Charles Street Chats: Q&A with Tiffaney Parkman
Dr. Tiffaney Parkman, lecturer and director of the B.A. in Human Services Administration, has had a storied career in mental health and human services that picked up after she earned her first degree and developed over time to lead her to higher education and The University of Baltimore.
She found a passion in work that supports people in need and has now spent many years helping her students better understand themselves and their communities so they can achieve their own goals as professionals in human services.
Behind the Chat
Order: lemon ginger tea
Location: Nancy by SNAC
Distance from campus: 0.4 miles
Q: How would you define human services?
A: Any career where you work with people is human services. I think that no matter if you’re in the business school, if you’re in the law school, you should take some classes in human services. Most people have experienced some professional that had a poor bedside manner: You are trying to get a need met, whether it’s your laptop being fixed or you’re at the doctor trying to figure out what’s happening, or the dentist, and they are not able to meet you where you are at a human level, and you leave there feeling defeated, or maybe you don’t go back for services, or you skip to different places trying to get that need met. Human services really captures any discipline that deals with other humans, and gives you the skills so that you can do whatever it is you’re going to do at a higher level and at a better level.
A lot of our students, a good portion of them want to be social workers, or they want to be therapists or start their own nonprofits where they are helping to ameliorate something in the community. We also have students who go on to law school, that go on to get an MBA or become professionals in public administration, and they have a heart for people, so however they go about that helping is human services.
Watch: Tiffaney beams with pride about her students at UBalt
Q: How did the COVID-19 pandemic change the human services field and how have you those changes evolved how you teach?
A: I tell my students that this is the field that we will never have to worry about being replaced. Robots can’t do what we do, AI can’t do what we do. And because we are living in times when there is always something happening—school shootings, mass shootings, infrastructure failures, the effects of global warming where natural disasters are really taking a toll on human life and family life—we will always have a job. The pandemic really accentuated the need for more human services. When I asked the class or ask anyone, ‘Are you mentally ill?’ ‘No, no, no, I’m not mentally ill.’ But in fact, we are all mentally ill, we just fall on a continuum where some people need medication, maybe all the time, some people might need medication, every now and then, and then some people might not need medication, but perhaps they’re having a bad day. We are all mentally ill at some capacity, and the pandemic really highlighted it for many people, that yes, I do need help, yes, I do need other people. People who had not had access to services did not know where to get them, because they had not found themselves in a place where they needed those types of services. The pandemic, for everyone, opened the door to show how to get those services.
For me as a professor, how that changes how I teach or how I go about class is recognizing I have students who are coming to me, who want to help people knowing that they have PTSD from being in a pandemic. Self-care is No. 1. You have to be able to take care of yourself before you can take care of someone else. And you’re also dealing with other things. Many people lost family members due to COVID, they could not have proper burials because of COVID, the confusion around where we get information and fake news, all of this was happening. The first thing as a faculty member was to take care of those students, and to make sure they were OK before they could learn or develop skills so that they could help anyone else. That’s paramount in terms of my teaching and how I go about the classroom, before the pandemic, but specifically after, recognizing that everyone has been changed because of that. And I’ll say it was an easier lift for me because I’m a school shooting survivor. I was at Virginia Tech when that shooting happened. When something traumatic happens, you have to pivot or you have to be able to quickly surround people, make sure they’re OK before the expectation of them being able to do some higher-level functioning can work. Faculty members have to remember that even though you’re there to give content, and you are the expert at whatever you’re teaching, the person on the receiving end can only absorb as much if they are OK, if they are clothed, if they are fed, if they feel safe and a sense of security, and sometimes that doesn’t always translate out.
Q: Why do you think it’s important for your students before they graduate, to get involved with and engage with their community?
A: I was born in New Orleans. I grew up in Indiana. I went to college in Mississippi. I went to graduate school in Kentucky. I lived in Georgia and I went to graduate school in Virginia, and then I moved to Maryland. In each of those places I started off new, I had to find community, I had to find my people, I had to find the places where I was interested in and work those networks because I was not from there. I was new.
When I came to Baltimore and I came to UBalt, I was really astonished at being in classrooms where people were siloed. They didn’t know their classmates, they didn’t know what they did. I started integrating activities where they would get to know each other and learn more about their community.
When I first started, there was a walking tour of Station North that we were required to do as part of the hiring process and it was amazing. So fast forward, maybe two semesters later, I taught a community organizing class. I contacted that organization and said, ‘I need this tour as a part of my class.’ Now Station North is just a couple blocks up from the school and I said, ‘Wear your tennis shoes. We’re going,’ and so we did this walking tour, and after, they had to do a reflection. And they were like I’ve lived here my whole life and I never knew that that existed. They were amazed.
People can live in a place and really not know what’s going on, where things are, and so I made it my mission to include activities in my classes that engage students with the community, not so that they can also learn what’s happening, but so that they can use the skills and abilities and knowledge that they’ve gained as a part of being in our program out in the community to better some issue.
So they are required to partner with a community agency, think about some issue that they want to fix or that they want to have an impact on. After the Freddie Gray riots, the summer school students partnered with a church and they had a summer program. They painted a big mural for their community, they did artwork for the kids and they got all everything donated because they wrote a grant and they wrote a proposal, and they went to Michael’s and Michael’s gave them all the supplies that they could use. We had ice cream party for the students. That was something that was key for those children who had just experienced—well, we all experienced it—so the students really gained a lot just by using their skills to help someone else after something tragic happened.
We also do projects that benefit our own students. Our students worked on the primary plan that started what is now the Campus Pantry. They developed a proposal, they went to schools looking at how food pantries were developed, They talked to different food-sourcing agencies in terms of how they could get donations and did a whole presentation for the school. That project led to the president seeding money to do a larger study, and now we have a food pantry. And last summer, they worked to improve a lactation room on campus. I’m a mom, I breastfed for 18 months. I have an office where I pumped. The University Baltimore had space, but we could do better. The students got together, wrote proposals, they were able to secure monies to get information brochures, a refrigerator, rocking chairs, and spruce up a place that their community needed.
For me, that’s what this is all about, being a director of a program, producing students who can take what they learn and actually impact change at a small level, at a deeper level, have a large impact, no matter where they go and no matter what they decide they want to do.
What Charms Us
We end all of our Charles Street Chats with the same question: What do you love most about Baltimore? Here’s Tiffaney’s answer.
I love most about Baltimore, the people, the culture. I love the community that’s here, and even though I am a secondary Ravens fan, I love that they still embrace the New Orleans Saints fan in me.