Virtual Service Opportunity – Join Loyola University Maryland’s Green Bandana Brigade
The University Innovation Fellows (UIF) cohort from 2019 is comprised of three juniors: Siena Pizzano, Cammi Galley, and Benjamin Hunt. UIF’s have a strong desire to become agents of change and innovate on Loyola’s Evergreen campus. In partnership with the Counseling Center, Siena, Cammi, and Ben founded the Green Bandana Brigade, a student run program whose goal is to spread the awareness of campus, local, and national resources for students coping with mental health concerns. The founders felt the need to bring attention to mental health because students aged 15-24 are in the highest risk group for many mental illnesses, though 1 in 4 nationally will not seek help or treatment. In addition, there are more than 1,000 deaths by suicide on college campuses annually in the United States. Therefore, Siena, Cammi, and Ben want to promote a culture where students genuinely care about each individual’s well-being and decrease the stigma surrounding mental health.
In order to become a member of the Green Bandana Brigade, students and faculty/staff members will need to complete our online training called Kognito . Once the training is complete, the individual will receive a certificate, which will need to be emailed to GreenBandanaBrigade@loyola.edu.
All students, faculty and staff members who complete Kognito will receive their green bandanas to identify them as a safe, nonjudgmental person to approach with mental health-related difficulties. Green Bandana Brigade members know about available resources and can provide resource cards to assist others in getting help and support. The Brigade’s goal is to let students know that they have the support of all their peers and faculty/staff members whenever they might need.
Solidarity: Watch recordings of campus events that contribute to our understanding of anti-racism and more just world.
A Q&A with Alex Long, Open Society Institute Community Fellow, Director of the McElderry Youth Redemption Boxing Program, and Violence Interrupter for Baltimore Safe Streets Program.
Representatives from organizations working on the US Border and with immigrant communities in the United States discuss the intersections of immigration and racism in their daily work.
Sarah Smarsh is the author of Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth. She has covered socioeconomic class, politics, and public policy.
Professor Marcia Chatelain, a historian at Georgetown and graduate of St. Ignatius College Prep, will discuss Georgetown’s Working Group on Slavery, Memory, and Reconciliation. In her talk, Chatelain will relate Georgetown’s deliberation on using their slaveholding past to animate its future, and she will discuss why Catholic institutions must lead the way in confronting racism and its pervasive impact in the world.
During the 26th annual MLK Convocation, author Roxane Gay discusses social issues as it relates to her ongoing work in feminism, body image, and social justice
This lecture sets Martin Luther King's Letter from Birmingham Jail in historical context, demonstrates the theological issues raised in the text, and point out the constructive value of the text for today particularly in the light of debates over white supremacy and its features.
Sister Helen Prejean is known around the world for her tireless work against the death penalty. She has been instrumental in sparking national dialogue on capital punishment and in shaping the Catholic Church’s newly vigorous opposition to all executions. She is the author of Dead Man Walking: An Eyewitness Account of the Death Penalty in the United States, which has ignited a national debate on capital punishment and it inspired an Academy Award winning movie, a play, and an opera.
Stevenson spoke about America having the largest prison population in the world – and how the criminal justice system that puts the men, women, and children in these prisons is broken. Excessive punishment and abuse are widespread, and the collateral consequences are devastating lives and communities. An inspiring and unflinchingly honest speaker, Bryan Stevenson talks about defending some of America’s most rejected and marginalized people. The stories he tells are heartbreaking, yet inspiring, and motivate audiences to make a change.
Claudia Rankine, Jamaican-born award-winning author and poet, contributed new insight to the Loyola community’s ongoing conversation on race on campus, in Baltimore, and in American society. Rankine has become known for her “American lyrics”: powerful, inventive meditations on everyday racial experience in American life, infused by long legacies of violence up through and beyond Ferguson, Mo.
Ta-Nehisi Coates delivers the 22nd Annual MLK Convocation.