Miranda Thompson

Miranda Thompson brought humility to hectic first weeks of Afghan refugee crisis.

Miranda Thompson, AM ’22, a graduate of the University of Chicago Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice, closed out summer 2021 as a volunteer for the International Rescue Committee helping with emergency response efforts for Afghan refugees arriving at Fort Dix, New Jersey.

“If I could just make a kid forget where they were for one day, that was a good day,” said Thompson, who found the experience to be complicated, challenging, and life-changing.

“It reframed the way that I think about migration and the process of how people come here.”

The summer began with a field placement at GirlForward, a Chicago-based organization that serves refugee and immigrant girls. Later she deployed with the International Rescue Committee to help receive Afghan refugees at Fort Dix. Then she helped resettle some of those same refugees through Heartland Alliance International.

Within three days, Thompson flew to New Jersey where she awaited her instructions in a hotel.

“It was hectic because I was there during the first two weeks. “We were building processes, including morale and wellness activities programs, from the ground up, figuring out how to center afghan voices in programming,” Thompson said. “It was a great lesson in learning how people build community even in the most terrible situation."

As a clinical concentration student in the Global Social Development Practice Program (GSDP), Thompson posed core questions about if she should engage in the work she was doing, along with how.

“That’s an incredible place for a social worker to start. She brings that humility to the work in a way I respect deeply,” said Jessica Darrow, AM ’07, PhD ’14, who heads the GSDP Program.

Thompson found engaging the refugee resettlement system from the inside to be an interesting but difficult learning experience. She especially valued Darrow’s support and refugee resettlement expertise in trying to make sense of it.

“She provided me the space to process that experience and talk about it,” Thompson said. “This year was a hard year for refugee resettlement because of the crisis in Afghanistan and because the Trump Administration divested the system. There was not a lot of infrastructure and then there was an influx of refugees.”

Last August Thompson returned to Mindful Philanthropy, the organization where she completed her first-year field placement remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic. The Philadelphia nonprofit guides funders in mental health-giving. As a program and research associate, she helps funders devise strategies and educates donors about mental health issues.

Thompson received her bachelor’s degree in design from the University of Cincinnati. After graduation, she worked for Mata Traders, a Chicago organization that partners with fair trade organizations to make and sell women’s clothes and jewelry. The job entailed frequent travel to India and Nepal to meet with artisan groups and social service agencies. Many of the people she met were social workers who changed her understanding of social work.

“I always thought of social workers as people in a school or hospital setting. I never really thought about this more community-driven setting,” Thompson said. “I wanted to lean more into the social side of what I was doing. That’s why I pivoted into a new career.”

As different as design and social work can be, there also is critical overlap, according to Thompson.

“My design education was rooted in starting with the individual you’re designing for, then working backward,” she said.

One of her courses taught much the same approach but within the framework of social policy and Michael Lipsky’s concept of street-level bureaucracy. Lipsky explains that as a policy is implemented, the practitioner is faced with both constraints and moments of discretion.

“That ends up shaping the experience of the policy by the recipient of services,” Darrow said. “The enactment of those moments of discretion or the adherence to policy constraints is what ends up being the policy regardless of what's written.”

Thompson chose the Crown Family School over other social work options because of its GSDP program. The Crown Family School’s emphasis on the holistic relationship between the micro and the macro—clinical practice and policy making—also appealed to her.

“I knew I didn’t want to be a therapist, but I wanted to gain some of that micro-level knowledge situated within a more macro-like framework,” she said. “I wanted to get a holistic understanding of everything that's available in the field. Now I’m doing an admin role and I enjoy it.”

How to think critically about her work was one of the biggest lessons that Thompson learned through her Crown Family School training, especially in her field placements. As an outsider going into a new workplace, it becomes all too easy to slide into the accepted way of doing things.

“I’ve learned to not be afraid to ask questions, not to shy away from challenging workplace conversations, and advocating for yourself and your peers,” she said.