personal strengths to issues concerning depleting community centers and food insecurity. This project has enabled me to engage more substantively with my own university and one of its graduate schools, and the city which I have called home for the past two years.