LT Alumni Collaboration: Kelly Fisher, LT’19, and Nam-ho Park, LT’19
What happens when you bring together highly motivated leaders from all walks of life, who work in various industries, and who have expertise in fields ranging from informatics to food security?
Cross-sector collaboration. Transformative leadership opportunities.
The LT Class of 2019 brought together 80 incredible leaders, including Nam-ho Park and Kelly Fisher. Nam-ho is a lecturer at the University of Washington in Informatics, a discipline focused on the intersection of people, information, and technology. Kelly manages the Food Security Program at Seattle Children’s Hospital, providing food resources to patients, their families, and the larger community.
Nam-ho Park, LT’19, University of Washington
Kelly Fisher, LT’19,
Seattle Children’s Hospital
As part of Nam-ho’s work, he manages the undergraduate Capstone Project class, a two-quarter course that connects teams of undergraduate students majoring in Informatics with a sponsor within the IT industry, government, or nonprofit sectors. The goal of the capstone course is for students to work on an applied project that solves human problems with technology. During the LT’19 year, Nam-ho reached out to his classmates to see if they would like to sponsor a student project from January to May 2020.
Kelly jumped at the opportunity. For her, it was an incredible gift to work with smart, innovative students. Nam-ho and Kelly worked collaboratively to devise two projects, with Kelly as the project sponsor and Nam-ho as the faculty advisor.
For the first project, students designed a functional prototype of a website to help patients and their families access critical basic resources (food, housing, and transportation) more easily. As part of the process, students worked with staff and stakeholders across the organization, prompting increased cross-department discussions and internal collaboration on programs.
For the second project, students designed a mobile app that allows patients and their families to see what food is available from Seattle Children’s Food Pantry and order it. Using graphics and text, the app shows what items are available, allows users to sort based on food allergies, and connects to the inventory management system.
As the project sponsor, Kelly had the opportunity to mentor the students, regularly listening and offering space and support. This aspect of the project was especially transformative for Kelly. She was able to leverage lessons learned and skills practiced in LT, especially the importance of leaning into difficult conversations.
“Being able to draw from LT conversations and that comfort of having uncomfortable conversations was at the heart of both projects,” Kelly reflected. “LT helped me see problems and then call them out in as kind and as graceful way as I could. To be able to do that with students who are at the beginning of their careers is really powerful.”
Because Kelly practiced having difficult conversations in LT, she was equipped to listen to students and help advise them about challenging topics – including how COVID and racism were affecting them personally. As a result, the team’s deliverables (such as the website and PowerPoint slides) reflected rich diversity, representing different races, abilities, ages, and genders.
In reflecting how LT helped Nam-ho navigate and support his students during these especially challenging times, he credits LT for helping him gain a deeper understanding of U.S. history (he was born in South Korea, grew up in the U.K.) and the Puget Sound region around race, equity, and social issues.
“LT provided a fundamental understanding of those issues. I can provide more specific examples within our community, and I can support the students in a more informed way having gone through LT and building my fundamental understanding of racism and inequality.”
Resources:
Nam-ho Park is recruiting organizations to sponsor student projects. If you'd like to sponsor a team of dynamic UW Information School undergraduates to work with you on a project at your organization, please contact Nam-ho Park at namho@uw.edu. Projects should explore the intersection between people, information, and technology, and last about 18 weeks. Nam-ho would be happy to chat to tell you more and help scope and right-size projects with you. Applications start in October and last through the end of November. Projects start in January.