By Natalie Festa, CCL Student Assistant
Taylor Phillips grew up in a military family, spending most of her childhood in Hawaii and Georgia. While she enjoyed living in different places, the feeling of home was often hard to find. This soon changed when Phillips chose to attend Rice University and participate in the Urban Immersion (UI) program, a financially-inclusive opportunity for matriculating students to learn about principles of civic engagement and to explore the city of Houston. Phillips says that she knew she wanted to attend Rice because of the small college atmosphere and the curious student body; what she did not know was how much a program like UI could make Houston feel like her new home. UI allowed her to engage with complex social issues while building lasting friendships with like-minded students.
After UI, Phillips continued her involvement with the CCL, participating in the Houston Volunteer Cohort her freshman year and the Houston Action Research Team (HART) program her sophomore year. Her team worked with local non-profit Undies for Everyone (UFE) to design a disaster relief strategy after Hurricane Harvey in 2017, with much of the work involving research, interviewing, and connecting other non-profits and their leadership to UFE to develop a comprehensive plan. Phillips remembers the experience as formative but jarring, noting that “the HART program is where people come to you for questions and no one else knows the answer...in school, you’re always used to someone asking a question and the answer is there.”
While the pressure to find real answers may have been daunting, Phillips and her team were able to create a successful project by working together and learning how to begin from scratch, how to pose good research questions, and how to reach out for help. Over the course of the semester, the team conducted over 30 interviews, with one culminating in a discussion with former Houston Mayor and Rice Alumna, Annise Parker. Though they had not expected her to respond, Mayor Parker proved a key resource for the project and was eager to help. “The CCL has just taught me to take a chance, to reach out to people that seem so inaccessible, [because] those who are knowledgeable about these things want to help others,” Phillips reflects. “It made me realize that despite my age, despite my education, I can do amazing things, especially with a team.”