Today we’d like to introduce you to Amy Danzo.
Hi Amy, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
I am a mother. I am a wife. A daughter. A sister. A friend. An employee. A facilitator.
I am a writer and a stalwart advocate for higher education and equity for all.
Through my work at Northern Kentucky University, I’ve discovered that I have a passion for making systems, policies, and programming work for our students – not for our students to have to work for them. If I look at a policy and can’t see where it benefits a student or proves inequitable, I immediately begin researching it. If I happen to be a part of a department with an untapped area – where if we focus a bit more time and energy, it will create opportunity for our students – I look for people with strengths or experience that are interested in working together on making the area better. I am at my best flow when I am working with a diverse group of people who are equally as passionate as I am about access and equity for all.
From the moment I entered this world, I was following. As the youngest of four, I was always the smallest and the neediest. I remember being by my mother’s side often as we supported my siblings and their pursuits. I found myself never knowing as much as them and being very aware of the glaring differences between myself and them. I wanted to be equal to them – to learn as much and be as strong and brave as them. I looked up to each of them and continue to do so even to this day. They had big dreams, immense courage, and big brains.
My father, a first-generation high school, college, and graduate school graduate student, spent his entire career writing grants to help obtain state funds for people who could not afford to make essential improvements to their homes. My mother, a first-generation college graduate, joined my dad in his work. A trained teacher, she decided to stay home and raise her kids. Once I, the youngest, was in school, she tried to get back into teaching but could not find a job, partly because it had been close to fifteen years since she had taught. Throughout my life, both of these scenarios have had a significant impact on how I planned my future. I learned through my dad that we could use our strengths and passions to make a difference in the world by helping those less fortunate or who may not have been born with as much privilege as us. Through my mom’s experience, I learned that society punishes women for wanting to have a career while also wishing to care for their children.
Even though I was part of a family of six, I spent much time alone. I had an extremely vivid imagination and would write and create play scenarios continuously. I regularly fantasized about being a famous actress or singer. So much so that my parents got me into minor acting and singing gigs in our small town of New Philadelphia, Ohio. We didn’t live close to any big cities, so to go further with my dream would have meant packing up and leaving. That was next to impossible with a family rooted in this small town. So, I fixed my mind on other activities. I began playing basketball in eighth grade (after being cut from the team in seventh grade). I was probably the least skilled player, but I played with all my heart. Year after year, I got more time on the bench than on the court. I remember being frustrated with this. I wanted to play, and I felt my coaches weren’t allowing me to improve my skills. I wrote a story about the girl sitting on the bench. I don’t remember the story exactly, but I know it was about a basketball player who sat on the bench and whose coaches finally gave her a chance, and she ended up scoring the game’s winning basket. I not only wrote the story, but I gave it to my coaches, too. It was the first time I used my writing to express myself to others. And not only to express my feelings, but to advocate for myself. While it didn’t get me more playing time, it did help to build my confidence in my writing and advocacy.
I attended Ohio University (OU, oh yeah!) in Athens, Ohio, for my undergraduate and graduate degrees. In college, my goal was first to become a television meteorologist. After two years of journalism, geography, and telecommunication classes, I switched majors. Partway through my sophomore year, I was diagnosed with a heart murmur. Before the diagnosis, I thought I was dying. I later found out that it was the diathesis-stress theory coming to life. I was predisposed to anxiety, and the heart murmur was the stress that brought out my anxiety. From that point on, I would battle daily with anxiety. From medications to therapy appointments, my life became much more complicated. Once I truly understood what anxiety was, I was astounded by the clarity I felt knowing how anxiety affected the mind and body. I learned the power of normalization and decided I wanted to help others find the clarity I felt. So, I switched my major to psychology and loved everything about it.
In college, I also got my first taste of leadership. I was elected as the new member educator for the incoming freshmen sorority pledge class in my senior year. As an Alpha Xi Delta sisterhood member, I was responsible for teaching these 20 sisters everything there was to know about the sorority and the rules and expectations. It was the first time I realized that I could inspire others to be good and do good.
