Q&A with Community Service Award Recipient Catherine Clark

CSE student receives University’s highest honor for public service

April 9, 2020

Helping to collectively raise a quarter of a million dollars to support social and racial justice is no easy feat. But Catherine Clark did it—and earned a top University of Minnesota award as a result.

Clark, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science (CEMS) at the College of Science and Engineering, received the Outstanding Community Service Award. It’s the highest honor the University of Minnesota gives to an undergraduate or graduate student who has made an extraordinary, significant, and demonstrated contribution to the betterment of society through academic studies and/or public service. Clark received a cash award and plaque at a luncheon in Coffman Memorial Union on March 5, 2020.

Clark is advised by Professor Russell Holmes and is a recipient of the 3M Science and Technology Graduate Fellowship from the College of Science and Engineering at the University of Minnesota. Clark has served on campus through the CEMS Graduate Student Council (GSC) and the Institute on the Environment (IonE) Boreas Leadership Team. Clark has also branched out, serving her community through the Giving Project led by Headwaters Foundation for Justice, a nonprofit based in Minneapolis.

In this Q&A, Clark talks about her experience fundraising and volunteering to help others.

What got you interested in community service? 

There's a lot of injustice in the world and I can’t not try to do whatever I can to prevent it. As an undergrad, I was part of groups that would do outreach, but when I started graduate school, I was hoping that my research would make me feel like I was actively making the world a better place on its own. Instead, I found that my research felt very siloed and separate from the world, so I really wanted a way to dig in more and be substantially involved. I’ve dabbled the last few years in community service, until I became committed to spending a lot of my own time and resources to dig in and do more than just go to a march or volunteer for a day.

What was it like being involved with the Giving Project?

The Giving Project is amazing. It’s a six-month cohort program where about 25 of an intentionally cross-class and multi-racial group of people fundraise for their community and work together on solving issues on race and class by talking about historical and systemic racism. It’s a very rare and transformative experience. Collectively, we raised over $250,000 in three months, which is a number I didn’t think was possible to reach. We got to fund 12 local organizations that are run by and for BIPOC (black, indigenous, and people of color) communities. These organizations are already doing amazing work and to be able to support them financially was very cool. I had never been a part of something like this and being part of this fundraising project made me realize that the best way to make change is to listen and help the people already doing good.

What was your approach to fundraising with the Giving Project? 

The project coordinators meet with us individually to go through who we can ask for money and for how much. I learned that fundraising is about taking the time to talk with people about what their values are and why they support certain issues. It blew my mind how much financial support I could ask people for if I approached them the right way. Now my whole fundraising mentality is reoriented around investing a lot of time on one-on-one personal conversations rather than spamming people on social media. 

What has been the coolest or most memorable part of your public service?

I’m a white person and I want to help and be involved in fighting racial injustice, but it’s hard to help when I don’t want to be taking up space that I shouldn’t. Headwaters and the Giving Project structured their program and gave in it a way that helped people that want to be involved but might be scared to. 

Another cool moment was seeing that some of the people I asked for money last year for the Giving Project are now participating in the project themselves this year. They now are actively asking other people for money for the work I care so much about. 

Have you combined your interest in social change and community service with your materials science research in any way?

Science For All is a super cool student organization at the University that a lot of graduate students are involved in and they go to schools to do science experiments with kids. This feels like the most tangible thing I’ve been a part of even though it's not involved with my specific research. My research is on materials for solar cells and there's solar gardens going up in Minneapolis and Saint Paul, and there are tons of opportunities for researchers to build relationships with community members and figure out what questions they need answered and what is stopping them from getting what they need or want. I would love to see change in science and academia in general—for both to have more community-engaged research. 

What advice do you have for people looking to get involved with public service?

There are amazing researchers at the University that are doing community-engaged research. If that is something that people are passionate about, talk to those professors to see how they do it and how they incorporate it into their own research.

Donating money is the easiest thing to do in the sense that it takes the least amount of time if you have the financial resources and it can be super impactful in terms of shifting power in our society. However, not everyone has money to give and prefer to connect by giving time. So, in that case, I would give a shameless plug to join the Giving Project. 

My other advice is to look for organizations that are accountable, tackling issues at the root, and building relationships. This is why I love the Giving Project—they focus on root causes of issues, for example, not just treating the symptoms of homelessness, but trying to fix the fact that there are homeless people to begin with. They also heavily focus on relationship building, which made it a lot easier to stick with it long-term.

What does receiving fellowships, such as the 3M Science and Technology Graduate Fellowship, mean to you?

I could not have gone to graduate school without financial help. It was the difference between me being here and not being here, so I’m very grateful for that financial support. 

Specifically, my fellowships allowed me to branch off and start a new area of research that many students hadn’t worked on before. So, that's been really interesting and rewarding.

Why did you choose to pursue your graduate degree at the University of Minnesota’s College of Science and Engineering?

Before graduate school, I was working in Florida at Siemens Energy as an engineer. One of the reasons I moved back to Minnesota is because my mom was diagnosed with Parkinson’s and I knew I wanted to be home with her. Although I really loved my job in Florida, I was thinking that I wanted to switch from my undergraduate mechanical and aerospace engineering focus to more explicitly focus on solar cells.

As I was looking around, I was shocked by how amazing the College of Science and Engineering at the U was and how many excellent research groups there were that related to solar cell research and development. The more I read about it, the more I was amazed at how the U had exactly what I wanted. So I came for a visit one weekend and I had a great experience. 

Our department is very collaborative and has a good graduate student culture. I felt very welcomed, and I had already made friends with people in two days during my visit. I was already pretty sure I wanted to come here, but once I visited and met the professors and other graduate students, I was sold. It was a combination of personal reasons and the amazing research institution that the University of Minnesota is as well as the resources and culture that my department offered.

Story by Kathryn Richner

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College of Science and Engineering student Catherine Clark describes her outreach experiences in a video interview.

If you’d like to support students at the University of Minnesota College of Science and Engineering, visit our CSE Giving website.