Your Story Matters Here: Jenn Phillips
Written By: Tim Wesley
Jenn Phillips just wants to make a difference, and she wants a starfish tattoo as a reminder.
“I have a few tattoos, and I’d love to get a starfish,” she says. “I try to live out the starfish story.”
That’s the story of a little girl who finds scores of starfish on a beach and realizes they will dry out and die, so she starts tossing them one at a time back into the ocean. A man walks by, sees starfish covering the sand and tells the little girl she can’t possibly make a difference.
“Made a difference for that one,” she says, lobbing another one into the surf.
Whether it’s through her career in higher education or as a Dutilh member/volunteer, Jenn strives to make a difference, too.
“I’m sure I fail at that, and I acknowledge I’m not going to make a difference in everyone’s life,” she says. “But as Christians, we’re supposed to ask, ‘What else can we do? Is there more we should be doing?’ I try to think about what’s in my locus of control and the ripple effect of trying to help just one person.”
For Jenn, 36, the ripples emanate from West Middlesex, a one-stoplight borough of about 800 residents, where she had roughly 75 classmates in her high school graduating class. She credits her parents with instilling a sense of purpose and a perspective that always encouraged her to look beyond the boundaries of her small hometown.
“Growing up, my parents wanted us to learn something on our vacations, so I’ve learned a lot from traveling,” she says. “We would go to museums in different areas. My dad was insistent on seeing Mt. Rushmore and the Badlands in South Dakota. By the time I was 15 I had already been to Crazy Horse Mountain. Those trips helped me to see a lot of diversity beyond my hometown.”
After graduating from West Middlesex High School, where she was on the track team and played clarinet in the marching band, Jenn went to Robert Morris University and earned a business degree in 2010. Since then, she’s been all about the business of helping people, mostly college students, in a variety of roles and settings.
Initially, she worked for two years at The Arc of Mercer County, helping people with intellectual disabilities. After that, she enrolled as a graduate student at Slippery Rock University, where in 2014 she earned a master’s degree in student affairs in higher education. Following three years at Miami (Ohio) University as resident director, she joined Youngstown State University as housing coordinator. In 2019, she went back to Slippery Rock, this time as assistant director of residence life.
Although her employers and specific duties have changed along the way, the common thread has been Jenn’s focus on trying to make a difference by helping young folks navigate an increasingly challenging path to adulthood.
“Being a young adult and teenager right now is extremely difficult,” she says. “It’s so much different than when I was a teenager. Back then, social media wasn’t a thing. We didn’t have smart phones to communicate with one another. Being a college student is hard enough, but now there are so many outside factors to go with the pressure they put on themselves, or that’s put on them by other people.”
During the 2022-23 academic year, Jenn and her team had responsibility for all aspects of life in the residence halls for the nearly 3,000 students living on campus at Slippery Rock. In that role, she and her team could be involved in everything from planning campus-wide student events to helping students with roommate troubles to calling maintenance about a water leak. In her current role, Jenn is responsible for the department’s leadership development program, including writing the curriculum. No matter her specific job, she’s always been a problem solver and trouble shooter.
“I’m a Type A personality, so I like to be organized, but in this job you have to be flexible,” she says with a laugh.
A year after joining Slippery Rock, the pandemic hit and Jenn added COVID coordinator to her list of responsibilities.
“I thought that was going to wreck me,” she says.
COVID concerns have subsided, but concerns about the mental health of students remain a challenge for Jenn and her staff. On multiple occasions, she’s personally been tasked with keeping tabs on particular students who expressed suicidal thoughts.
“At times, the mental health crisis was so prevalent that I was knocking on doors to ask students if they were OK,” she says. “In those situations, you want to get them connected to the resources they need. In the meantime, I would just try to let them know that they matter, that they can make an impact in this world. When I’m having those difficult and heavy conversations with students, I want them to see light at the end of the tunnel, to see how far they’ve come. You can get overwhelmed when you look up at the stairwell, but let’s stand on this one step for a little and see progress.
Jenn offers the same encouragement and perspective when leading Dutilh Student Ministry’s small group for ninth and 10th graders, and when serving as dean of Creative Arts and Talents (CAT) Camp at Jumonville. She’s also an active participant in Graceful and Grateful, the women’s ministry at Dutilh, and last year she represented the church at the Western Pennsylvania Annual Conference.
“I love the community aspect of Dutilh, where people are always wanting to come up and say hello,” she says. “And I love our focus on youth and kids, with events like Youth Sunday, the Christmas concerts and Pancake Sunday.”
While staying active and trying to make a difference at Dutilh, Jenn is also focused on an important, life-long pursuit: To visit all 50 states by the time she’s 50. A map in her office tracks progress.
“Whenever I pick a vacation, sometimes it’s because I need to cross off a state,” she says. “After this summer, I’ll only need one state a year until I turn 50, so it’s definitely doable.”
Definitely, for this determined and dedicated young woman.