Danielle Howell ’17 is from Brooklyn, New York. She is the child of Caribbean immigrants and has always been especially interested in the ways literature, the arts, and healthcare intersect. At Princeton, she majored in Comparative Literature, specializing in the Spanish and Portuguese languages, with gender studies as her chosen textual discipline. She minored in Translation and Intercultural Communication at Princeton and was also on the premedical track. During her time at Princeton, Danielle volunteered as an EMT with the Princeton First Aid and Rescue Squad and spent her summers working to improve healthcare disparities in Mexico and Peru. She enjoyed her experience working as an art teacher in Port Elizabeth, South Africa and being a dancer and choreographer for the Black Arts Dance company at Princeton, so she is very excited to continue similar work as a Fellow at the Coalition for Hispanic Family Services. She hopes her time as a Fellow will help her learn more about how she can better support at-risk youth in her community and make a positive impact as a doctor someday.
I was very excited to begin my role as a Princeton 55 Fellow at the Coalition for Hispanic Family Services because I was really moved by the mission statement of my organization and I wanted to take a year before medical school to do work that would make a tangible difference in my community. While I expected that I would be positively impacted by the people I interacted with during my Fellowship, I never imagined I would be as moved and changed as I have already been at this point in the year. I am a Teaching Artist; the Assistant Site Director at our afterschool program at PS 123 in Brooklyn, New York; and I also get to analyze data on the educational outcomes of my organization. As such, I have had the benefit of becoming familiar with the many dimensions involved in the maintenance of a nonprofit, from the groundwork, to the managerial work, and the work that ensures that what the nonprofit sets out to do is actually being accomplished.
Working in the public sector has definitely come with its challenges. Life for those who most need the kind of help my organization provides includes significant hardships, and I have been struck by the multidimensional way the cultural, social, and economic position one is born into can affect the education, opportunities, access, and day to day resources people have. It is easy to sometimes feel like these kinds of situations are hopeless, or like the day to day tasks my organization accomplishes are not making a dent. Nonetheless, I feel incredibly grateful to wake up each morning and be able to collaborate with people as loving, open, intelligent, empathetic, and courageous as my coworkers.
As a result, I have grown through the character traits that I have seen displayed by those I am surrounded with.
In a political and social climate that continuously challenges the rights and protections those from countries outside of the United States deserve, I feel lucky to be able to work with a population that has exposed me to the beauty of cultural diversity and some of the common threads that connect us all as human beings: the expression of our life experiences through words, and the arts.
More than anything, I am grateful for the children I get to work with. Despite the challenges they face, they come to our afterschool program with an openness to learn and a joy that inspires me. They have taught me how to be humble, willing to learn, fearless in the face of change or disappointments, forgiving without question, and appreciative of the simple joys life has to offer.
Furthermore, as the year has progressed I have realized that it is actually the most difficult situations and experiences that have helped me grow the most. I am grateful for the times that I have felt saddened or frustrated by the challenges the children I work with face because I have learned that positive change starts with frustration. It starts with acknowledging that something is not right and that it needs to change. Improvement can only occur through the acknowledgment that there is a lack and that there is a population that deserves more than what it is getting. It is this motivation to see change that I will carry with me for the rest of my life, and I have these children and these amazing people I work with to thank for it. I plan to incorporate nonprofit work into my career as a physician someday and I am very excited to take the skills I have learned this year with me as I enter the medical field. There is so, so much work to be done, and I am very eager to be in a position where I can contribute to it.
The Leading Edge 