During her senior year in high school, Slattery, FCRH ’15, attended a Model United Nations conference in Hershey, Pennsylvania, that featured a keynote speaker from Honduras. When he announced he’d be giving away a free trip to the Central American nation, Slattery, who had been planning to enlist with U.S. Navy after graduation, was shocked to hear that out of 3,000 names in the audience, hers was the one that was chosen.

“My parents were initially very excited, not so much when they found out it was the then-murder capital of the world,” she said.

“After being exposed to extreme poverty there for the first time, it just changed my path in life.”

That service trip, to work with the group Students Helping Honduras, only lasted a week, but it inspired Slattery to pursue a career in humanitarian aid. After graduating from Fordham College at Rose Hill with a degree in political science, she moved to Indonesia to teach English on a Fulbright scholarship, and then returned to Honduras in 2016 to work as a program director for Students Helping Honduras.

That experience brought her back to Fordham, where she’ll be earning an M.S. in humanitarian studies in May.

“I came back and said ‘I really wanted to put my feet into this work further and work in humanitarian response,’” she said.

Education is Key

Education is key to the work that Slattery did in Honduras, and it’s going to be the focus of her master’s thesis. She conducted needs assessments as a member of a Honduran-led team in the northern section of the country.

The assessment identified difficulties such as schools that were five miles away from where children lived, schools that were situated close to dangerous locations like highways, and in more than one occasion, schools that shared space with local bars.

While it’s well understood that children can suffer severe development issues when their education is denied or delayed, what Slattery has found is that when it comes to children, safe environments and education can mutually reinforce each other. And, conversely, missing out on an education can be nearly as damaging—for the child and the community—as the disaster that disrupted it.

“Once a child falls out of the system, they may not feel empowered to participate in community programs or civil society. It proves costly for everyone, because the thinking, learning, and psychosocial skills that children develop in school contribute to post-war reconstruction,” she said.

“Education should be considered a pillar of the humanitarian response. We give lifesaving things the most priority, like food, water, and shelter, but we’re finding that education is just as important.”

Studying Humanitarian Action in Spain

This past spring, Slattery attended the Universidad de Deusto in Bilbao, Spain, and took classes such as Humanitarian Action and Peacebuilding, Design Strategies and Protection Programs in Humanitarian Action, and Ethical Management of Humanitarian Organizations. Like Fordham, Universidad de Deusto is a member of the Network on Humanitarian Action (NOHA). Slattery said her experiences in Honduras convinced her she wanted to focus on community-based protection, which made Deusto an ideal place to take classes.

“In Deusto, they focus on a specialization of protection. People are often viewed as objects in need of protection, but they have their own resiliency to protect themselves. These classes really focused on mainstreaming protection programming into all aspects of humanitarian programming,” she said.

What was particularly enlightening about her time in Spain, she said, was the way she was able to observe the externalization of the European Union’s border. In April, she flew to Morocco and visited Melilla, a five-square mile autonomous Spanish city of 78,000 residents located on the tip of the country’s northern coast. The city is separated from the rest of the African continent by a set of 20-foot-high fences topped with razor wire. As part of their visit, Slattery’s class met with a nonprofit organization that helps immigrants that successfully make it over the border apply for asylum.

“I’ve traveled to probably 40 countries, and it was probably one of the most intense borders I’ve ever seen,” she said.

In addition to academic work, Slattery has in the last year earned certificates in areas such as hazardous materials, bleeding control, and tactical emergency casualty care. Her travels in Honduras often brought her to remote areas where medical care was in short supply, so she said she felt the need to get basic training for herself to prepare her future work.

A Trip She’ll Never Forget

Looking back, she said that what moved her the most when she first visited Honduras was a stop at a village that had been devastated by Hurricane Mitch in 1998. In 2010, she said, many residents still hadn’t returned home and had little access to clean water, electricity, or education.

“This forgotten, protracted displacement really stuck with me, and it just made me realize that we have a shared responsibility to bear witness, stand in solidarity, and preserve the human dignity of those affected by violent conflicts or climate disasters,” she said.

In the fall of 2018, students who want to do just that will be able to gain all the skills they’ll need to work in the field of humanitarian aid.

Fordham’s Institute of International Humanitarian Affairs (IIHA) is offering a Master’s of Science in Humanitarian Studies, a 30-credit interdisciplinary program built on social justice values and humanitarian principles.

The degree, which will be the first U.S.-based master’s degree dedicated exclusively to international humanitarian response, will be offered through the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS).

The IIHA already offers a Master of Arts in Humanitarian Action through the GSAS that is an executive-style program for those already working in the sector. It has an average student age of 40.

IIHA Executive Director Brendan Cahill said the M.S. in Humanitarian Studies will appeal to students in their 20’s who want to learn skills that non-governmental organizations (NGO’s) are looking for. Fordham undergraduates from any degree program will also be able to apply in their junior year to an accelerated track, allowing them to complete a BA/BS and MS in Humanitarian Studies in five years.

In addition to students affiliated with schools affiliated with the Network on Humanitarian Actions, Cahill said he expects the degree will appeal to undergraduates attending other Jesuit universities.

“It’s a natural graduate degree for those students who are already inculcated in Ignatian pedagogy,” he said.

The degree will feature three distinct tracks: Human Rights, Communities and Capacity Building, and Livelihoods and Institutions. Cahill said that in the past, a person might have gotten a degree in food security, logistics, or accounting, and then learned on the job as they rose through the ranks of an NGO. With this degree, they will graduate with a suite of skills at their fingertips, from financial accounting and communication skills to data analysis and development.

“By combining these disparate elements, you become a more well-rounded aid professional,” he said.

“It helps to know how to do these skills; they complement the passion and compassion that naturally leads one into the humanitarian sector.”

All students will take five courses have been created exclusively for the degree: Fundamentals of Humanitarian Action, Contemporary Issues in Humanitarian Action, Information Management, Humanitarian Resource Management & Administration, and Monitoring & Evaluation in Humanitarian Response.

Another draw of the degree is the vast network of partnerships that students will be able to tap into for classes and for a mandatory semester-long internship. If a student is interested in a subject that is not being offered at Fordham, he will be able to take it elsewhere. A class on food security issues might be offered through the University College, Dublin, for instance, and a course on education in emergencies might be offered by the Jesuit Refugee Service.

“We can teach students a lot by being in the capital of the world. The U.N. headquarters are based here, and there are so many humanitarian NGOs based in New York. But how else are you going to learn other than by getting experience in the field?” said Cahill.

“We’ve been running training programs for 20 years.  We have 3,000 alumni in middle to senior levels at organizations around the world. There’s a growing number of undergraduates who view their liberal arts education through the prism of humanitarian studies, but for those who want to go into the field, there has to be a mentorship. There has to be a hand that’s put out for them to pull them in. That’s what this program is designed to do.”