Today we’d like to introduce you to Dawn McCarty.
Hi Dawn, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
During the early 2000s, I developed an interest in the economic and social changes occurring in rural Mexico. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) had changed everything in the rural communities that I was getting to know. Already working in academia, I used grant funding to spend two years in total conducting formal interviews of women and families across Mexico that had been left behind by husbands, fathers, daughters, and sons that had migrated to the United States. Back in the US, I took a faculty position at the University of Houston Downtown to help start a new Social Work Program, and a meaningful synergy between my scholarship in Mexico and my new service with actual migrants at Casa Juan Diego was born. Casa Juan Diego holds iconic status in Houston as a long-standing refuge and house of hospitality for new and established immigrant communities. Casa Juan Diego is a traditional Catholic Worker House, and as such, all the staff, including me, live in the community and serve refugees, asylum seekers, and other new arrivals directly, without any pay. Based on 13 years of this meaningful and beautiful work, I developed a new professional practice paradigm, Solidarity Social Work Practice, and gained knowledge and experience that brings every class I teach to life! Getting to do this work with new arrivals from all over the world is an honor, and the many encounters with thousands of people on the margins of our community continue to inform my work as now Professor and Director of the University of Houston Downtown Bachelor of Social Work Program.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
When you are doing the right thing, using your time to care for others and work for justice, a path will always open up for you to continue. This I know for certain.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
I am most proud of the community and culture that I have helped to create in the UHD Social Work Program. In the program, we teach, mentor, and shape our learning environment in solidarity with our students, working hard to model equality and empowerment in everything we do. As an example: we are a fully open-access program so that every student has the same access to learning materials for each course taught in our curriculum, students are taught by faculty that represent their diversity, and we provide a trauma-informed educational environment that enriches and supports students during challenging times. We claim success when students take these value-based experiences while in our program and apply them to the people and communities they will serve as new social work professionals.
We’d be interested to hear your thoughts on luck and what role, if any, you feel it’s played for you?
Luck is not the cause of my success. I was simply born into the right family at the right time. And, because I was born into privilege, it is my lifelong task to reconcile this imbalance. Everyone should have the opportunities that I have been given — to be safe and healthy and to be able to pursue their dreams. It is my goal to work for such a reality.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://solidaritysocialwork.org/
- Instagram: solidaritysocialwork
- Twitter: @DawnMccartyd
