Staff Focus: Community Service Is Personal for Maurice Smith

Academic service-learning coordinator says that surviving Hurricane Katrina informs his approach to civic engagement.

October 19, 2015

Maurice Smith

Maurice Smith, coordinator of academic service learning in the Honey W. Nashman Center for Civic Engagement and Public Service.

This is the second Staff Focus, a new regular feature in George Washington Today that will introduce university staff to the GW community. The staff profiles result from feedback gleaned from a GW Today reader survey on ways to better serve our readers. The profiles will be published every few weeks on Mondays. If you want to recommend a coworker for Staff Focus, contact us at [email protected]. Please put Staff Focus in the subject line.

By Ruth Steinhardt

Maurice Smith was a student at Loyola University when Hurricane Katrina made its devastating landfall, shredding parts of his hometown and leaving whole neighborhoods underwater.

The Saturday afternoon the storm hit in August 2005, Mr. Smith was stuck in creeping traffic on New Orleans’ Twin Span Bridge. He watched from behind the wheel of his Honda Civic as Katrina whirled in from the south.

“I saw the water starting to churn and felt the bridge sway,” Mr. Smith recalled. “I could see a wall of white—that was how hard it was raining, that it made a wall. That was one of the first arms of the storm.”

Mr. Smith evacuated safely to a friend’s home in Tuscaloosa, Ala., his family to the homes of relatives in Georgia and Alabama. But Katrina and the upheaval the storm left behind would change his life.

“People don’t realize that [when Katrina hit] it was the beginning of school,” he said. “People had just dropped their kids off. We were in orientation weekend, school was going to start on Monday. And all of a sudden it was like ‘Oh, change of plans.’”

More like an upheaval. A month after the storm he moved to Chicago, where Loyola had a campus to which it relocated him and hundreds of other students. When he returned to New Orleans in January 2006, it was to a city that needed his help.

“We [Loyola students] were pretty much doing service every weekend of 2006,” he remembered. “We were out cleaning up, rebuilding houses, restoring our own neighborhoods.”

It was a deeply personal, often grim process. Mr. Smith said he and his fellow volunteers found bodies in the rubble more than once.

“The first couple of times, it was very [hard]. But then you become a little bit desensitized. You [learn] the protocol, and then that just kicks in.”

Opting out was not an option. “If we didn’t get out and help rebuild, then we wouldn’t have a place either,” he said.

Ten years later, Mr. Smith is coordinator of academic service learning in the Honey W. Nashman Center for Civic Engagement and Public Service at the George Washington University. It is the latest step in a career of service cemented in post-hurricane New Orleans.

This view of service shaped in the aftermath of Katrina—not so much altruism as something ingrained in personal and communal life—still informs Mr. Smith’s approach. In his current work, he oversees curricular engagement, coming up with ways to incorporate civic engagement and public service into GW students’ academic lives.

One way he does that is as director and coordinator of the Civic House Academic Residential Community, a first-year program for students who want to be active citizens of Washington, D.C.

“We want [GW] to be not just an entity in D.C., but also a neighbor,” Mr. Smith said. “We talk a lot [to students] about how, when you’re here, you are a community member. It’s important where you choose to live, where you spend your time, where you buy your clothes, even where you put your trash. That all affects the neighborhood.

“That’s one of the reasons I’m happy to get up every day and come to work, because I work with people who get that.”

Amy Cohen, executive director of the Nashman Center, described Mr. Smith as “a huge asset” to the center. “The number of academic service-learning classes at GW has doubled since his arrival,” Ms. Cohen said. “He has also been a great mentor and leader for Civic House, providing support for service, academics and civics as well as great life advice.”

In Mr. Smith’s view, service is not a matter of parachuting into disadvantaged communities, but of listening to affected people and forging relationships with them.

“It’s really important for me to work in a place where we are being realistic about the partnerships and relationships that we’re building,” he said. “When we come to the table, we want to offer everyone a space there to plan with us, talk with us, work with us—as opposed to planning at them, talking at them, working at them.”

One example is a physical therapy class Mr. Smith helped link up with Playworks, a nonprofit organization that creates structured, healthy recesses at elementary schools. The students helped craft preventive care curricula, teaching children how to warm up and stretch safely.

“Whether you’re an engineering faculty member or a theater major, everyone can find some form of service that they connect to,” Mr. Smith said. “And when you do find those perfect fits it’s awesome because then people put in a whole new level of work to continue the relationship and even build it to a new level.”

An inveterate traveler—“I love to just get in my car and go,” he says, referencing the same Civic he waited in on the Twin Span Bridge—Mr. Smith said he loves Toronto and hopes to visit London and Australia, but he still has a strong relationship with the city where he grew up. He goes back to New Orleans “as often as possible,” he said, recently returning for an uncle’s 60th birthday.

“It’s still an amazing city,” he said.