Virginia Gary

Virginia Gary is currently an MSW candidate at the University of Southern California and an intern at the SISGI Group. Virginia’s passion for addressing social injustices and inequities led her to embark on a career in human and social services nearly a decade ago. She has expertise in managing community awareness and fundraising campaigns at United Way of Miami-Dade and in overseeing clinical research studies in support of military health and medicine at the Naval Medical Center San Diego. With her vast experience, she has a holistic perspective on community issues and how to most effectively address them. Virginia’s concentration in the MSW program at USC is in community organization, planning and administration, and she is currently focusing her research efforts on mental health issues and homelessness specifically in the military community in addition to evidence-based interventions and programs that address these social issues.

Author's posts

Should a Living Wage be a Basic Human Right?

Today marks the 8th anniversary since the last federal increase in the minimum wage. Since then and since the publication of my original blog post on this issue, several states passed legislation to increase their minimum pay, joining the 29 states and 41 localities with a higher minimum wage than the national rate of $7.25 …

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What Makes America Great is Our Communities #SouthernService

As an intern with the SISGI Group I recently had an opportunity to attend the 2017 Southern National Service Training Conference in Orlando, FL. When I arrived at the conference, banners and logos from a variety of agencies were on display. Some organizations were familiar to me, such as AmeriCorps and City Year and some …

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Increasing the Minimum Wage: An Answer to Growing Income Inequality in the U.S.

Hillary Clinton opened the first presidential debate by addressing one of the prominent issues in this election, income inequality. She proposed: “First we have to build an economy that works for everyone…That starts with raising the national minimum wage.” However, when it comes to increasing the current federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, there …

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