Faculty, Staff, and Student Collaborations with Greensboro Community Center Provide Support To Area Homeless Population

By Heather Hans



Dr. Julie Hersberger engages in lively discussion at the Interactive Resource Center in Greensboro.

In the UNCG School of Education, many of our faculty, staff, and students volunteer their time and energy at local agencies in the Triad, either as part of their coursework, their research, or simply out of a dedication to serving their community. For many of them, service isn’t a one-time commitment but rather a key part of their education and their professional lives, demonstrating the essential nature of community engagement. At the Interactive Resource Center (IRC) in downtown Greensboro, Library and Information Studies (LIS) professor Julie Hersberger and Educational Leadership and Cultural Foundations (ELC) doctoral student Kathleen Edwards have contributed many volunteer hours and their professional expertise to the success of a unique service agency.


The IRC is a day center that helps people who are homeless, have recently been homeless, or are facing homelessness. It provides a range of services from the basics, like doing laundry and taking showers, to creating resumes and finding jobs and housing. On an average day in December, there might be at 40 people sitting in the center's large front room, and most of them are active, whether they are chatting with each other or engaged in an activity, such as doing laundry, organizing toiletry items, or painting a beautiful picture. Collaboration and time spent together are some of the most important aspects of the center.

Kathleen Edwards, who has been a regular volunteer since 2010, explains the IRC is not “a typical social service agency, which really just pigeonholes homelessness as a social problem."

Edwards sees the IRC as “a bit subversive—actually, not a bit, as really subversive,” she says. “I think the idea of homelessness is very threatening to our culture, and if we were to stop thinking about homelessness as a social problem, and look at our culture through the eyes of homelessness, I think it would expose a lot of things,” she says. “Our culture is built on capitalism, and we work jobs so we can purchase houses, and that’s the American dream,” she continues. “And then we go into debt, so we need to continue to work, and all of that keeps us so busy we don’t have time to question our government, or build relationships with our community.”

Greensboro’s incubator

At the IRC, building relationships is fundamental, and everyone can be involved in the center's day-to-day activities.

“We really believe in collaboration and community-building, and that goes in two directions—one and chief is collaboration with the people who come here for help," Executive Director Liz Seymour explains. “There are lots of opportunities for people who are here to step up and affect policy and really help out with day-to-day operations,” she says. “But also, we do a lot of collaborating out in the community, so we have many partner agencies who offer services here in the building.” “And of course,” she continues, “we have tons of volunteers, and we’ve become kind of an incubator.”

Edwards relates to the feeling of community at the IRC: “This is how I feel connected in Greensboro, it really is,” she says. Originally from Ohio, she moved to North Carolina to work as a service learning coordinator at Elon University. While at Elon, she realized the educational grant money she received from doing the AmeriCorps VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America) program would soon expire, so she took the “Teaching Social Justice” course at UNCG. She loved it, and decided to apply to the program and become a full-time doctoral student.

Popular education in practice

In her work at the IRC, Edwards is particularly interested in popular education. Her first introduction to the idea came from her volunteer work with a prison literacy program in Dayton, Ohio.

“When I was in the prisons and when I was working with folks one-on-one, there was a curriculum we were supposed to follow, but I really ended up having to throw that out the window," Edwards says. "It made the most sense to start with what people knew and make things relevant to them.”

So, she helped them learn to write kites, the requests inmates make for many things, including seeing a doctor. She also helped them learn to write letters to family, judges, and lawyers.

“The amount I learned from that process and from people I was working with was just monumental," Edwards says, "So that was my introduction to popular education, which is the idea that, one, we learn from each other, and that people’s lived experiences are valid knowledge."

“I think this is a good example of popular education in practice,” she says, looking around the IRC. It’s here she taught a service-learning course for UNCG students last fall in collaboration with Volunteer Coordinator Tiffany Dumas, and they encouraged visitors to the IRC to come to class and participate.

"In the classes the IRC guests were becoming educators," Edwards says. "While they were learning from the students—and that was exciting for them—they were also recognizing they had legitimate, lived knowledge to share with the students as well. The students had questions only the guests, no one else, could answer."

“It’s one of the highlights I have of teaching,” she continues. “It just felt so right; it was very congruent with my values.”

