ALUMNI SIGHTINGS Champion of Arts in South Chicago By Nicholas A. Love
Visit nl.edu/artschampion to watch the video featuring Jacqueline Samuel’s Reach acceptance speech.
Jacqueline Samuel, Ph.D., ’11 and ‘15, is a leader in youth development, violence prevention and trauma-informed community development in South Chicago, a city neighborhood on the far Southeast side bordering Lake Michigan. For Samuel, who is a two-time National Louis University graduate and 2016 Reach Award winner, it all started with the arts. Samuel leveraged a passion for encouraging all generations of artists by putting herself at the intersection of education, community and art, working with a program called Building Community through the Arts. The program was focused on integrating established artists with community development projects in South Chicago and other under-resourced neighborhoods like it. Samuel became attached to South Chicago. She found so many inspiring artists that were expressing their creative skills outside of the community. So the challenge began; how do you make space for artists to thrive in their own backyard? Samuel has spent a great deal of effort seeking the answer to that question as the senior program director for Claretian Associates, a human services and program provider for low- and moderate-income residents in South Chicago. Most recently, Samuel helped neighborhood youth document the last 10 years of public art in South Chicago and interview local artists. The product was a catalog of South Chicago arts and artists who’ve improved the neighborhood’s quality of life, and it’s become a bit of an underground hit among the teens and their neighbors.
Just as the intersection of art and education was how Samuel discovered her love for South Chicago, it was also how she discovered National Louis. Samuel’s introduction to NLU began in the 1990s when she worked under an NLU program that taught teachers at 36 Chicago Public Schools how to integrate arts into their curriculum. From there she took a one-off class at NLU about putting research into action. It wasn’t until years later — spurred on by a desire to increase the effectiveness of her work — that she was ready to commit to graduate school. A student-organized event sold her on the NLU public policy program. “I loved the dialogue I was having with the students — my peers, my class. It was rich, it was informative, it was really right on the cusp of current issues that were going on in the country,” explained Samuel. After her positive experience in the public policy program, it was an easy choice for her when a faculty member suggested that she take her education a step further by obtaining a doctorate in community psychology. Samuel has moved in her South Chicago journey through the arts and into a Ph.D., but she hasn’t set her first love aside. She brings passion and her artistic mindset to her important work at Claretian Associates. “My background is in theater — so it’s almost like creating a play, so to speak. You have this wonderful cast of characters, and they’re trying to get to a particular goal. And I’m the director trying to find a way to help them do that.”
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National Louis University VIEW | Fall 2016
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