The Allensworth Legacy in California Continues

By S. Jolene Hui, LCSW, Membership Coordinator

Ariana Allensworth is not only part of a rich and wonderful historical legacy in California, she is a passionate and committed social worker.

Allensworth, a second-year MSW student at UC Berkeley, was recently awarded a 2015-2016 NASW Foundation Verne LaMarr Lyons Memorial MSW Scholarship. This national scholarship is awarded annually to four MSW students who demonstrate an interest in or have experience with health/mental health practice and have a commitment to working in African-American communities.

Fittingly, Allensworth has historical ties to a prominent African-American community. Her great, great, great uncle, Colonel Allen Allensworth, is the founder of Allensworth, the only town in California to be founded, financed and governed by African-American leaders.

The town, founded in 1908, was created as a place where African-Americans could live free of discrimination. It was a fully functioning farming community and city that is currently preserved as a state park. To this day, special events still take place there, which celebrate this iconic place.

This important part of Allensworth’s history was a crucial part of her childhood and continues to be driving force in her life. Allensworth was born and grew up in the heart of San Francisco and was raised in a social justice-minded household where her parents had public interest careers.

“Growing up in San Francisco and having the parents that I have is what shaped my work the most,” she says. Her father, originally from a poor and segregated area of Terra Haute, Indiana and drafted to Vietnam, did not learn of his ties to the town until he was in his early 20s while in school at City College in San Francisco.

Allensworth said that since that time, her father has been very committed to sharing the story of this community and always encouraged her to visit there and participate in events.

“I think because of my dad’s discovery of this powerful piece of our family history, he instilled at a really young age how important it is to know your culture and your history.”

As a high school student, Allensworth participated in youth organizing and activism work, taking advantage of leadership opportunities. She had a summer fellowship in New York at Barnard’s Young Women’s Leadership Institute, which led her to stay there for her undergraduate education at Fordham University in the Bronx.

Majoring in urban studies, African and African-American Studies, Allensworth was involved in campus life and worked on the Bronx African-American History Project that she explained is, “a community-based oral history project that seeks to provide an in-depth portrait of the contributions or leaders and residents of African descent in the Bronx.”

As an undergrad she had the opportunity to study abroad in Barcelona and also worked in Ghana through the Global Outreach Program at Fordham. Upon graduation she was accepted into an Americorps program called Public Allies, which placed her in a public school called New Design High School that focuses on holistic development where design is incorporated.

Allensworth stayed there after her placement ended and was employed by an arts education non-profit named Urban Arts Partnership where she co-developed the iDESIGN/iCONNECT program designed to reengage chronically absent New Design high school students through mentorship, case management, group counseling and arts and which now functions in several school sites throughout New York City.

About that role she says, “That step was what informed my commitment to become a social work professional.”

She worked for five years at the school and as her first cohort of students graduated in the summer of 2014 she returned to California where her family is still located and applied to a wide array of schools.

“I wanted to challenge myself to apply my skills with a new population and community. I I felt like coming back to the bay area and UC Berkeley, in particular, was a good place to develop my network.”

At Berkeley, Allensworth is in the management and planning concentration. Her placements while in grad school have been very “grass-roots” focused. She spent her first year placement at The Hunters Point Family in the Bayview Hunters Point section of San Francisco, a historically African-American community. While there, she explained that she supported the formation of the African-American Healing Alliance, a collaborative oversight body of mental health professionals working to address health disparities among African-American children, adults and families in San Francisco’s southeast sector with a specific focus on trauma and community violence.

This summer she’s been interning at PolicyLink in Oakland as part of their Arts, Culture, and Equitable Development Team. Her second-year placement is at Youth Speaks where she will be supporting their Brave New Voices Network initiative, a national network dedicated to building a sustainable field of non-profit organizations and programs that intersect arts education and youth development.

“I’m deeply passionate about youth development work,” Allensworth says. “I’m interested in finding ways to leverage arts and culture as tools to mitigate barriers to mental health services experienced by youth of color and to empower them to have a voice in the services designed for them.”

Also in the area of art, she has taken film courses and started work on a film in 2010 called “Voces de Fillmore” about the experiences of Puerto Rican families during the gentrification process.

In regards to being home and continuing on her path as a social worker and crucial part of her community she says, “It’s wonderful being back around my family. It’s nice to be able to share time with them.”

However, she also sees much work ahead because of  the “racial, ethnic and economic diversity that made my childhood so vibrant is not the San Francisco of today. It is something that informs the type of social work I want to do, fighting for communities of color to remain in their historic neighborhoods.”

Undoubtedly, Allensworth will continue to thrive in her environment and advocate for those in her community. She has a legacy to live up to and the capability to do it.

Jolene Hui, LCSW, is NASW-CA’s membership coordinator and can be reached at jhui@naswca.org.