We are excited to announce Volume I, Issue I of the Service and Social Justice Newsletter.
We hope you all enjoy reading about some of the great Service and Social Justice work that’s going on in Honors and at Fordham.
Many thanks to our SSJ Committee Chairs, Katie DeFonzo and Olivia Jones, for their work on the newsletter!
Click the link below for the Newsletter:
Katie DeFonzo is a graduating senior in the current Honors class who is incredibly involved on and off campus. Double majoring in History and Spanish and minoring in Medieval Studies, Katie works as a research assistant for The Bronx African American History Project through Fordham’s history program. She also gives tours of the Fraunces Tavern Museum in Manhattan, acts as an ESL tutor at St. Rita’s Immigration Center, works on both the Copy Editing and Peer Editing staffs of the Fordham Undergraduate Research Journal, leads retreats through Campus Ministry, plays second violin in the orchestra, and sings in the Schola Cantorum. Finally, she has been involved with the Honors Service and Social Justice Committee since its beginning and has become one of the committee’s chairs, passionately helping to plan events that allow Honors students serve their community.
I had the chance to speak with her about Honors, her role in the Service and Social Justice Committee, and her post-graduation plans.
From your time in Honors, do you have a favorite event or a favorite thing about the program in general?
I really like sophomore year, being able to go to the [AJCU] Honors Conference. In terms of my favorite part about the program in general, I like how cohesive it is and how you can see a lot of continuity between classes; I love when something we are talking about in literature comes up in my history class. I’m really looking forward to the Last Lecture tomorrow and I love the community and the events we have, like the Christmas party and the barbeque. I like how it’s more than just a learning community — it’s a community of friends in a lot of ways.
So you mentioned that you’ve been a chair of the Service and Social Justice Committee basically since its beginning. How did you become involved with that project?
Sophomore year when Dr. Keller became the director of the [Honors] program and started the Student Advisory Council, she asked us what we wanted to see, which was really nice. Someone put forth the idea that there should be a committee for service and social justice and that seemed really interesting to me so I put my name on the list. My junior year I became a chair [of the committee] and started to help plan the events that we do. It’s been really rewarding and I’m happy that I became involved with that subcommittee in particular.
What is your favorite event that you’ve done with that group?
We’ve done a lot of different things, but I really like one program we did earlier this year, which involved distributing food to residents in an apartment complex in the Bronx with Meals on Wheels. That was really special because we got to meet and deliver food personally to each resident so we could see immediately where our help was going.
What are your post-grad plans?
I’m going to Catholic University in Washington, D.C. for their dual Masters degree program in history and library science. I chose [that program] really because of the internship I had over the summer at the Museum of American History in D.C.; I realized how important not only a knowledge of history is, but also how being able to make that history accessible to people really matters. I think that this dual Masters degree program will be a great way to do that.
