Story #21: Tammy Anderson
At JEP, we are extremely grateful for all of our former Executive Directors who have paved the way for what we do today. One of them is Tammy Anderson, who started working for JEP over forty years ago. She led JEP with compassion and understanding, shaped decade-long relationships with individuals on and off campus, raised an immensely high amount of funds for JEP, and built bridges to other organizations that are still vital to JEP today.
In an interview we did with her last year, she perfectly captured the impact she had on the development of JEP during her time. “In the early days, folks on campus saw JEP almost as a charity arm of the university that sent our students out to “help” the community. They didn’t think about the program as mutually beneficial with our students and our neighbors learning with and from each other. However, the JEP staff would not be deterred. We continued to share our mission and over the years, built strong and long-lasting community partnerships that were history-making. Not only did we help to make USC a better university, we became an international model of service-learning as representatives from other higher ed institutions around the world came to learn from and observe our programs.
But Tammy’s passion and advocacy for JEP didn’t stop when she handed over the baton to our current director, Susan Harris. As Associate Dean of Experiential and Applied Learning in the Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences at USC, she now leads a new office that brings together Dornsife’s experiential learning programs and provides strategic direction and planning, serves as a hub for best practice, seeds innovation, and supports faculty engaged in experiential learning. She also still stops by the JEP house frequently to chat and offer encouragement, advice, and the positivity that follows her wherever she goes.