Telling their story

Edwards also collaborated with Gwen Frisbie-Fulton, Fund Development and Marketing Manager at the IRC, on the Storyscapes project, a summer writing workshop last year in which visitors came together each week in the IRC to work on writing stories related to place, particularly downtown Greensboro. After the poems and stories were finished, they went to each featured location and got permission to post the poem there. They made a map and website, so you could scan the QR code at each location, read the poem, and hear the artist reading the poem through an audio recording.

One poem, written by Donna Harrelson Burnett, called, “I was there,” described her former neighborhood of Morningside Homes, where she witnessed the Greensboro Massacre in 1979. Burnett, upon revisiting the neighborhood, discovered where she lived on Everett Street had been razed and turned into a new neighborhood, and that Everett Street gets renamed there, literally erasing the location where the massacre occurred. Burnett’s poem testified to the fact that while the location may be hard to identify, she was there, and she remembered what had happened.

“Many of them spoke truth to power,” Edwards says. “They were political, social justice poems, even if on the face of them they weren’t.”

The Storyscapes exhibit locations debuted in the fall of 2013, but Edwards is not finished with it yet. After completing coursework for her degree, she is planning a dissertation on community-engaged, participatory research at the IRC that focuses on the importance of storytelling.

“Rarely do people here get asked about their stories by folks not here,” Edwards says. “This is a chance for those stories to get out there.”

Information needs

Dr. Julie Hersberger volunteers primarily as a case manager, working one-on-one with visitors to help address their needs. Hersberger, whose research focuses on information behavior and how people meet their needs using information, has learned a lot in her time spent at the IRC.

"It's the perfect integration of research, teaching, and service, though I would tell you I didn't go over there for any of that. I went over there because I needed to do something for the community, and I thought I might know something I could help with over there," Hersberger says. Also, "It's changed how I teach people to listen and to provide information," she says.

Hersberger explains that people dealing with homelessness have to overcome many hurdles to find information about services, jobs, and housing.

"Sending people off on wild goose chases happens all the time," she says. "I do a lot of combinations in case management of Googling and calling." "I'm pretty good at information seeking, I'm kind of an expert at this," she says, smiling, but "it is often difficult and frustrating for me to help them find things."

If it's difficult for Hersberger to find the information and contacts needed, how hard would it be for someone who is dealing with the crisis of homelessness? In addition, visitors to the IRC may have other road blocks. Hersberger describes how one visitor needed to get an ID card, but first needed to obtain a copy of his birth certificate from the state of New York. "It can cost up to $30-40 to get a copy made, and you have to pay with a credit card," Hersberger says. And of course, many people dealing with homelessness might not have a credit card, much less $30-40 to spare.

Even once logistics like this are straightened out, "There are no blanket cure-alls for this problem," Hersberger says. "Unless you're dealing with the problems in the logical sequence, you fail."

Giving hope

"Homelessness is a condition, but there are many different reasons people get in that condition," Liz Seymour explains. "We can't say homelessness is all about addiction or about mental illness or job loss or any of those things; it's just an event that has happened in somebody's life."

Thankfully, the IRC partners with many other agencies to offer services all in the same building, creating a more seamless operation. And, of course, it relies on volunteers like Edwards and Hersberger to augment those services. "She (Edwards) has helped us to establish and grow programs," Seymour says. "Julie's strength here has been one-on-one, she's just so tenacious," she says. "They've both brought wonderful qualities, and somewhat different qualities, to the IRC."

As for the center's success and growth, Seymour attributes it to a more economical model for the organization, as well as a strong community will for it to succeed. "I think as a larger community we're tired of the view of homelessness that is just so dispiriting and depressing," Seymour says. "The IRC, being different from that, has given people hope."

That hope is renewed through the efforts of regular volunteers like Dr. Hersberger and Edwards, and in other community-building efforts in the School of Education. For its 2013 Service Project, School of Education staff and faculty collected an overwhelming assortment of toiletries such as shampoo, toothpaste, and deodorant, plus other items such as snacks, hats, gloves, coats, and blankets for the IRC. With these donations, they were able to put together 40 bags of toiletries as well as a good selection of clothes for IRC visitors this holiday season.

The School of Education Service Project and the continuing work of faculty and students like Hersberger and Edwards demonstrate that great educators are engaged in their communities, and constantly strive to make a difference however they can.