Whitney Gent’s Passion to Serve Others Gives Hope to Those Experiencing Homelessness

Whitney Gent, Ph.D., assistant professor of rhetoric and civic engagement, brings her passion for community engagement to the University of Nebraska at Omaha (UNO).

Gent has studied, volunteered, and advocated for issues related to homelessness and communication for over 15 years. She conducts a research program focused on how homelessness is represented in pop culture, and how it appears in public policy.

After completing her Ph.D., Gent found a home at UNO for her scholarly work related to poverty and housing.

“I was really interested in UNO in particular because of its emphasis on community engagement,” Gent says. “When I learned there was a whole community engagement center here, I was blown away.”

Gent instills UNO students with a service-learning skillset through her course, Persuasion and Social Influence.

In the final project, students serve as consultants for local nonprofits that assist with poverty and homelessness such as Lutheran Family Services, Youth Emergency Services, and Saint Vincent De Paul. Students provide a set of recommendations that assist the nonprofits with making their communication materials more persuasive.

“This mimics how consulting works in the real world,” Gent says. “What’s really cool about this project is that it’s useful in the community and it gives students the experience of what it’s like to professionally work.”

Gent’s students also participate in the Maverick Philanthropy Initiative, where students present their nonprofit client and vote on which one should receive a $1,000 grant.

“What’s in it for the organization is a set of recommendations about how they can improve the quality of their communication materials, and potentially receive some money to do that,” Gent says.

Gent’s fierce drive to advocate for homelessness and poverty stemmed from an internship she took as an undergraduate at National Public Radio in Washington, D.C.

“I was living in Washington, D.C. and I was seeing very visible poverty all the time,” Gent says. “It wouldn’t ever leave me alone, I never got used to it.”

That experience drove Gent to volunteer at a homeless shelter for a year through AmeriCorps, which became the catalyst for her advocacy towards poverty today.

“I cared so deeply after that,” she says. “I couldn’t stop.”

Her time spent in the nation's capital enlightened her on the disparity between wealth and poverty.

“Washington, D.C. is supposed to be one of the most powerful cities and has such incredible wealth, and also extraordinary poverty,” Gent says. “The fact that these exist in the same place felt, to me, unconscionable.”

Her career catapulted to several impact-making professions, including development consultant for Project Create; an arts education organization that serves families, children, and youth experiencing poverty.

Today, in addition to her service-learning course, Gent recently took on a new role at UNO as the academic director of the Young Southeast Asian Leaders Institute (YSEALI).

“My entire career pursuit has been to figure out how I can best use my skills to meet some of the world’s needs,” Gent says. “I’m a firm believer in the idea that we should we do the work in the world where our skills match the world’s needs.”