A fast pitch competition isn’t usually associated with a school of social work. While business schools regularly employ the technique as an exercise in how to raise money for entrepreneurial pursuits, a fast pitch event at schools dealing in the social sciences is virtually unheard of.

Educators at the USC School of Social Work are changing that – one pitch at a time.

For 34 mostly Master of Social Work students (a few either came from other USC schools or were in a dual degree program, which offered a multidisciplinary component) who took clinical associate professors Renee Smith-Maddox’s and Annalisa Enrile’s co-taught social change courses last spring, a fast pitch competition served as their final exam.

“A learning experience with an embedded competition gives students an opportunity to design a social change initiative and effectively nurture new ideas, products and services,” Smith-Maddox said. “Our students have to be able to consistently advance their knowledge based on the client's or customer's needs, define and address complex issues, and connect ideas in new ways to rapidly create effective solutions to social challenges.”

Throughout the semester, students – those based both on campus and online – tackled the problem of unaccompanied child migration, teaming up to develop social innovations that would help this extremely vulnerable population. Since last summer, when a marked increase in the numbers of unaccompanied minors from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala crossing into the United States rose to prominence in mainstream media, concerned social workers such as Smith-Maddox and Enrile have looked for ways to keep the conversation going. Teaching this class was one way to do that.

“Interviews on television about social challenges such as unaccompanied minor migration are usually with lawyers or politicians,” Enrile said. “Social workers are rarely asked to contribute to this conversation, yet they are asked to solve the problem. So how do we get a seat at the table?”

Doing great good

The idea for the semester-long project stemmed from a social innovation laboratory organized by Enrile and Smith-Maddox last summer, with the help of the school’s Innovators in Residence GreenHouse, in response to the School of Social Work’s focus on thinking in bigger, more creative ways, especially when it comes to effecting change in the real world. Extrapolating from that experience, which included MSW students and representatives from outside the social work profession, the professors devoted an entire course to the social innovation lab idea.

Over the course of the semester, students visited the California-Mexico border to meet with local social workers and lawyers (this was no small feat, given the politics involved, and in fact many governmental groups canceled at the last minute), and held their own mini social innovation labs with guests from areas of study besides social work.

Students took on the seemingly insurmountable task of ameliorating the situation of unaccompanied migrant children, who often flee their home countries because of devastating violence or poverty. Many have family members already in the United States and try to reunite with them. But the journey can be treacherous, especially for the increasing numbers of young female minors making the trip who are most vulnerable to extortion, rape and sex trafficking.

If these youth make it to the United States, a confusing situation awaits them – one managed by the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which does not have the same checks and balances as child protective services agencies, often in a language they don’t understand in a legal system that allows children as young as 8 to represent themselves in immigration court. And if these children are allowed to stay in the United States, their sponsors, which include family members, schools and other local agencies, often face their own set of challenges connecting their new charges with the resources they need.

That’s where the USC students’ projects come in to play.

Eyes on the prize

The fast pitch winner was Juntos! (Juveniles Uniting as Newcomers, Teachers Offering Support), developed by then-students Chloe Valmore and Jessica Reynaga. Juntos! is a mobile application designed to ease the integration of these children into U.S. schools by connecting their teachers to student information; culturally relevant teaching methods; community-based resources; and evidence-based, trauma-informed approaches for school settings. In their pitch, Valmore and Reynaga asked for $50,000 to get their app off the ground, and they were praised by the panel of judges, which included representatives from the nonprofit, policy and community engagement sectors, for addressing the scalability and sustainability of the project.

Valmore and Reynaga found they share a common interest in education for children living in the inner city, where a large number of unaccompanied minors with U.S. sponsors end up. Reynaga used to be a teacher herself, so she thought of ways to help these children from a teacher’s perspective.

“As I learned more about unaccompanied minors, I realized that during my time as an educator I never stopped to think about how my students’ immigrant status affected their behavior or performance in the classroom,” Reynaga said. “This is largely because teachers have to juggle so many different factors that vary with each and every student. These insights are really what led us to think of a tool for teachers of unaccompanied minors – something that would benefit both the teacher and student.”

Having previously worked at Alain Leroy Locke College Preparatory Academy, a public charter high school located in South Los Angeles, Reynaga used her connections there to conduct a basic needs assessment with teachers on the English Language Development team through in-person interviews, which gave them an inside look at the challenges these students face in the classroom and the difficulties teachers face supporting these students academically.

“Throughout the process, we learned that as practitioners, innovative and creative strategies in community building and social transformation are essential,” Valmore said. “As macro social workers, we learned that our innovation for Juntos! emerged from the inspiration of fixing the problem, ideation of generating ideas and implementation of shifting our thinking to action.”

Second and third place winners were projects called LISTENR and Sobreviviendo Through Art, respectively. LISTENR (Linguistic Interpreting Services to Ensure Nurturing Results), developed by Stephanie Noriega, Mona Rupani and Julia Trueherz, is a mobile app that identifies the native language, often an uncommon indigenous one, of the unaccompanied minor and matches that child with service providers or interpreters who speak that language. Sobreviviendo Through Art, created by Octavia Bates, Mary Arroyo and Ludin Chavez, teaches these migrant children elements of expressive art to give them the sense of empowerment needed to share their experiences in court testimony.

No fast pitch competition would be complete without prizes. The top three projects will be matched with social innovation organizations – Taproot Foundation, artworxLA and Special Service for Groups – to bring their ideas to reality.

“This experience reminded me why I teach,” said Enrile. “Seeing these amazing innovations come to life…It’s been a great learning experience for us as educators, too.”