O’Neill student receives public safety scholarship

Posted on September 20, 2021 by Leslie Wells

A woman and man stand in white tshirts holding large scholarship check — Jerry Baker presents O’Neill Public Safety Management major Candace Smallwood a scholarship from the Jason Baker Legacy Scholarship, funded by the Beyond the Badge 5K/Walk.

Candace Smallwood is the first in her family to attend college. Her mother is a preschool teacher—her father, an aviation mechanic.

“Even though they hadn’t attended college, my parents were incredibly encouraging and gave me the critical emotional support I needed to know that I belonged here,” she says. “IUPUI and O’Neill picked up the baton from them providing guidance about what college would be like and helping me navigate campus life and my major.”

This first-generation student can boast another family first, as well. She’s the first to pursue a career in law enforcement.

“My whole life has centered around public service,” she says. “I’ve always been drawn to helping people. When I was evaluating careers, I thought law enforcement could be a great way to live out my life in service.”

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Jamie Levine Daniel honored for work on antisemitism

Posted on September 13, 2021 by Leslie Wells

Woman wearing black sweater and glasses standing in hallway — O’Neill Associate Professor Jamie Levine Daniel was honored for her work on addressing antisemitism in the classroom.

On September 2, 2021, O’Neill Associate Professor Jamie Levine Daniel was sitting in her office meeting with a student. She doesn’t usually have her phone out, but that day she had left it on her desk.

She saw an alert pop up—an unexpected text message from a friend.

“He said, ‘Congrats on best article,’” she says. “I had no idea what he was talking about.”

Then came a screenshot of a tweet from the Network of Schools of Public Policy, Affairs, and Administration’s (NASPAA) Journal of Public Affairs Education.

In the midst of the Jewish High Holy Days season, she—along with fellow Jewish colleagues Rachel Fyall and Jodi Benenson—had received the 2021 NASPAA JPAE Outstanding Article award for their article, “Talking about antisemitism in MPA classrooms and beyond.”

“It was completely unexpected,” Levine Daniel says. “We wrote the resource we wished had existed for us. We made the case for caring about antisemitism more broadly and within this frame of ‘othering’ and public service delivery.”

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Study sustainability and cross-cultural understanding

Posted on August 30, 2021 by Leslie Wells

Graphic that says Sustainable Development Goals

While COVID-19 put study abroad programs on hold in 2020, three O’Neill students were forming a transatlantic connection with students in Rwanda.

“I’m a pretty big traveler—especially internationally—but as a sustainability student, it can be a bit conflicting,” admits Aspen Grieshaber, a Sustainable Management and Policy major. “A lot of that travel just isn’t sustainable.”

Especially during a pandemic. That’s why an IUPUI Honors College course in the fall 2020 semester caught her attention.

In 2020, the Rwanda Virtual Exchange Program let IUPUI students virtually connect with students at the University of Rwanda to learn about each other’s cultures while also examining how each country addressed Sustainable Development Goals created by the United Nations. The 17 SDGs were adopted by UN-member nations in 2015 to advance sustainability efforts worldwide.

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Indiana Climate Fellowship provides sustainability partnership

Posted on August 23, 2021 by Leslie Wells

Written by: James Boyd, O’Neill Bloomington, Director of Marketing and Communications

Growing up in Greenwood, Indiana, Ciana Sorrentino didn’t know what she wanted to do when she grew up, but she knew she wanted to help her community, not sit in a cubicle for eight hours a day.

The third-generation Hoosier spent this past summer as an Indiana Climate Fellow, helping the Kentuckiana Regional Planning and Development Agency develop key assets in nine different Indiana and Kentucky counties to develop a hazard mitigation plan.

Sorrentino was a triple-major as an undergraduate in the Kelley School of Business—business management, human resources, and international business, in case you were wondering—but joined the O’Neill School at IUPUI to pursue her MPA in Policy Analysis. During one of her courses, she was assigned a group project that paired her with Danni Schaust.

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Diplomacy Lab helps O’Neill graduate students make a difference in Kosovo

Posted on August 16, 2021 by Leslie Wells

As O’Neill students return for the fall 2021 semester, those in O’Neill Senior Lecturer Bill Foley’s J-531 National and Homeland Security in America course will get the chance to contribute to the U.S. Department of State’s policymaking process. For the seventh time in as many years, Foley will lead his students through a Diplomacy Lab project, a research opportunity allowing students to dive into complex foreign policy challenges proposed by State Department officials.

For fall 2021, students will evaluate the effectiveness of social and cultural exchange programs for improving the United States’ image, messaging, and foreign relations with various nations.

“The Diplomacy Lab project gives students a chance to engage the international dialogue in a way that no other embedded government project can do,” Foley explains. “Our students actually become the research arm of the U.S. Department of State.”

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