Recent Grad 101: Maya Carey
Recent Chatham alum, Maya Carey (they/them) graduated in 2018 with a Bachelor’s in Political Science and Women and Gender Studies as well as a Certificate in Women’s Leadership. Since then, they have been working on educating their community on gender-based violence prevention at Hope Works of Howard County in Maryland, a non-profit that works to provide support and advocacy to those affected by sexual and intimate partner violence. We caught up with Maya to learn more about their post-grad journey, their recommendations for maximizing your college experience, and what’s on the horizon for this alumni superstar. Check out Maya’s interview below—
Tell us about what you did immediately following your Chatham graduation.
Maya Carey: A couple weeks before I graduated, I got a job offer [at Hope Works]. After graduation I stayed in Pittsburgh for a month and then I took a month off before starting work. I actually went on Birthright and went to Israel with my twin sister. Then, I started my job in Columbia, Maryland. It was really tough moving from living with my chosen family and friends in Pittsburgh to moving back home to live with my parents. I tried to spend as much time as possible with my chosen family when I was in Pittsburgh and then I gave myself a bit of a brain break before I started working full time.
How did this lead to your current job?
MC: It's the same organization, I have a different job title. I started as a volunteer program coordinator. I was running the volunteer program for Hope Works of Howard County, a local domestic violence, rape crisis, and human trafficking intervention and prevention center. I am in the community engagement department at my agency; we do prevention while the rest of our agency does intervention, working with clients and survivors who are in crisis or shortly out of crisis. I worked with the broader community and with longterm survivors who had been out of crisis for months or years. I work on two levels:
Primary prevention is at the community-based level. That’s working with school systems, youth group organizations, churches, mosques, and synagogues. Primary prevention consists of talking about healthy relationships, consent, bystander intervention, and trying to prevent violence before it happens.
Tertiary prevention is working with long term survivors, hoping to make sure that they don't enter into abusive relationships or aren’t assaulted again. It's providing them with community and a sense of long term support while also giving them skills and healing mechanisms to heal from the violence that occurred.
In August of 2020, I got a promotion. I'm now working solely as a community educator. I also work on policy issues within the county and the state of Maryland around gender-based violence.
What does your day to day look like?
MC: It's one of those jobs where you do everything. You have your job title, but there's a 1,000,001 things that you do in addition to that. We're community educators, so we have to build curriculum and develop continuing education around gender-based violence. Pre-pandemic, I was always on the phone. I ran a volunteer program and was organizing over 100 different people, making sure that they were all trained. We do a very intensive training at Hope Works to make sure that everyone has a broad understanding of the clients we serve, the safety concerns, and an understanding of what gender-based violence is. There are huge misconceptions and falsities that come from the public. That's because rape culture and victim-blaming culture are a huge part of American society.
We use art space healing for primary prevention and tertiary prevention. We run two arts magazines. Currently, I'm running a youth leadership project which is a year-long youth group project for high schoolers. That project is focused on engaging around social justice. The work that I do pertains to gender-based violence but we're connecting broader social issues to understand how violence is perpetuated throughout our communities, regardless of if it's gender-based violence, racial violence, homophobia, or transphobia. Connecting all of those systems of violence to gender-based violence is really important in the work that we do. I also co-host the podcast, Transforming Together. We're about to record a February episode with our youth leaders for Teen Dating Violence Awareness Month. It's a lot of coordinating, talking, educating, a lot of being a people person and putting yourself out there and having difficult conversations, which is good for me because I'd like to talk.
When you're doing educational workshops, is there a key takeaway that you want people to walk away with?
MC: It's never a survivor's fault. Gender-based violence is one of the only crimes where people immediately blame the victim or the survivor. We have to understand that abusers use power and control to manipulate, isolate, demean, and disempower survivors. There are many reasons why people don't leave, and that complexity needs to be understood. You should never ask someone why they didn't leave, why they didn't say no, or why they didn't change their situation. I also want to note that part of the reason why I'm such a good educator is because I'm focused less on the outcome and more on how the conversation is going. The outcome doesn't matter if we are having a productive conversation towards unpacking some of the myths and fallacies around gender-based violence. If my goal was to have people understand all of the complexities of gender-based violence, that would be stupid. Not everyone has a base understanding. I am flexible in conversation, making sure to go with the flow and engage in dialogue that's uncomfortable.
