“Alumni Engagement” is a series of profiles on Carls who, thanks to the Center for Community and Civic Engagement, have nurtured a lifelong commitment to the public good.
To learn something meaningful is to carry it with you. For Borr Vang ’12, Carleton’s Center for Community and Civic Engagement was a home for meaningful learning.
Vang, a St. Paul native, has been active in service learning since elementary school. It was natural for her to become involved in the CCCE upon coming to Carleton. She sought out programs that aligned with her passion: education. Vang taught at Northfield Middle School Youth Center, read to children at the public library through the Caldecott Club, and tutored for Lamton and the Youth Tutoring program.
“What I love about education is that it is a reciprocal relationship. The teacher is never done learning from the student. I may be helping a tutee on a math problem, but they help me understand their perspective and push me to be more creative when approaching a problem,” says Vang, a psychology major at Carleton.
“It is so important to take the time to reflect, take a step back from the specific volunteer task, and learn about the perspective of the ones receiving your help. We all have our own strengths and weaknesses, and civic engagement is an opportunity to learn from each other.”
What she does today: Vang works to help others afford what is invaluable to her. She is a senior financial aid counselor at St. Catherine University in St. Paul, where Vang collaborates with graduate students to make their education as affordable as possible. She draws in members from various departments on campus to unearth creative ways of realizing this goal. Together, they give life to visions of equity, willfully materializing opportunities for education through innovative partnerships.
Sparking her passion: “The CCCE gave me opportunities to go out into the community, to build relationships, to truly experience—to actually see. This informs the basis of the work I do now as I continue to collaborate with diverse populations. No matter how open-minded I am, I can always learn more. I can always be more understanding. There is always more room.”
Biggest lessons from CCCE: The values civic engagement fostered in Vang extend beyond the workplace. They remain at the heart of who she is today; they are integral to what it means for her to be a good human being in the world.
“The CCCE gave me the opportunities to realize the principles I already believed would make me a decent human being. I believed I needed to be helpful, understanding, and open-minded. It’s not like I didn’t have those qualities before working with the CCCE, but the programs I participated in pushed my boundary of what each of these words meant to me.
“Civic engagement will always be a part of my life.”