Alumni Profiles

B.A., sociology and anthropology, concentrations in peace and conflict studies and visual art, 2003

Low-Income Housing Tax Credit Compliance Analyst

Spectrum Enterprises

Portland, Maine

Jeni Borland meets us in downtown Portland, Maine, where she has deep roots, personal histories, real connections. The interesting thing is, she credits Guilford College way down in North Carolina with making her as successful as she is here in her own hometown.

Jeni works for a company that cares about low-income families, and her job, as she sums it up, is to “inspect the housing projects to be sure that the owners are not being slum landlords.” That means that she makes on-site, physical inspections of low-income housing to verify that everything is as it should be.

A full set of experiences at Guilford College prepared her for this career: “During breaks at Guilford, I earned money by working in low-income/affordable housing,” she says, “and I realized that this area of work is my passion, my love.”

She adds that while she was a student at Guilford, she took classes on understanding poverty and on holistic approaches to development; she also did a lot of work in the area of mediation. And because one of her professors was from Kenya, she learned a great deal about poverty and poverty-fighting initiatives in Kenya. “It turns out,” she says, “that there is a huge East African population here in Portland, so the experiences and studies at Guilford College were perfect training!”

Jeni began her commitment to social consciousness at a very early age, even attending a special, socially conscious education program in grades 1 through 5. She strengthened that awareness and commitment throughout her high school years, volunteering in a variety of positions (including working for Maine’s Family Crisis Services, assisting domestic violence victims and survivors).

Then it was time to go to college. Her friends, not wanting to leave the general area, went to Dartmouth, Brown, Wesleyan … and Jeni herself applied to more than a half dozen colleges in Massachusetts and New York. But she was very aggressive in her investigations (“I visited 15 colleges in one week alone”), refusing to exclude schools out of the area. Finally, a college fair in Portland introduced her to Guilford.

“I had never talked to anyone from Guilford College before that,” she says, “and if I had visited Guilford as soon as I applied, I wouldn’t have needed to visit elsewhere. As soon as I arrived at the school, I had the feeling that it was the place.”

She adds that Guilford’s study abroad program was “a major attraction — they make it easy … Guilford makes studying in London easy.” She went to London for the fall semester of her junior year, taking classes as well as serving a 16-hour-per-week internship. “I worked with WomenAid International, an organization that runs relief projects all over the world. I helped with fundraising for an orphanage in Georgia [formerly part of the Soviet Union].”

But get this — her first day on the job in London was 9/11, as in 9/11/2001. “I’ll never forget it — I was there in my little office space and I got a phone call from the director of WomenAid, who said, ‘I regret to inform you that the United States is under attack.’ I said ‘What??’ And she told me to find a television to get more details. We all did that, and of course we all tried to call home, but the lines to the States were jammed. Eventually someone got a line through and started a phone tree, spreading the word to all the families of all the Guilford College students in London at the time.”

She had other memorable experiences from that semester, including trips to Italy, France, Scotland and Amsterdam. Also, she says that one particular class, International Perspectives of Accounting and Taxation, stands out “because we studied the social aspects of international finance. It was fantastic.”

In fact, Jeni adds, all of her Guilford College classes were great: “They were similar to the experiences I had known growing up in Maine, in that the classes at Guilford were small, with a great deal of individual attention in a very open, accepting environment. That kind of academic atmosphere is not common, but it’s wonderful. The Guilford College classes were more conversations than lectures. The professors really know you, and they want to use your own personal experiences as a means to inform others. It makes for great intellectual discussions.”

There was one major difference from her experiences in Maine, she says: “Guilford College, unlike Maine, offers tremendous diversity. You’re part of a mix of students, faculty and staff who come from all over the world and from all social, ethnic, economic and cultural backgrounds. It’s wonderful. Believe me, I’d go back in a minute!”

Jeni says that the skills she gained through her work with the Conflict Resolution Resource Center (she was its Student Director) and through training in mediation techniques are things that she uses on a daily basis — “I use my Guilford training to de-escalate anger among my clients, and I’m able to train others to serve as mediators using conflict resolution.”

Professionally and personally, Jeni Robinson Borland and Guilford College are still together.