My start was in the early '60s. So the world was changing, and so the ability to think out of the box was really something that was prized at that time.

I actually started teaching in the inner cities. I worked in Chicago, and it was when I was in West Oakland teaching that I got involved in my first real community organizing, although I had seen the need when I was in Chicago, because I predominantly worked with underserved populations, underrepresented populations.

So it was in the early '60s when we were in Berkeley, California that I started working with the Black Panthers helping to establish the free breakfast program in the schools. And that became a significant part of my life and directly relates to what I do today because the kinds of skills that are necessary to organize communities, speak with different populations, get different people to hear each other and to work from within a structure like a school system applies to what I do today, which is the building of interdisciplinary research across a major research one institution that has a variety of colleges and missions with those colleges.

You cannot take yourself seriously, and you cannot take responses on a personal level. What you're doing is listening to what people tell you is important to them, whether it's in a community of people that live out in the real world or within an academic setting. So one of my favorite questions that I like to ask people is: in a perfect world, if funding was not an issue, if resources were not a problem, what would you really do? And it's fascinating to see how people will open up and tell you what they really want to do. So I think not taking yourself so seriously, learning how to listen and hear what people are saying, validating their point of view even if it's different from yours, and showing them that you're there to facilitate, support, and advocate for those goals is essential in either setting.