Gracie McDonough Wins Community Impact Award
UNLV’s school of Public Policy and Leadership awarded CSN librarian, Gracie McDonough, the Community Impact award for her work on her thesis legacy project! This award recognizes students whose engagement activities advance learning, justice, and social change within the community. Gracie, along with her group members from UNLV, the Nevada Contractor’s Board, and Workforce Connections created a mentoring program for The Harbor and the Department of Juvenile Justice. The Harbor provides guidance and services to youth, families and victims. The Community Impact Award recognized Gracie and her group members for having a tangible, measurable effect on their community.
Gracie’s project was created so that justice involved youth or pre-justice involved youth and their families could get mentoring to help them learn more about emotional intelligence and how their actions can cause emotional reactions in their family members. The project also helps in understanding how to turn those possibly negative reactions into positive conversations.
“The biggest thing that I learned from the Urban Leadership program is that change is constantly happening and so are the needs of your community,” said Gracie. “When we started creating this project it was completely different from what was delivered, since the needs of the organization and the people that they help were changing. When we presented the final draft, it was even better than The Harbor had envisioned, and was so detailed that they were able to implement it almost immediately. I am incredibly honored that the program that we built has won the Community Impact Award and I am looking forward to our continuing partnership with The Harbor.”