Humans of St. Norbert:

“When COVID happened, we were really trying to think about how to maintain our programming [at the Cassandra Voss Center] in an entirely virtual format. It was a hard pivot, but I think it is something that has allowed us to grow as an entity, as a center on campus. One of the things that I’ve been most proud to be a part of over the past year is our new anti-racism workshops, which was entirely the brainchild of Dr. Bridget Burke Ravizza. I’ve mentioned this to a number of folks, but she reached out to me this past summer after the killing of George Floyd and said, you know, this is a program that exists at my daughter’s institution and I would love it if we could do something like this at St. Norbert. That conversation sort of snowballed into us creating our six-part workshop. It’s been this really cool opportunity for us to connect in a sustained way with a really large number of folks in our campus community from students to faculty and staff. But it has also provided a really cool opportunity for us to connect with students from Marquette University, something that if we weren’t in this virtual format, I don’t think we would’ve explored.

“This experience has given me a profound reminder of the necessity of being nimble and being ready to reimagine one’s work in a very short amount of time. We have put a tremendous amount of effort into thinking about every second and minute of our programming to try and create the highest quality experience for the folks who virtually come to our center. Responding to a global pandemic and providing important work and conversations to our campus has been a complicated process, but it has helped our center grow in ways because it’s provided a tremendous challenge but a cool opportunity to think about how we want to do our work. I believe the work of the Cassandra Voss Center will be forever changed by this experience because it demands us to think about how we can deliver our work to a wider and wider audience. Our ability to do immersive virtual programming expands our potential reach and that is something that is really exciting to me. ” – Billy Korinko ’09, director of the Cassandra Voss Center