Hungry to Do More

Paige Wallace ’21, an anthropology major from Austin, Texas, came to Trinity without knowing how—or where— she wanted to make a difference in the world.

Paige just knew that she wanted to make one, and that’s a start. “I didn’t even have anthropology on my radar at all,” she says.

As a first-year student, she enjoyed taking her First-Year Experience (interdisciplinary courses required of all entering students) on the topic of social justice with sociology and anthropology professor Alfred Montoya. “The way that he introduced these topics of racism and sexism—all the ‘isms’—as things we could work to dismantle and change, he framed it in a way that really was a call to action, and it was just really inspiring to me. That just clicked. And I thought, ‘This is what I want to spend my life working on and thinking about.’”

Spurred by this experience, Paige went on to focus on medical anthropology, which examines how structural systems affect health, as well as taking on a minor in gender studies.

As an undergraduate at Trinity, Paige had opportunities to explore these subjects beyond the classroom, too. She interned with various social justice nonprofits such as The Borgen Project, The Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services, and The Food Policy Council of San Antonio.

And that’s all while balancing her time between multiple interests: as a student-athlete, she played goalkeeper for Trinity’s soccer team; as a student journalist, she covered sports for the Trinitonian, the University’s campus newspaper; and she also found time to serve as a social justice tutor for her peers.

Paige also enjoyed Trinity’s unique approach to Greek life (Trinity has no nationally-affiliated chapters, focusing instead on a collection of independent sororities and fraternities), where she joined the Spurs sorority. She also joined campus organization Partners in Health Engage, a student group committed to making health a human right by advancing the goals of the global health organization Partners in Health, and enjoyed studying abroad in Switzerland as part of a Global Health and Development Policy program.

After graduating, Paige’s experiences within the nonprofit sector prompted her to pursue an AmeriCorps VISTA position with Feeding Texas, a nonprofit that works with 21 member food banks across Texas to eliminate hunger in the state. AmeriCorps VISTA is a national service program where members help similar organizations working to alleviate poverty.

At Feeding Texas, Paige works with the Community Health and Nutrition team to develop, evaluate, and monitor nutrition education and health programs that member food banks implement within their communities. “When I was younger, I was just trying to understand why this is even happening: How do people not have access to food? How can food not be a basic human right? Why is this something that’s up in the air for millions of people? This is so fundamentally wrong that I couldn’t sit by and do nothing.”

Paige says she is now moving from asking “why” to a more important step.

“Now that I’ve graduated, I’m still continuing to learn and grow. But I’m less in a space of asking why our world is the way that it is,” she says, “and more in a space where I have the tools to start doing something about it.”