A Mother, Student, and Leader with a Vision

Jenn Piatt: A Mother, Student, and Leader... with a Vision

by Vanessa Persico, Colgate University
Outstanding Student Leaders Digest (published by AIDemocracy.org)
January 17, 2006

Jenn Piatt, a sophomore at the University of Nebraska at Omaha (UNO) and now a recipient of the Outstanding Student Leader Award, has her priorities set.

“I’m passionate about my daughter, school and AID,” she says, “And it drives me.”

Indeed, it has driven her to accomplish amazing things on her campus. Early this November, Piatt, organized a town hall-style meeting for AID’s “Hope Not Hate” initiative, persisting in the face of many obstacles and hostile voices.

Five days before the town hall, Piatt received a phone call from an individual identifying herself as the secretary of the Imam of the Omaha Islamic Center, one of the panelists for the event. The caller said that the Imam would be unable to attend. Piatt was distressed, but rolled with the punch and began the search for a replacement speaker.

“[The Imam] received one of the notices and called me to ask why I was pulling him from the panel,” Piatt says.

When Piatt told him about the phone call, the Imam explained to her that he did not have a secretary.

In spite of such suspicious setbacks, the town hall was a rousing success. Nearly 110 Omaha residents showed up with more questions than the stellar panel had time to address. Included in this panel were professors of a wide array of disciplines as well as an “Independent Muslim voice.”

One attendee left a comment on AID-Omaha’s website thanking the organization for a thought-provoking evening of dialogue. “We walked away from the meeting full of observations and full of questions,” she wrote, citing the wealth of new information about the Muslim community to which she and her husband were exposed during the town hall.

“Reading that comment, honestly, made all of the obstacles seem meaningless,” says Piatt, who feels that the event itself, not the difficulties she encountered organizing it, was the important thing.

In the words of AID co-executive director Sarah Bush, “This event was really a model of what a town hall could be.”

Piatt heard about AID through a friend of a friend, current AID-Omaha president Brian Wiese. “I live in the Midwest,” Piatt explains, “Where oftentimes international topics seem very lost…As someone who strives to pay attention, I feel a little responsibility in helping to start the dialogue and to help shed some light on the issues which AID discusses.”

According to Piatt, her support network of family and close friends is key to her success. Her main motivation, though, is her daughter, three-year-old Isabelle. “I look at my daughter and feel a deep sense of obligation to improve conditions for her generation,” says Piatt, who also works 35 hours a week, is a full-time student and maintains a 3.79 GPA. “I pretty much drive myself crazy during the semester,” she says. “I’m not exactly sure how I do it. I just do.”

Though the long-term, large-scale effects may not emerge until Isabelle’s generation has grown into conscious citizens, Piatt also finds immediate reward in doing work for AID. She is constantly motivated by the little things: the positive comments on the AID-Omaha message board, the notable attendees like the National Public Radio representative who came to the town hall meeting, and the overall feeling that something good and important is being done.

“The reward surpasses my name in the paper and winning an award,” Piatt says. “It’s about a sense of accomplishment, it’s about listening to the discussion, feeling the passion in the room vibrate right down into your hair follicles, and it’s about learning something from a different perspective! That’s the best reward!”

Next semester, Piatt hopes to schedule more well-advertised videoconferences to expose Omaha students and citizens to international discussion. If she and her AID-Omaha colleagues put forth as much effort, energy and passion on this as they have in the past, then things are certainly looking up for UNO.