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Dr. Riva Brown

Riva Brown, an award-winning associate professor of public relations and global learning specialist at the 51��¥, is transforming the campus experience. Through service-learning projects and globally focused activities, she is empowering students and fostering a culture of engagement and innovation.

Brown is a graduate of the University of Southern Mississippi’s School of Mass Communication and Journalism. She first developed a passion for teaching as a journalist covering Mississippi’s public universities and community colleges. Brown fell in love with higher education after touring these college campuses, making connections and developing relationships. After leaving journalism, Brown began working in a university’s public relations office. From there, she was a clinical assistant professor at Jackson State University, teaching news reporting and public relations courses. In the fall of 2013, she was hired as an assistant professor of public relations at UCA.

For Brown, it’s always been about giving her students real-world experiences within her classroom. One way she accomplishes this is by implementing service-learning into her teaching. Over the years, her classes have completed service-learning projects with more than 15 nonprofits, including those serving citizens in Kenya, Ghana, Zambia and Syria.

“With service-learning, you’re doing something for a non-profit organization,” said Brown. “You are doing the work that they need to help advance their cause. Because nonprofits cannot pay anybody to do public relations or any other type of work, if they have specific needs that align with the course objective, then the class can do the real work as part of the course and as part of their grades. So, the nonprofit benefits by getting work that they’ll hopefully be able to implement in their initiatives, and the students benefit because they’re doing work for a real organization.”

In addition to providing real-world experiences for her students, Brown has been committed to exposing them to international perspectives. Since 2021, she has been actively engaged in Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL), an initiative designed to empower students and instructors to connect and collaborate on online projects with other classrooms around the globe. She has partnered with other classes in countries such as Colombia, Kenya, Mexico, Ukraine and more.

According to Brown, her passion for programs such as COIL enabled her to obtain her current position as UCA’s global learning specialist. “I took that role in the fall of 2023,” said Brown. “The Associate Vice President for Global Learning, Dr. Phillip Bailey, saw my passion for that type of work, and he wanted to expand global learning initiatives across campus, so he asked me about that role, and that’s how it came about.”

“I first started to get to know Dr. Brown in 2018, when she went to our partner university in Mexico, which is the Jesuit University of Guadalajara, and was attending one of their programs,” said Bailey. “Her resilience and cultural savvy were on display at that event, and as I moved further initiatives in the office, she served on the Study Abroad Advisory Committee and in other roles. I started focusing on ways to engage more UCA students in global learning and expanded new initiatives for COIL. She was in the first cohort of global learning fellows. She’s had some profound experiences. With her expertise as a public relations professor and her travels, I got the provost’s support to have her work in my office half-time as the global learning specialist.”

“When I became a global learning specialist,” said Brown. “I wanted students to see that the world is so much bigger than UCA, it is so much bigger than Conway, and bigger than the South United States. There’s a whole world out there, and I can do some small things in my classroom to expose students to a world much bigger than themselves. I know that they may not see it at first, but I guarantee that at some point in life, it will hit them. We need that exposure, and whatever they choose to do with that, it’s on them, but the fact that they got that exposure is key.”

In February 2024, Brown proposed that the university consider joining the University Global Coalition (UGC), an international initiative aimed at advancing the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)—a shared framework for fostering global peace and prosperity now and for future generations.

“Part of my job is to spearhead campus-wide global learning initiatives,” said Brown. “The SDGs was something that I learned about when I was doing COIL. While I was researching, I was like, ‘There must be something bigger that I can do, something that we could connect to that’s larger than ourselves.’ So, in March, we held the SDGs Action and Awareness Week under the UGC.”

Additionally, Brown and her students have launched various globally focused campus activities within the last year, including the International Day of Peace and a World Mental Health Day observation. Brown’s students also worked closely with organizations such as the Green Bears Coalition, Feminist Union and Circle K International to demonstrate how UCA students can make a difference globally by acting locally.

Brown’s Public Relations classes have also completed service-learning projects with the Syrian Emergency Task Force’s (SETF) Wisdom House in the fall of 2019 and spring of 2020. In the fall of 2022, after a conversation with President Houston Davis, Brown created the SETF-UCA Chapter, allowing the university to become the SETF’s first college affiliate. The SETF is a non-profit organization established in 2011 to aid individuals affected by the ongoing unrest in Syria. As the organization’s service-learning partner, UCA connects students in an international grassroots effort to assist impacted individuals. Brown and her students recently held a news conference providing communication materials for supporting Syrian refugees.

“It’s all about building partnerships to make things bigger and to make it reach other audiences because we can’t do things solo,” said Brown. “We all have to work together to achieve these goals. I want to align everything I do in my personal and professional life towards something bigger than myself.”

In addition to implementing service-learning and globally focused events for the university, Brown is also involved in multiple outreach organizations, such as the American Red Cross and Bear Boots on the Ground, for disaster relief.

Brown’s passion for disaster relief was sparked during Hurricane Katrina in 2005, when she was still working as a journalist. At the time, most of her family lived in New Orleans, including her mother, while other relatives resided along the Mississippi Gulf Coast. The storm caused significant damage to her mother’s house and yard. Reporting on Katrina victims three hours away, Brown was unable to assist her mother with the cleanup. When she finally visited her mother’s home, she was surprised to find all the damage and debris had been cleared. Curious, she asked her mother who had done the work. Her mother explained that disaster relief volunteers had taken care of it. Deeply moved by their kindness, Brown declared, “I’m gonna do this,” setting her on the path to helping others in disaster-stricken areas.

“As a journalist covering that hurricane and other natural disasters, I always had a sense of guilt that I’m here interviewing people, asking them questions during one of the most difficult times of their lives, and then I have to leave,” said Brown. “I always wanted to be that person to help, but couldn’t. So being involved with Bear Boots on the Ground was just like ‘it doesn’t get any better than this.’”

Over the years, Brown has served multiple communities through her disaster relief efforts, having been deployed to places such as Louisiana, Florida, Guam, and her home state, Arkansas. In recent years, she has begun serving on the board of directors as a volunteer for the American Red Cross.

Brown continued, “I decided to get involved with the American Red Cross because of their principles and values that align with mine. People know the American Red Cross for blood drives, but it’s so much more than that. I wanted to do disaster relief for that type of organization. As a result, I was able to go to Guam last year after a typhoon, and I spent three weeks there working in a shelter. After I got back, I was asked to join and become a member of the board of directors, and so I have been able to do a different level of work doing things beyond disaster relief.”

More recently, Brown traveled to Turkey to the SETF’s House of Healing, located on the border of Syria, where she was able to help some of her students with their efforts to help internally displaced Syrians have a better quality of life. One of these efforts included getting baby formula to a camp in Syria.

“As a professor, you’re supposed to do teaching, research and service, in that order,” said Brown. “Meaning that service is last for professors. Personally, service comes first; it is who I am and what I do. I will find a way to infuse service into my teaching and research, but it will always be first for me.”

“When I say I’m blessed to work with Dr. Brown, that is profoundly sincere. She’s an incredible asset to this university,” said Bailey.