Alumni
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Jordan Clark
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During his 3 years at Vanderbilt, Jordan Clark has volunteered in the Nashville community in a variety of capacities that include serving as an English language instructor, tutoring through a Spanish service-learning class, organizing an after-school enrichment program, and most recently, coordinating a community-based health research project and advocating for inclusive immigration reform.
Jordan’s service has also taken him abroad to parts of Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Spain, and Kampala, Uganda, where he executed his first Ingram Summer Project in 2013 with fellow Ingram Scholar Kevin Wolf. There, Kevin and Jordan partnered with Ugandan engineer Dr. Moses Musaazi and his organization Technology for Tomorrow (T4T) to document and promote sustainable rainwater harvesting practices. This experience provided Jordan with the opportunity to explore the connections between service, enterprise, and social research, and it inspired him to pursue more development work in the future.
During the summer of 2014, Jordan worked in Nashville with Dr. David Hess of the Vanderbilt Department of Sociology to organize a second summer project, this one a faculty fellowship supported by the Ingram Scholarship Program. For this project, Jordan partnered with Progreso Community Center and the Nashville Latino Health Coalition to plan, design, and carry out a participatory health impact assessment (HIA) with Hispanic communities in Middle Tennessee. The stated goal of this assessment is to enhance local understanding of the health of Hispanic immigrants and their families while attempting to define the tentative public health effects of immigration reform by asking community members directly about their experiences.
The Ingram Scholarship Program has played a crucial role in Jordan’s growth as a scholar and global citizen. His participation in the program has yielded him invaluable friendships, insight into future careers, and deepened perspective about critical social issues of our time.
Looking to his senior year and beyond, Jordan intends to carry his experiences as an Ingram Scholar forward into a life dedicated to serving others and working toward positive community change. Jordan hopes to continue exploring ways to combine a commitment to service with a professional career at an international scope. He is particularly interested in exploring the nexus between sustainable development and the global health sciences. During the 2014–2015 year, he will continue to collaborate with Vanderbilt partners and members of community to follow through with the translation and reporting phases of the impact assessment initiated thru his summer project. He also plans to return to teaching English with adults in the Nashville community.