Revealing our Roots: A Conversation with Nora Pillar Reynolds

Nora Pillard Reynolds, PhD is former director of globalsl (the Collaborative). Nora co-founded Water for Waslala, an NGO that worked for access to water and sanitation in rural Nicaragua. She has taught community-based learning courses at Temple University, College Unbound, and Haverford College. In her research, she utilizes participatory methods to explore multiple perspectives in civic engagement and community campus partnerships. Nora earned her MA in International Development at La Univerisidad Complutense de Madrid in 2004, MS in Elementary Education from St. Joseph’s University in 2006, and PhD in Urban Education at Temple University in 2016.

Recently we sat down with Nora for a conversation on her Collaborative origin story. The following was edited lightly for our blog.

From Philly always

A lot of my work would get framed as international. But I'm very, very place-based in my approach.I'm from outside Philadelphia. My whole extended family is within a few hours of Philly. My roots are here, and I'm chuckling because I have worked very deeply in Philadelphia and very deeply – over 20 years – in this one municipality in Nicaragua.

After I did grad school in Spain, I came back to Philly in 2004 and taught in North Philadelphia at Potter-Thomas Bilingual School through Teach for America and have been living in the city downtown ever since. When I applied to Teach for America, you had to preference which regions you would be willing to serve. First choice, second choice, third choice, I only put Philadelphia. And then I wrote, “I will not accept it if I am placed elsewhere.” I applied a long time ago. It's different now.

I'm not leaving Philly. When I applied to my PhD programs, I only applied to Temple for urban education. Period. It was connected to the school where I've most recently been teaching, in North Philly, and it was very much rooted here. I was at Temple doing my PhD in urban education, which is interdisciplinary. It was based in education, geography and urban studies, public policies, sociology. So you're required to take courses across the university.

Novella Keith founded the program. If you go back to old citations from initial articles around international service learning in the Michigan Journal, etc. you'll see, “Oh, that Novella!” 

She founded the program, which is relevant because when Eric [Hartman] came up to Philly he taught a class at Temple because he knew Novella. He didn't know how long he'd be here. This was my third year, I was  starting my dissertation. 

Meeting Eric 

One day I was in my office reading papers and Novella came in. She said, “Oh, you need to come into my office and meet someone.” I said OK even though I wanted to get papers graded before class started. We've all been there! So I brought my little bag of carrots that I was eating for my lunch into the office to meet Eric.

We did the “Hi!” and “Hi!” and “Should we meet for coffee?” If you've met Eric, there's no just, “Bye.” So we met for coffee two days later on campus. And he said, “You need to come to IARSLCE based on your interests. It's in three weeks in Chicago.” And I thought, “What are you talking about? I can't cancel my classes for the week – it's not built into the syllabus. What are you talking about?”

Well, he's persistent. I ended up canceling class and flying to Chicago to go to IARSLCE two weeks later. I walked in thinking I don't even know what this conference is other than a really long acronym.

Eric took me under his wing, started introducing me to everyone. That's when I met Richard [Kiely], and all these folks. He is a networker extraordinaire. Doing a PhD, you wonder, “I'm the only one thinking about these issues?” At IARSLCE, I felt that I had found my people.

Eric became a member of my dissertation committee. I kept going to IARSLCE. But, I founded a nonprofit in Nicaragua in 2002. We’d had tons of university students, professors, and volunteers visit through university partnerships. My perspective was community outcomes from the nonprofit perspective. My approach, my perspective, my experiences are in community based organizations and nonprofits, either domestically or globally. 

Our response to IARSLCE was, “Wait, we're not hearing as much about community outcomes as we want. So we're doing this over here.” All of us were kind of the oddballs at IARSLCE as it was heavily academic and higher ed focused. Richard and Eric were  organizing a Collaborative gathering at Duke. Eric asked me to speak on the opening panel on the topic of community outcomes. I met everyone that way because everyone heard the panel.

I think that was when we started with what became the Collaborative. We worked in nonprofits and we were dipping our toe in higher ed. It was a small gathering, like 45 people. It was a ragtag group of Eric's friends, it was why a lot of us had come.

From hanging out at conferences to working together

The idea was, first do the [Global Engagement Survey] GES with student outcomes. And, the following year, expand it to incorporate community outcomes. But people didn't want to pay for that, though they would pay for the student outcomes.

At the time I was writing my dissertation and Eric asked if I could work 8 hours a week on the GES. Ben Lough and Eric, and I think Cynthia [Toms] at that point had come up with questions, pulling from different existing scales. I said, “Sure, I can do some data cleaning.” That was the start. They had come up with the initial set of questions for the survey and then I took it from there. The four of us were the research team, which felt like a team made in heaven. We all got along great, we all complimented each other with very different areas of experience and expertise.

I learned a ton from them. I just pinged Ben last week. I'm having big questions around a survey and data weighting for representativeness – this is not a statistics question, this is an ethical question on how we're including people. Ben just has so much like deep statistical knowledge that I still ping him for things.

My role then was a GES research assistant, something like that. And then it became the GES community of practice.  We had a grant form the Luce Foundation to offer the GES to Hispanic Serving Institutions and first in family serving institutions free of charge, to diversify the sample.

That's when I became the director of the Collaborative. We offered the GES to folks without asking them to pay while we got the reliability of the scales. I did the GES, and I also supported webinars and the conferences. 

I came to the work through Eric as opposed to coming at it from, “ Oh, I'm interested in communities of practice,” or “I'm interested in network development.” I wasn't coming at it from that. But it's almost like I don't know how to operate any other way now.

Back to Philly:-)

I left the Collaborative and moved to my current role because I knew I only wanted to do work in my own community - in Philly. I'm still on the board for El Porvenir in Nicaragua, but that's because it's been 20 years and there is a difficult political situation. But I wanted to work on all projects in my own neighborhood, programs that my kids are involved in, that I myself utilize. So that was why I shifted into this really specific role. That was not by accident.

I am currently based in Philly working with ImpactEd, which is hosted at Penn. We are a small center that works with nonprofits and public institutions in Philadelphia to support them in using data to better understand and improve their work. Almost all of our work is Philly based, and almost all my clients are here in Philadelphia. I'm working heavily with public institutions right now, but also some nonprofits sprinkled in there. 

I work in evaluation. But we now have a community practice that we're trying to establish, because we realize there's so many folks in nonprofits who work with the data who feel like they're on an island. They're kind of the bad guy to lots of people. Everyone asks them, “Why are you asking me for this data?”

It's not dissimilar from the folks who are trying to be the one person doing community based experiential education at some massive institution, and they feel like they're on an island by themselves. Or the one person who's pushing for a shift to more ethical practices in those places.

Stronger together - that’s the Collaborative

I feel like I'm replicating almost the same building mode: folks just need each other; what can we do – where we're positioned – to leverage the resources we have to enable more folks to take advantage of those resources? That's also how the GES started. Connecting with one another helped us each affirm our own roles and work and provided motivation. We can also speak with a stronger and collective voice when we push for changes. Leveraging the connections in the Collaborative makes everyone stronger.

That's what the Collaborative is: a collection of people. That's what connected me in the first place, that's what kept me connected. That's why I stayed for so long after I resigned – I did 18 months of transition. This is not normal, right?! After I already started my new role?! It's the network of relationships that I think is what makes it special.