In this episode of Sagebrushers, President Sandoval chats with Carina Black, the first executive director of the Northern Nevada International Center. The Center builds bridges of understanding and fosters global engagement through international exchanges, refugee resettlement and language access.

Black discusses the diverse programs offered at the Center, including the Mandela Washington Fellowship, a program that brings Sub-Saharan African professionals to the United States to grow their professional networks. The two also explore the Center’s language bank, which provides translation and interpretation services in more than 200 languages, and how the University became the only higher education institution affiliated with a refugee resettlement agency.

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President Brian Sandoval: This is Sagebrushers, the podcast of the University of Nevada, Reno. Welcome back, Wolf Pack Family. I’m your host University President Bryan Sandoval. Whether it’s through a dinner conversation with a delegation of African entrepreneurs or by participating in a youth leadership project with participants from across the globe, the Northern Nevada International Center offers once in a lifetime opportunities to learn how similar we all are and how our differences can unite us. So, let’s get started.

Today’s guest, Dr. Carina Black, is the first executive director of the Northern Nevada International Center. She also initiated the Refugee Resettlement department, the only resettlement entity in Northern Nevada. She’s a University faculty member who has taught courses in global studies, world politics and more. She received her Ph.D. from the University in comparative politics and is fluent in four languages. Today’s podcast is being recorded at the Reynolds School of Journalism on our University’s campus. Carina, welcome to Sagebrushers. I’m excited to share with our listeners more about your amazing programs.

Dr. Carina Black: Thank you so much for having me.

President Brian Sandoval: Just thrilled that you’re here. So to kick us off, can you share how our University is affiliated with the Northern Nevada International Center and the importance of our relationship?

Dr. Carina Black: I didn’t come on the scene until the late 1990s. A guy named Joe Crowley had kind of forged relationships with what was then called the International Visitor Leadership Organization, and he brought the visitor council on campus saying that the University really supports internationalization. He gave us a graduate student. So when I came on in 1999, I was given a little cubbyhole and a graduate student and was told, “Okay, you’re going to host international visitors, and you’re going to help develop international relations with trade and the city.” And then some other folks went to the City of Reno and got a seed grant. And that’s how we got started on campus. And we’ve had an affiliation agreement for the last 25 years.

President Brian Sandoval: I’ve had a chance to meet with the Mandela Washington Fellows, a program that brings Sub-Saharan African professionals to the United States to grow their professional networks. Please tell me a little bit more about this and some of the other exchange programs that you offer.

Dr. Carina Black: Yeah, we love the Mandela Washington Fellowship, which is part of a larger initiative that was started by President Obama about 10 years ago, and it’s called the Young African Leaders Initiative. It really is designed to bring the best and the brightest from Africa to our campus for six weeks and give them networking skills, business and entrepreneurship skills. And we partner with the College of Business and many different faculty to transfer their technical know-how that they have. But most importantly, the fellows come here and they learn the African continent is such an amazing place where they themselves can build their own networks. So it’s the idea that we should no longer be providing foreign aid in the future, but we just need to provide a little bit of skill building and networking skills and have them lose their sense that they’re 50 individual countries, but they’re really one continent.

President Brian Sandoval: I really appreciate in the past your inviting me to meet with the Mandela Fellows because they are incredible individuals and they come from all different walks of life and as you say, many multiple countries. But can you talk a little bit about some of their backgrounds?

Dr. Carina Black: Yeah, so this year, we’ve had 25 fellows from 22 countries. The range is so broad. We have such amazing opportunities here in the community to connect them to people that really are interested and care about what’s happening on the African continent.

President Brian Sandoval: And then very quickly, talk a little bit about once they finish here, some of their successes when they go back home.

Dr. Carina Black: I should say that to be accepted into this program is more difficult than being accepted to Harvard. So 50 to 60,000 individuals apply for 600, 700 slots every year. When they go back, they go to companies like Microsoft and IGT and they go to large organizations. But most importantly, they build networks with people from the other cohorts, which are in public service and in nonprofit management. So the idea is that through their networks, not just with business and entrepreneurship, they make connections then to government.

President Brian Sandoval: And with these programs as well as the increasing diversity in Northern Nevada, you offer a language access bank, which provides translation and interpretation services to our community. Can you talk a little bit more about that?

Dr. Carina Black: So we provide interpretation and translation services in about 200 languages, either in person, over the phone or on video conference. That is the law. So basically any institution that receives federal funding is required to provide access to justice if it’s in a judicial setting. But even from a medical perspective, social service perspective, all agencies should be thinking about how much we are diversifying. And luckily we worked with some legislators in the last two legislative sessions to push for having all state agencies create language access plans. That was passed in the previous legislative session and now it’s filtering down to cities and counties as well. And even other nonprofits are coming to us and asking, “How do we set up a language access plan?”s And that’s basically kind of a strategic plan. How do we serve them well? And we provide them with the assistance to do that. So to me, that has been one of the most amazing part of running the language bank is we were running it for 20 years and always pushing agencies to think about all the different populations they serve.