Every time you have a conversation about gender-based violence, racism, or oppression, you're helping your community. That conversation is going to go to their loved ones. The outcome is the dissemination of information. The outcome is having people question the status quo. We've normalized so many violent characteristics in our ideas about relationships. When we can have conversations about challenging the norms, even if we don't get to a desired outcome, we're still doing work that matters and is changing the culture. Black and brown women have been doing this work for generations. We've seen changes but it's not something that comes overnight. If we can change the way we communicate, then we can change the culture. Thinking about that as an outcome is a little bit better.
Do you have an aspirational destination that you want to land in your career?
MC: I don't dream of work but I think doing the work that I do right now is really important. I would love to dive deeper into social work and public health and get my dual degree in that. I'm tied to the idea of transformative justice. That's the theme of my podcast and the theme of a lot of my workshops—understanding violence prevention and community accountability as a tool for ending systems of violence. I would love to work more closely with my community around finding alternatives to policing, particularly looking at the effect policing has on women of color, communities of color, communities with disabilities, LGBTQ+ communities, as well as the criminalization of domestic violence, sexual violence, and human trafficking. I'm actually doing work around that now with Howard County. I'm working on a bunch of different racial equity Task Forces addressing policing and community safety.
I would love to continue to do that on a broader level—working out some alternatives to the systems that we have today, teaching about accountability, and teaching around what it means to actually heal from violence. [I want to] teach a culture where we divest from policing and invest in community healing, invest in the idea that every person experiences harm and every person has caused harm, and there are ways to heal from that other than locking people up and canceling the rest of their lives. What are some alternatives that actually support our society and make it safer?
How did Chatham inform your career path?
MC: [My time at Chatham] was a really difficult time; there was a lot of movement. During my junior year we went co-ed. We saw pushback from the university about changing [the name of] Sanger Hall* and a lot of racial tension on the campus. I knew that after going to Chatham, I wanted to engage tension in a way, and I think the best way to do that is through education. Through Chatham, I was able to get a lot of great internships and opportunities to work with the community. I worked for the Pennsylvania Center for Women and Politics (PCWP) and for the Women's Institute. I had a really great experience working with powerful, brilliant women, and learning from them. I got a scholarship from the university to work with Representative Dan Frankel. I worked with the city of Pittsburgh doing ADA disability grant writing and policy. I worked with the YWCA, another nonprofit doing work with women and children. The Women's Institute and PCWP pushed me to go out into to the community. That gave me the confidence I needed to become a really good public speaker and to engage people in difficult conversations. I learned a lot of communication skills from talking to people on campus and advocating through my role as president of the Chatham Feminist Coalition and working with the Black Student Union to advocate for curriculum changes as well as more diversity, equity, and inclusion. I owe everything to the Black and brown women on campus who had to fight to be present and have their voices heard. I'm thinking specifically of Diarra Clarke, Dr. Randi Congleton, Terry Bradford, and other powerful Black women who paved the way for me to be able to share my voice.
*Read about the University’s resolution on Sanger Hall here
Do you have any tips or advice for current students who are looking to explore their career in college?
MC: If you can, try to network to get paid internships. Engage putting yourself into places where you're a little uncomfortable so you can get more comfortable with being uncomfortable. I hated networking. I hated talking and feeling like I was taking up airspace but I kept doing it, and it really did transform the way that I thought about my opinions. Trust that if you have something to say it's important. Engage in what matters to you. If you're passionate about something that isn’t along the lines of your degree, explore it. You might find out that's what you want to do. Do something that scares you.
I think one of the biggest things that I could recommend is finding ways to integrate some type of self-care. There will always be classes, there will always be jobs, there will always be something for you to do. But if you're burnt out and feeling disengaged from the world, you can't be present in the places that you are supposed to be present. Integrate self-care and community care. Check in on your roommates, check in on your classmates, and be accountable to each other.
Learn how to balance things and figure out what makes you happy. Figure out what recharges your battery and do that every week so that you're never running on empty. Try something out. If that doesn't work, try something else out. Not everything has to be a crisis. We live in a world where we're so overwhelmed with crises that it gives us crisis fatigue. When we see an actual crisis coming up, we don't have the capacity to meet it head on. That's where health care, community care, psychological, emotional, and physical care come in. All of those ways of caring for yourself need to be implemented in whichever way feels most rejuvenating for you. Find some type of balance—push yourself but also know that if you push yourself too much, you're not going to end up doing anything for you. You have to do things because you want to do them and because you have a drive for them.
Though it didn’t make it into the article, one way Maya practices self-care is through their print-making projects. You can check out Maya’s art on their Instagram: @femmeprints and Etsy.
