Active agents for social change

All colleges and universities share a relationship with the community they’re situated within.

Over the years, Alex Fink started to sense there was something unique about Augsburg and its relationship with the surrounding Cedar-Riverside community.

“The consistent message I heard from the young people I spoke to in the neighborhood was that Augsburg has kept inviting us in,” he says. “Augsburg has shown its long-term commitment to being part of the community.”

That change-making work drew Fink to Augsburg, where he now serves as an assistant professor of social work and director of Augsburg’s Sabo Center for Democracy and Citizenship. What he has seen at Augsburg has only confirmed his impressions of a university committed to preparing its students to be agents of positive change in their communities.

“It’s in the water and the air here. Once students arrive, they understand what the university is about because it’s built into so much of what they do here,” he says. “[Augsburg students] understand their role in the world is to be part of the community they live in, and to contribute to it in a meaningful way regardless of what they decide to do for their career.”

Countless alumni have brought life to Augsburg’s mission, enacting both local and systemic change. Erin Boe ’23 MAT, Jamil Stamschror-Lott ’16 MSW, and Jasmine Grika ’14 are three recent examples, transforming lives and garnering recognition for their innovative leadership. Within their unique spheres of influence, they model what it means to be an Auggie.

Inclusion through art

It’s the fall of 2024, and Erin Boe is seeing her impact in real time. Then again, that’s a near-daily occurrence.

Her classroom at Maple Grove High School is the home base of the Unified Art curriculum, which pairs students with and without disabilities in collaborative art projects. Boe says she created the 12-week curriculum as a framework for art to teach life skills, leadership, and compassion.

“It’s incredible to see what happens in this classroom and how these ideas cascade outward,” Boe says. “I tell my students from day one they’re becoming active agents for social change.”

It’s very intentional that disability inclusion and change-making are at the heart of Boe’s curriculum, which she developed in partnership with the Special Olympics.

“When I was at Augsburg, inclusion efforts weren’t an isolated topic; they were embedded in every class,” Boe recalls. “We were constantly encouraged to question how our work could foster belonging. This critical thinking and intentionality were embedded into the forefront of everything we did, so we were putting culturally-relevant pedagogy at the front of every class.”

Boe was recently named Minnesota’s 2024–25 Art Educator of the Year, a recognition that has brought visibility to her groundbreaking curriculum and helped spread its ideas to educators across the United States.

“It makes me want to think bigger,” Boe says. “How can we spread the message further and grow our impact into even more communities?”

Transforming mental health care

It’s the fall of 2005, and Jamil Stamschror-Lott is wide awake in class.

He’s been waiting for something like this, exactly what his undergraduate sociology professor is speaking to: explanations for why Stamschror-Lott has seen so many people who look like him being mistreated. The class helped him name and contextualize so many of his own life experiences, from his family’s early years in rural southern communities to his middle and high school years in Minneapolis and St. Paul.

“I struggled socially, emotionally, and mentally, and so did many of my African American peers,” he says. “My family had a caring experience and a level of stability [through my mom, who] went to college and worked as a nurse for 30 years. But I was recognizing what was happening to African American folks like me and those around me who have been marginalized, oppressed, and dealt with all these different ‘-isms.’”

That kind of exploration sparked Stamschror-Lott’s career and a desire to provide an “outlet of relief for folks experiencing that marginalization.” After several years seeing many of the same inequities impacting youth in detention facilities and schools, Stamschror-Lott felt he needed a more advanced degree to attain his desired level of impact. Augsburg’s Master of Social Work program provided the training he wanted at both the micro and macro levels.

One year after graduating in 2016, he and his now-wife, Sara, took the leap into opening their own practice, Creative Kuponya, which provides culturally-responsive care outside the traditional medical model. The impact has been immense, with more than 6,000 free or reduced-cost mental health sessions completed since. Eighty-six percent of sessions have served people of color, with the majority of those clients receiving mental health services for the first time.

“To see so many concepts and stereotypes be busted in this process has been remarkable,” Stamschror-Lott says. “There’s been a perceived stigma of, ‘Folks of color do not go to therapy.’ However, what I have witnessed is that to connect with someone who speaks my language, has walked in similar shoes, it is extremely liberating. I’m incredibly happy and proud of the connections we’ve made.”

The Stamschror-Lotts’ work was recently affirmed when Jamil was named a 2024 Bush Fellow, which will support his and Creative Kuponya’s work the next two years.

“It’s been a phenomenal journey,” Stamschror-Lott says.

Advocating for Native communities

It’s the fall of 2012, and Jasmine Grika just had a light bulb moment. She’s been talking with Jennifer Simon, then-director of Augsburg’s American Indian Student Services, who encourages her to explore a career in social work.

“This all really clicked at Augsburg. I had been adopted at age 10 and had these life experiences shaped by the Indian Child Welfare Act,” says Grika. “I was starting to understand the successful impact [the Indian Child Welfare Act] had on me, having that cultural preservation from being raised by family members with the same background as me,” including citizenship in the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe through her mother and a tribal affiliation with the Red Lake Nation through her father. “That [contextual learning at Augsburg] sparked this passion in me to really drive systems change and help people understand the importance of cultural and family preservation on a systems level. Everything took off from there in those beginning stages.”

Grika’s experiences at Augsburg helped shape her passion and skills toward radical change, and after graduating she continued her education at Washington University in St. Louis. After completing her master’s degree, she returned home, working with the Ain Dah Yung Center to decrease disparities among American Indian families in the child protection system. Three years later, Grika transitioned to a St. Paul-based nonprofit, Alia, this time advocating for national child welfare systems change.

Just two years ago, Grika completed her doctoral degree in social work from the University of Southern California. She is now the tribal collective supervisor for the Minnesota Department of Human Services, which focuses on strengthening government-to-government relations between the state and Minnesota’s 11 tribal nations.

Last year, Grika was also named a fellow at the University of Minnesota Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs, where she spearheads work to shape legislation on data sovereignty within Native American and Indigenous populations.

Through all her professional work experiences and advocacy efforts, Grika has built on a foundation of cultural identity and drive for change that her time at Augsburg helped shape into her ongoing vocation.

“Representation is so important in the systems that impact our community,” she says. “It can be off-putting to work for a system that has historically done harm, but the only way it will change is through representation from the communities that are impacted by these policies.”

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Top image: Student portraits line the wall of a Maple Grove High School hallway near the classroom of Erin Boe ’23 MAT. (Courtesy photo)