Grad students present asset maps at Center for Church and Community Impact

Fellowship Southwest is privileged to support interns at Center for Church and Community Impact (C3I) at Baylor’s Diana Garland School of Social Work. These graduate students, some of who are dual-degree students getting their M.S.W. and their M.Div at Truett Seminary, have been serving at C3I this year for their internship. They each chose a project related to their focus of work and developed an asset map. Two staff members from Fellowship Southwest, Cameron Vickrey and Anyra Cano, attended their presentations in person in Waco to learn from them and see the impact of their work.

Sean Powell

Identify assets and resources available to the homeless population in Waco

Sean worked with local stakeholders and team members to develop a map of assets and resources for homeless in Waco. His team was made of members of the Heart of Texas Homeless Coalition, a person who was formerly homeless in Waco for many years, as well as someone who is currently experiencing homelessness.

They put together resources that were food based, housing based, health based and congregation based.

The most unexpected part of this project for Sean was watching social capital grow in real time by including an individual who is currently homeless on the team.

Chie Seshimo Lee

Resource Map for International Students to make resources findable and accessible for international graduate students and their families.

As an international graduate student from Japan, Chie knows what it feels like to be in a new country with very few resources. She Interviewed many other international grad students, and put a team together to find resources that will help other students in the future.

International churches are a hub of resources and a natural place where students can find hospitality, welcome, and genuine care.

She found that most of the resources available to students in Waco would require a car for transportation. This is an unfortunate challenge as many, like herself, rely on a bike or walking.

Chie also learned that 50% of food pantry users at Baylor are international students, which highlights the need for resources. She is planning on using her remaining time in Waco to advocate with the university on how they can better serve their international students, not only through resources, but through a changed approach. In her cultural competency studies, she found that the U.S. is far more task-based than many other countries that are relationship-based, and their programming needs to be more relationship-focused in order to establish trust.

Beth Ann McCormick

Asset Map for Survivors of Sexual Trauma

Compile accessible and living list of assets and resources available to suvivaors of sexual violence in Waco.

An alarming statistic Beth Ann shared is that 1 in 5 women will be sexually assaulted before Thanksgiving of their freshman year in college.

Beth Ann put a team together, including one person who is a victim of sexual violence herself, to find resources in the categories of crisis care, physical, spiritual, community outreach/ed, medical care, mental/emotional care, legal services, other (crime scene clean up).

Most resources are in the mental/emotional care category at 33%, then crisis care at 25%.

Of the 206 churches in Waco, very few offer spiritual resources. They only included a congregation if they have a specific program for interacting to victims of sexual violence.

Beth Ann's and her team’s recommendations from the project include filling gaps in the spiritual and legal resource categories, disseminating the resource guide to Waco faith communities, for organizations to build partnerships, develop and use curriculum for survivor groups, create environments of empowerment through educations (normalizing the conversation).

Natalie Ortiz-Lovince

Robertson County and Franklin, TX Asset Map

Natalie’s asset map project was a little different than the others. Instead of focusing on a topic of need in Waco, she entered a new community as a social worker to see what they have to offer.

In rural Franklin in Robertson County, Texas, Natalie worked mostly with FBC Franklin. They people and staff there knew there were needs in their community, but were not sure how to address them.

Natalie taught them to switch from a deficit mindset of needs to a strengths based mindset of assets. She also reminded them that many of them are assets in themselves. This was a new and empowering way of thinking for many of them.

Natalie’s project provided a map of resources and assets within Franklin and Robertson County to all the churches and social services agencies in the community. It is easily updated for when Natalie turns this map over to a stakeholder in the community.

Her hope is to rekindle the communication between churches and showcase the strengths in the county. As is common in rural counties, school districts and churches are the sources of the biggest assets. 42% of assets in Franklin are in the churches.

Recommendations are to continue to share and update the map, encourage pastors to network with one another to share resources and work together, and provide safe play spaces and programs for children and youth like a community center.

If you are intrigued by these asset maps and would like to learn how to do one for your community, you are invited to a webinar led by one of last year’s C3I interns, Cintia Aguilar. She is holding one in Spanish on May 16 and one in English on May 18.