After I received my bachelor’s degree, I went straight to graduate school, where I earned my master’s degree in counseling education. Since I worked throughout my undergraduate and graduate degrees as a work-study student at the university, I felt a comfort and a calling to continue working in higher education. This comfort led me to a job at Northern Kentucky University in Highland Heights, Kentucky (Norse up!). And that’s where my leadership started to blossom.
I can’t explain why I am strongly pulled toward higher education. Working as a work-study allowed me to see the inner workings of higher education. I saw how hard the staff and faculty worked to support students with scholarship, career experience, and personal trials. The hustle and bustle of a college campus always gets me. I can feel the electricity of dreams being started, continued, and almost finished. But unlike electricity that jolts through your body, this one ripples peacefully like a meandering stream. Students are in classes learning, experiencing, and growing. Their present will lead to their future, and their mistakes will be the ladder rungs that lead them to self-actualization. Breathing in the fresh, late-summer air on a college campus…nothing feels quite like it.
My husband and children have significantly impacted my ability to thrive and use my passion and talents to help others. Jason and I have been together for 18 years and have four wonderfully brilliant, beautiful children: Lidia, Leonardo, Lucia, and Luna. Jason has supported and cared for me from the first moment he entered my life. He motivates me, encourages me, keeps me accountable, and loves me despite my flaws. My children have taught me much more about patience, teamwork, humility, and empathy than anyone I’ve encountered.
My experiences with raising my beautiful babies while still continuing to work, along with seeing colleagues suffer through short, unpaid parental leaves, led me to use my writing to advocate. I wasn’t sure what I was writing or to whom I was writing, but I just started writing. I wrote about how Americans are given a time limit with their infants. And how millions of working parents are forced to return to work even when their bodies and minds are not healed from bringing new babies home. This was true for my organization as well. I included stories about pregnant workers coming in sick or injured because they wanted to save their vacation and sick days for the baby’s arrival. And stories about new parents who had to return to work too soon after the baby arrived because they couldn’t afford unpaid leave. This impacted their health and the health of their baby. But, once I was done writing, I knew it couldn’t stop there.
I wanted paid parental leave for all. I felt with all my heart that it would help NKU staff and faculty with their health, their babies’ health, and their loyalty and dedication to the students they served. So, I started sharing my writing with my coworkers. Those excellent staff and faculty funneled me through committees and channels until I was introduced to someone who could push paid parental leave forward at NKU. After three years of petitioning for paid parental leave and the collection of voices amplified by a group of faculty and staff, the first-ever paid parental leave was established at Northern Kentucky University.
I’ve used my writing and advocacy to bring people together to tackle issues such as our children’s school COVID-19 policies, to keep a beloved city daycare from closing, and to remove discriminatory higher education policies. The key to these change initiatives is that my writing and advocacy are a spark that intends to light the fire in other people with the same passions and hopes for change. I do not take singular credit for any of this because a working group’s true collaboration, respect, and coalescence leads to awareness and change.
I have so much more to learn from others in order to be a responsible, reliable, and equity-minded advocate for change. This is why I am currently pursuing my doctorate in education from Northern Kentucky University. In this program, I have gotten the pleasure to learn with justice-minded peers and professors.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way? Looking back, would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
2020 marked the beginning of several years’ worth of challenges. In January 2020, my husband unexpectedly lost his job, where he had been employed for fifteen years. I was pregnant and due to give birth to our fourth child that June. And the next month, COVID-19 surged in America, and I was sent home to work, facilitating my other three children’s remote learning. These factors put enormous stress on my family, and I was forced to switch to survival mode.
After several months, my husband found a new job, the three older children were out of school for the summer, and I had delivered a healthy baby girl. As the fall of 2020 came around, my heart began going into regular atrial fibrillation episodes after many years of remission. I was put on a beta blocker and began to live in fear of another episode. My focus again shifted to survival. Then, out of nowhere – in the Spring of 2021 – I was experiencing severe abdominal pain, and it was found that I had appendicitis and needed an emergency appendectomy. I was still nursing our baby at this point, which proved difficult while healing from this surgery. However, with my mother and mother-in-law’s support, I could power through and continue breastfeeding through my recovery. Throughout 2021 and into 2022, I continued to have episodes of atrial fibrillation. After years of discussion, I finally decided to have a heart ablation, as there was an 85% chance I would never have an episode again after this procedure.
