In the 1990s, when gang violence in Los Angeles County was at its peak, Cheryl McKnight was a member of the Gang Prevention and Intervention Unit in Long Beach. She helped initiate a truce between the East Side Longos and Insane Crips gangs, resulting in a long-standing peace that remains to this day. She soon became director of the city’s Future Generations Youth Center, where she enabled marginalized youth to take some ownership of the program. In 2007, she joined California State University, Dominguez Hills (CSUDH) and used what she learned about empowering to expand experiential learning and service opportunities for students as coordinator for the Center for Service Learning, ... Read More
SLICE
CSUDH Jumpstart Celebrates 10 Years of Service
Editor's Note: Interviews for this article took place in late 2019. It’s 9 a.m. on a school day, but Paola Gonzalez isn’t in a lecture hall. She’s leading a rapt circle of four-year-olds in a rousing rendition of “Slippery Fish” at the YWCA preschool in Compton. “Slippery fish, slippery fish, gulp gulp gulp,” she sings, wriggling her hands as the children squeal with delight. Gonzalez, a fourth-year theatre arts major at CSUDH, is well experienced in putting on a show. As a team leader for Jumpstart, she has ample opportunity to put those creative skills to good use. Each week, Gonzalez and her team of fellow Jumpstart volunteers plan and deliver an engaging curriculum for local ... Read More
Cultivating Crops and Eager Minds Earns Jenney Hall the Excellence in Service Award
Since she arrived at California State University, Dominguez Hills (CSUDH) in 2016, lecturer of environmental studies Jenney Hall has wasted little time developing new ways to teach students how to study and protect the environment, and how to grow nourishing crops for themselves and food insecure people. Hall quickly became well liked and respected among her students and colleagues in CSUDH’s Interdisciplinary Studies Department (IDS) for her teaching of introductory and advanced courses in environmental studies, and for developing curriculum for face-to-face online and hybrid courses. In 2018, she brought agriculture to campus when she co-founded the Urban Farm to teach the health and ... Read More
Toros and Friends Craft Masks to Protect Students and Health Care Professionals
Grabbing from a stack of material leftover from quilting projects, Cheryl McKnight slides strips of 100 percent cotton into her “workhorse” sewing machine, stitching them into face masks for the Rosecrans Care Center in Gardena. McKnight is the director of the Center for Service Learning, Internships and Civic Engagement (SLICE) at California State University, Dominguez Hills (CSUDH). She began making masks in March after SLICE Coordinator Miami Gelvizon-Gatpandan told her that the staff at the care center where her sister works as an LVN and infection preventionist had run out of face coverings to protect patients and themselves from COVID-19. “I got online and found a pattern and ... Read More
Suzette Mitchell Provides Validation for African-Native American Students
When alumna Suzette Mitchell visited her tribe’s reservation as a child, the children weren’t allowed to play with her. “Some even called me the n-word,” she said. Her grandmother was Goshute—a western branch of the Shoshone nation—and was ostracized after being the first in the tribe to marry an African American, a similar fate her mother shared after being stereotyped as a half-breed. Mitchell’s family experienced what many African-Native American individuals who stand on the border between two worlds do; they are often not readily accepted as Native American, and misunderstood as bi-racial persons with dual social identities. “It was very unpopular to marry a Black man back then. ... Read More
