Welcome, Samantha
Samantha Novak joined FIUTS recently as our new Manager of Community Programs and we’re so glad to welcome her to our office! She will be managing the Homestay & Friendship programs, improving our fundraising efforts, and overseeing communications and social media, among many other things. Here’s Samantha, introducing herself to the FIUTS community:
I was born in Alaska, to parents who love to entertain. These two facts of life shaped me in a lot of ways, including the following.
• Flying feels normal - every family vacation or trip to see my grandparents involved a plane from the time I was a kid. I have a vivid memory of one time sleeping on the floor between my family’s row of seats and the next row. Thinking back, I have no idea how I fit. To this day, I pretty much enter a hibernation state on planes.
• The question of whether something tastes gamey doesn’t resonate for me. My family butchers deer and moose on the kitchen table, and it still feels a little bit wrong to purchase fish from a store.
• Logistics of large events don’t faze me. I’ve been helping throw a 75 person Christmas open house yearly since I can remember, and we spend Christmas Eve with three other families, which means we had 22 people for a sit-down dinner including both turkey and prime rib last year. Other family parties have included a 100-person pig roast…roasting it and making nearly all the accompaniments from scratch ourselves.
In ninth grade, I faced the first big interview of my life. It was me, sitting across the table from 12 people. I’m from Anchorage, Alaska: the panel chose me to spend 2 weeks in Kotlik Alaska, a bush town of 600 only accessible by air. It was my first time being a minority, my first time spending a lot of time with Alaska Native people, and my first time eating akutaq (also called Eskimo Ice Cream — made with caribou fat, seal oil, snow and berries). I learned so much in those two weeks, and left understanding the concerns and culture of Yup’ik people in a way that I otherwise likely never would have.
The experience of learning both about myself and a different culture through immersion later led me to major in Global Studies at Arizona State University, which enabled me to study abroad for a month throughout China, as well as spending semesters in Buenos Aires and Prague. I am a big believer in the contact hypothesis, which states that under appropriate conditions interpersonal contact is one of the most effective ways to reduce prejudice between majority and minority group members. I think that a lot of our current global political situations demand more understanding and exposure to people and cultures who are very different than us. Everyone has a story, and I believe in a world that provides the opportunity for a diverse cross-section of society to share their experiences. Empowering a diverse community to express themselves works us towards a more empathetic world.
Post-undergrad, I served as an AmeriCorps helping at-risk populations in Seattle get connected with community resources and safety net programs. I learned Seattle through its food banks and job search centers, which is, I imagine, a different entry point into Seattle than most. On the other side of a Master’s in Public Administration from the Evans School at UW, I wanted to find a place to apply my skills for logistics, my passion for all the behind the scenes stuff (ie fundraising) that makes an organization’s programs possible, and my love for cultural exchange. Hilariously, I received my FIUTS job offer while on a 80-year-old sailing vessel in Copenhagen. I am so happy and excited to have recently started as Manager of Community Programs at FIUTS! I look forward to working both with FIUTS’ longstanding homestay program and in expanding FIUTS’ individual fundraising efforts. Feel free to talk to me about fundraising ideas, homestay stories, baking challah, sailing, or my ever-evolving list of cooking to dos.
I hope to meet you soon!
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You can contact Samantha at samantha@fiuts.org.