Spearheading Service
When you’ve traveled the world, finding a place to finally call home can be a labor of love. Investing in a community and its people and always striving for improvement is a special kind of labor.
It happens to be the specialty of Julianne O’Connell, a University of Georgia Ph.D. candidate. After years of teaching in Germany, Indonesia, and Austria, she has returned to the Classic City to make a difference.
O’Connell is an adventurer with a passport running out of room for stamps. But it’s not a love for hopping around the world that drives her travels. It’s a strong passion for and serving those in them, especially through food security. O’Connell strives to improve student support services and the basic needs of her community through personal, long-term connections with those who need that assistance. Her empathy and work ethic make that possible not just in her home base but anywhere in the world.
There and back again
O’Connell traveled to Germany in high school. And by the time she enrolled as an undergraduate, she knew she wanted to travel abroad and make an impact.
As a student, she worked as a resident advisor in Creswell Hall and was a dedicated member of UGArden, an experiential learning organization dedicated to organic food production.
“I had a few years to identify my values and how I like spending my time,” she says. “Service really came to the forefront of the jobs that I had.”
She majored in German studies and linguistics and became fluent in German (eventually learning some Indonesian and Spanish as well).
But speaking German in Athens, Ga, could only go so far. Enter the Fulbright Program. That program sent O’Connell to Indonesia to teach English for a year. She also lived in Austria, where she taught English to Austrians and taught German to the nation’s visitors. In the years spent away from Georgia, she made her own home.
“Making a home through community is possible through really getting to know the people in these host communities and understanding their needs and figuring out if there’s a role I can fill in through partnership and understanding,” O’Connell says.
A robust return
After a stint in over 30 countries, she decided to help others back at UGA and earn her Ph.D. in Higher Education at the McBee Institute of Higher Education. She is focusing on student support services to enable the next generation to have a secure foundation in life and has led the Higher Education Student Society and the Public Service and Outreach Committee.
O’Connell also came back to Creswell Hall as a graduate resident advisor. Now with worldly experience, she was equipped to help undergraduate residents during the COVID-19 pandemic. With limited access to dining halls, financial concerns, and overall mental health depletion, students who had invested in meal plans no longer always knew when their next meal would be. That’s what solidified her dissertation research into food insecurity among college students.
“I was always aware of the issue of food insecurity, but mostly as a K-12 issue. But here they are, having to make decisions between car payments and working and going to class and their basic needs,” O’Connell says.
In farming with AmeriCorps Tennessee and agricultural colleges in Austria, O’Connell understood the demand for fresh food that’s often missing from food banks. Now, you can find O’Connell spending her free time at UGArden or the Campus Kitchen at UGA, a student-based organization committed to hunger relief in the Athens community. Even if it’s based on helping others, O’Connell emphasizes that everyone—including the person doing the service—benefits from community care. It’s all reciprocated.
“I volunteer and help at UGArden, but I also gain access to knowledge, plants, and produce,” she says.
She now believes anyone can contribute to this collaborative cycle, even on her college campus. As a graduate assistant in UGA’s Office of Service Learning, she connects students to community resources and opportunities to give back.
After traveling the world, O’Connell has learned what it means to serve a community. She wants to pass it on to the next generation of students.
“You can have the mindset of a study abroad student in your own community,” she says. “I truly believe that you can still have a very adventurous, fun, meaningful, service-filled life, even if you are just in your hometown.”
