Alumni & Friends : Alumni Profiles

Building Pipelines to Better Communities, Better Lives

Amy Shlossman
BS Public Administration '04

She counts going door to door with her mother on behalf of the American Cancer Society among her earliest memories and says by the time she entered high school her parents were urging her to “get involved,” with a cause of her own. Amy Shlossman chose to volunteer for AIDS Walk Arizona and launched a four-year commitment that became a way of life: making public service equal in priority to academic achievement. Her efforts were rewarded last spring when she became the third UA student in history to be named a Harry S. Truman Scholar in public service, selected with 80 others nationwide to receive a $26,000 graduate education scholarship. Her 4.0 college grade point average and by then eight-year track record of community leadership made her a natural choice for the Truman Scholarship Foundation, which honors academic achievement and public service.

When Amy first volunteered to help with AIDS Walk she was dismayed to find that although people under 24 are the fastest growing segment of AIDS sufferers, they were overlooked as potential contributors to the cause. She was determined to demonstrate that young people could make a difference and did. In her sophomore through senior year she served as AIDS Walk Arizona’s high school coordinator, leading prevention education and dramatically increasing involvement of young people in promoting AIDS research and treatment.

Amy brought her can-do spirit to college. In her first year on campus she took an internship at the Aurora Foundation, a grass roots organization aimed at developing leadership capabilities among women and girls planning careers in education. At Aurora, Amy’s interest in community service merged with the Foundation’s focus on women and girls’ careers. She established their Social Entrepreneurship program, designing projects that allowed middle school students to contribute to improving the communities surrounding their schools. “I knew from high school that the problem with involvement was not apathy but lack of opportunity,” she says. “And based on my experience I think that if K-12 students have the chance to get involved early, in helping their communities as well as planning for their personal futures, they’ll stay in school.”

Transferring her Aurora experience to initiatives at the UA, Amy was the first student coordinator of Eller’s Rodel Pipeline to Excellence project, leading development of original programming in life skills and career planning for 8th graders at Tucson’s Amphitheater Middle School. Her Truman-winning proposal combined all her service work in a concept she calls “staying in,” keeping students K-12 engaged in school through service learning projects and early focus on careers. She plans to obtain a Ph.D., at almost certainly the university of her choice thanks to the prestige of the Truman award, but for now will take a year off to work at an educational institution or foundation to see the process of academic policy development from inside. As for her own career goals, she envisions building a national non-profit focused on “youth volunteerism, service learning and civic action.” Not content to simply be a change agent, Amy says “I can create the next generation of change agents.” Her record leaves little doubt she will.