President Brian Sandoval: That’s incredible. 200 different languages. The University is working diligently to partner with you to support refugees and is now considered a leader in how resettlement agencies and universities should collaborate. And in fact, the University is the only institution of higher education in the United States affiliated with a resettlement agency. Can you share more about what that means when it comes to resettlement? 

Dr. Carina Black: We’ve only been doing it since 2016. Me being from a university setting and loving the university environment, I thought I always had this vision that if we do orientations for families on the campus and the families have to come here and learn about America, but at the same time their children see what a university campus looks like. I thought we were a natural fit to being involved with setting up the tone and the path to self-sufficiency for folks, and then what happened, But nobody really took that very seriously. But this last couple of years, the federal administration has really pushed for more refugees to be resettled. And so they looked under every rock to see what are other ways for refugees to be supported. And they naturally started looking at universities. I got a call one day and said, “Hey, we see you’re at a university and you’re also a resettlement agency. ” I was like, “Yeah.” So this has really turned into an amazing opportunity where now I’m leading nationwide service learning community of practice. We’re teaching other universities and resettlement agencies on how to set up those partnerships. I didn’t realize until then that we were the only one and that we are really at the forefront of this.

There are other universities. Like ASU helped 200 Afghan women after the evacuation and just integrated them into their med school and is working with them. But those are kind of one-offs. Something happens, somebody responds. We are trying to institutionalize these kinds of relationships where universities and resettlements have all of these natural synergies. So for example, refugees need to learn how to open a business. Well, we have the Small Business Development Center. Refugees need support in health and mental health resources. We’re using the DICE Center for our mental health resources.

We’re using groups of medical students to support our clients with their appointments to [Northern Nevada] Hopes and other clinics. So there’s all of these synergies where our students can benefit so much from learning about the resilience and the journeys of refugees. I teach a class and I usually bring in panels of refugees. And my honors students are blown away. They have no idea what the world looks like, what it means to be displaced. And I remember one comment from the class this last fall. They were like, “We thought that when we were going to meet refugees, they were going to be angry and they were going to be rough around the edges, and these people were so kind and they were so complimentary of what the United States has done for them.” And it was an amazing event.

President Brian Sandoval: Oh, that sounds really special. So Dr. Black, you’re an immigrant yourself as you’re originally from Argentina and have citizenship in the U.S. and Switzerland. Will you share a little bit more about your personal journey with us and including the four languages that you speak?

Dr. Carina Black: I was born in Argentina. My father opened a Swiss textile company in Buenos Aires, and I grew up there until I was six, and the government appropriated all foreign companies, so we had to go back to Switzerland. I didn’t 100% feel that I was Swiss, but I also knew I wasn’t Argentinian anymore. So I went to France to perfect my French after I went to business college, and I came here to really, as an au pair to learn English. And I took one class at UNR in the ESL, in the ILC program and met a guy who was also a student here. He played football at UNR. I was a student. After he finished with football, he said, “Oh, now we need to go someplace.” And I was like, “No, this is a good place to be.”

President Brian Sandoval: The impact that you’re making, not just locally but globally, is truly incredible. I mean, I’m just overwhelmed [by] what you’ve done, and it really is a privilege and an honor for me to work with you in the University. What are some of the future plans that you have?

Dr. Carina Black: So many. We have grown our staff to over 50 people now in all the different departments, and we need to make sure that we have longevity for all of the ups and downs that are to come, but conflict is going to increase in the world. We can see that now, refugees will be coming to this country for a long time because the need for exchanges is only going to increase. We are furiously writing as many grants as we can to put Reno, UNR and NNIC on the map with the U.S. Department of State. We have some really awesome projects in the pipeline. My big dream is to build an international house. An I-House is a place where the university can really build community between its international students and global scholars and the local community. My vision has always been a student at the university has to have access to what it means to be a global citizen, and we will have a unique take on this because we get to add not just international students but also the refugee experience. And so our I-House that we are envisioning is really something that will incorporate all of those elements, which I’m super excited about.

President Brian Sandoval: That’s wonderful. Now, real quickly, if someone wants to find you, where do they go? Both online and in-person.

Dr. Carina Black: Sure, sure. We have a few offices. We have an office right next to campus at UNR. We have an office on Seventh Street. We have an office on Fourth Street, but the easiest way to find us is online at www.unr.edu/nnic.

President Brian Sandoval: Wonderful. Well, unfortunately, that is all the time we have for this episode of Sagebrushers. Thank you for joining us today, Dr. Black.

Dr. Carina Black: Thank you for having me.

President Brian Sandoval: This was a wonderful episode. So join us next time for another episode of Sagebrushers as we continue to tell the stories that make our University special and unique. Until then, I’m University President Brian Sandoval and go pack.