Working for our Essential Workers

This week’s blog is a reprint from the May ’21 issue of the USF Magazine. Miriam Uribe ’17, former Advocate for Community Engagement (ACE), is another McCarthy Center alum named on USF’s 30 Under 30 list! As an ACE, Miriam served as a year-long liaison between USF students, faculty, and our community partner, Generation Citizen, to coordinate service-learning experiences for 40 students. She was also one of our Global Privett Scholars, and traveled to Bolivia through our program to work on community-based sustainable development projects abroad. As a result of the incredible work she completed with the McCarthy Center, Miriam was named a ’16 Robert Holstein Scholarship awardee. The scholarship is given to students with an exemplary commitment to public service. Read on for how the value of service has shaped her career and the work she does currently.

For many of us, the COVID-19 pandemic opened our eyes to the plight of essential workers in this country. Miriam Uribe hopes we never close our eyes to them again.

Working with the national field director at the National Domestic Workers Alliance, Uribe ensures that domestic workers know their value and know their rights — and that their employers know them, too.

When Uribe was studying politics and Latin American studies at USF, she took Professor Kathleen Coll’s class on Latino politics “and it got me thinking,” she says. “I’m a worker, too. I’m going to spend more than half my life as a worker. I wanted to make sure that everybody has worker protections. I mean, I remember getting health insurance. I remember getting my first paid sick day. And I thought about my mom and dad and how they never took sick days because they couldn’t, so I decided to go into this field.”

Read the full USF 30 Under 30 article here.