Jenna Harb’s journey with activism and community engagement began early, and kick-started in high school when she found herself involved with the ACLU of Wisconsin.
However, as Harb invested more time in the organization, she discovered a preference for one-on-one community work.
Throughout her time at UW-Madison studying political science and legal studies with minors in public policy and Middle Eastern studies, Harb’s wide range of studies kept her options open for how she would approach her future career.
She began to realize that the aspect of civic engagement that excited her was the hands-on involvement with those who were impacted by the policies being created. Becoming an advocate for underrepresented populations allowed Harb the opportunity to provide empathy through her experience in policy creation and engage with the community in a profound and important way.
During her freshman year, Harb quickly realized that she wanted to begin pursuing an on-campus job that aligned with her long-term goals. Her job search brought her to the Morgridge Center for Public Service.
“I think that my interest and my skill set lies more with interacting with people on a one-to-one level and doing activism through that, through a nonprofit/advocacy setting, rather than party politics,” Harb explains.
After applying for several jobs at the center, a former employee at the Morgridge Center recommended Harb for the Student Organization Partnership Program (SOPP) internship, a position that Harb began at the start of her sophomore year, and held for the remainder of her time at UW-Madison.
The SOPP role holds positive peer interaction at its center and prioritizes connecting campus organizations with the necessary funds to help them succeed. Through grants from the Morgridge Center, several community-engaged organizations are able to give their members a full-picture experience, involving community-engaged opportunities, guest speakers and a wider bandwidth of opportunities to implement their goals.
“I think my favorite part of the job, specifically, was connecting with student organizations on an individual level,” Harb says. “We got to know what drives student organizations and what drives the student leaders to be a part of those organizations.”
After graduating from UW-Madison in 2023, Harb went on to work at Marquette University’s Center for Peacemaking in Milwaukee, WI. There, she is able to work with students, plan agendas for domestic and international trips relating to peacemaking and non-violence and handle recruitment planning for the university’s peace studies major and minor.
Continuing her time in higher education, Harb sees a lot of the same values that the Morgridge Center instilled within her at play in her current position and outside of work within separate activist circles she participates in. She describes the hard realization upon graduation that oftentimes the importance of community is de-emphasized within early adulthood when in reality, Harb explains, is the time when it proves to be most crucial.
“I think that it speaks to a greater issue of what community looks like in different places,” Harb explains.
She describes people living in bigger cities having a wider network and more opportunities to form connections versus someone who decides to settle in the suburbs, most notably for young people right out of college. Harb stresses that proximity and circumstances play a bigger role in our ability to form connections, a reality she is hoping to change.
This important realization led Harb to begin making a conscious effort to recenter herself with the principles that the Morgridge Center once instilled within her, regardless of location.
“I want to be better prepared for community engagement,” she stresses. “I want to be able to show up for my community the best that I can.”
This has led to her implementation of encouraging hard conversations within her current position and finding new ways to be a more successful facilitator of that kind of discourse. She hopes these are the skills that the students she works with take away — that while the barriers are numerous and extensive — true personal authenticity, in connection with community, can help you to achieve any goal.
“I certainly didn’t know what responsible community engagement looked like before I joined the Morgridge Center,” Harb states. “And that was a game changer for me.”