The surgery was successful, and I carried on about my daily life. But, something was off. I had surgery on my heart and thought I could continue on with no disruptions to my life. I got anxious when people reminded me that I have four kids, a dog, work, and school and then asked me how I did it all (I had no idea, really).
I thought I wasn’t stressed out until the therapist I had put off meeting with told me that our body will respond to stress, even if our minds keep pushing things away. I realized that I have no one who has a plate-like mine, and being the youngest of four, I’ve always had others to learn from and to lean on. So being on this island by myself was scary. And I realized that I had been scared for three straight years.
I’m now off all my heart medications, meeting with a therapist regularly, and on a daily SSRI. I am working to destigmatize getting help for anxiety. Through these struggles, I am learning how to be a cog in the wheel of bringing justice and equality to all, while not losing myself in the process.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
It wasn’t until I landed a job at Northern Kentucky University in 2008 that I was exposed to diverse thoughts, cultures, and races. I interacted and collaborated with colleagues and students with different spiritualities, ethnicities, races, abilities, cultures, and sexual and gender identities. I could listen and understand how as a second-generation, middle-class, white, American college student, my college experience was much easier to navigate than those without those privileges. Through these collaborations and interactions, my passion grew to change higher education so that all undergraduate students could have the experience I did, even if they didn’t have the familiar support and privilege I inherited.
My first job at NKU was as a Testing and Technology Counselor. I was responsible for administering exams and training and maintaining Assistive Technology for those needing examination proctoring. It was in this role that I was first introduced to credit-for-prior learning. According to the Council for Adult and Experiential Learning, credit for prior learning (also referred to as prior learning assessment and recognition of learning) “…is a term for various methods that colleges, universities, and other education/training providers use to evaluate learning that has occurred outside of the traditional academic environment. It grants college credit, certification, or advanced standing toward further education or training” (The Council for Adult and Experiential Learning, n.d.). CPL can come in various formats: exams, a portfolio of documentation, a performance, or any other institutionally-accepted assessment method. In my professional life, I have been able to bear witness to the profound impact CPL has on a student’s academic success. Starting with my experience administering credit-by-examinations, my curiosity about various ways to assess a student’s prior knowledge has been unflinching. Several years ago, I needed to enroll in DePaul University’s Prior Learning Assessment program to gain a deeper understanding of how CPL worked. Because of what I learned in this course, I worked closely with NKU colleagues to bolster NKU’s offerings of credit-for-prior learning. We wrote and received a grant from the American Council on Education (ACE) to change the CPL culture at NKU. With that grant, we could offer stipends to faculty members to create NKU’s first-ever faculty-created credit-by-examinations, or what we call CPLEs. We also were able to be stewards to departments in creating course equivalencies to certificates and licenses that weren’t earned as part of a higher education pursuit. NKU now has the most robust credit-for-prior learning portfolio in Cincinnati. The more I learned about CPL, the more I realized the possibilities it could provide to underrepresented minority (URM) students. This has led to grants for free CPL opportunities for Northern Kentucky University students. This work has led me to the positions I currently hold. I am now the Director of the Adult and Transfer Center and the Director of Testing Services at NKU.
My life’s work is based on my perspective of privilege and opportunity in America. I want our children to understand that they will encounter and collaborate with others in their life who don’t have the same privilege of generations and centuries of hope and opportunity. I want them to know that there is a huge portion of our population whose ancestors came here by force and with much despair. They feared for their lives and future generations’ lives while in this country. They weren’t allowed to own property, have the same education, get the same jobs, or network in the same circles as our ancestors. Because of this, society has set them back. And it is our responsibility to continue the work of tipping the scale towards equity in their favor.
Are there any books, apps, podcasts, or blogs that help you do your best?
Yes!
Books:
Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds, by adrienne maree brown
The Four Pivots: Reimagining Justice, Reimagining Ourselves, by Shawn A. Ginwright, PhD
Cultures of Belonging: Building Inclusive Organizations That Last, by Alida Miranda-Wolff
Rest is Resistance: A Manifesto, by Tricia Hersey
Podcasts:
Unlocking Us, with Brene Brown
Become a Good Ancestor, with Layla Saad
Contact Info:
Image Credits
Emerson Swoger
