Often, it also means giving people a way to find closure. After the 2010 earthquake that killed more than 300,000 people in Haiti, UCF Associate Professor Abdul-Akeem Sadiq worked with a team to figure out how to manage all the unidentified bodies recovered from the rubble.

“My colleagues and I developed a new strategy that involves taking photographs of the deceased, burying the deceased in shallow graves, and creating a numbering system that matches pictures of the deceased to their respective graves where they were temporarily buried,” he says. “When a deceased individual is identified by their loved ones through the picture, his or her body can be exhumed from the corresponding grave and properly buried or cremated. This strategy helps to prevent burying unidentified bodies in mass graves and making it difficult for victims’ families to have closure.”

It’s remembering that human beings are at the heart of disasters that motivates Sadiq, an emergency management expert who specializes in mass fatality incidents and in helping governments, companies, and nonprofits prepare for emergencies.

“I’m fueled by wanting to make a difference in people’s lives,” he says. “Most of my publications provide practical recommendations to public, nonprofit, and private organizations with the hope that if those recommendations are implemented, they will lead to a better society.”

Sadiq recently published a study that looks at the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Community Rating System (CRS) program and why less than 5% of eligible communities participate. The voluntary program is aimed at reducing flood impacts.

“We found that a major obstacle to participating in the CRS is a lack of resources, like the staff needed to fill out the paperwork and apply to join the CRS,” Sadiq says. “So, we recommended that FEMA should provide free staff support to communities that are not participating to help them with their paperwork and application process. In doing so, we may be able to increase participation and reduce disaster impacts on communities.”

Sadiq’s career in emergency management almost didn’t happen.

“I actually stumbled onto the field of emergency management,” Sadiq says. “Initially, my interest as a Ph.D. student was in environmental policy and health policy. Unfortunately, I could not find an assistantship in either area. One of my professors, who received a (U.S.) National Science Foundation grant to study earthquake preparedness among organizations in Memphis, Tennessee, interviewed me and offered me a graduate research assistantship. This was how I fell in love with emergency management.

Today, he and a team of students are working on research related to COVID-19. The researchers are looking at managing mass fatalities during COVID-19 and how to promote community resilience during these kinds of global pandemics.

Sadiq, of Nigeria, joined UCF in 2017. Previously he worked at Indiana ����ֱ��-Purdue ����ֱ�� Indianapolis (a partnership between Indiana ����ֱ�� and Purdue ����ֱ��) and as a research and policy analyst for various universities. He holds a doctorate in public policy from a program run jointly by Georgia State ����ֱ�� and Georgia Tech. He also has master’s degrees in economics and business administration in addition to a bachelor’s degree in agricultural economics and farm management. He has more than 40 published journal articles, is a reviewer for several academic journals and is a frequent speaker at national and international conferences. In 2021 he was elected Chair of American Society for Public Administration (ASPA) Section on Crisis and Emergency Management. ASPA is the main professional association for the discipline.

“Because,” little Inez says, “she was hungrier than me, mom.”

In the second memory, Long is looking at a bookshelf inside the same home. The shelves sag under the weight of the encyclopedias her parents have purchased for Long and her brother. It would take years for Long to fully understand the reason for all those books.

“It was not easy for us to go to a public library as it was built on the ‘white’ side of town, so my parents found other ways for us to expand our knowledge. That’s how they invested in us.”

These two precepts — recognizing the level of hunger in people and investing in them — are cornerstones in Long’s work as president of the Black Business Investment Fund (BBIF). Long has made such a positive impact in her 32 years with BBIF that Orlando Magazine named her one of the city’s 50 Most Powerful People in 2021. In April she will be inducted into the UCF College of Business Hall of Fame.

“It’s always a blessing to not just enjoy whatever comes my way,” Long says, “but to help others get the most out of life, too.”

“Sometimes, an opportunity is all that a person needs.” — Inez Long ’98MBA

With BBIF she paves the way for Black, minority and underserved small businesses to receive management training and financial backing. Under her leadership to date, 1,061 businesses have been approved for more than $81 million in loans, allowing them to support nearly 14,000 jobs, often after they’ve run into unscalable walls at traditional lending institutions. She’s also brought in $148 million in New Market Tax Credit, which attracts private capital investments into low-income communities allocations, and has leveraged more than $350 million in economic development projects.

And that leads to perhaps the most prominent statistic of all: More than 96% of the business loans through BBIF have resulted in investment gains. Traditional bank executives can only wish for that kind of success rate.

Let’s just say those banks had their chances.

“Sometimes,” Long says, “an opportunity is all that a person needs.”

Growing up in Winter Garden, Florida, young Inez James would ride bicycles and play marbles, football and baseball with her big brother and boys in the neighborhood. She never thought of her mother and father as being poor. Both parents had similar backgrounds, being raised by their grandparents, uncles and aunts, after their own parents died when they were very young.

“Mom and dad never made excuses,” Long says. “They were determined to work hard and create their own opportunities as a young couple.”

At that time, home loans were not made available to Black people. So, each of Long’s parents worked several jobs and saved enough cash to buy land and build their own home. They stocked it with love and books, and with a love �ڴǰ���books.

“Mom and dad taught us that knowledge could open a world of possibilities.”

Long had thoughts about attending law school while studying at the ����ֱ�� of South Florida, but when her father died suddenly, she knew the financial resources and support that she needed wouldn’t be available. A classmate, Fitzhugh Long, encouraged her to try a few business courses to see if anything clicked.

“I never expected that I would fall in love with accounting,” she says.

She also fell in love with Fitzhugh. They married and moved around the country for a few years, as Fitzhugh landed a corporate job with Kmart Corporation. Later they landed in Orlando where Inez began a career in banking while also raising their first two children. After a while, she recognized sexism and racism pervading the business environment. Long would need a source of leverage to push through it.

“The people at UCF encouraged me to be a mom, work and grow my skillsets. I’ll always be grateful for that.” — Inez Long ’98MBA

“More knowledge would be my strongest tool,” she says, explaining why she enrolled in the executive MBA program at UCF during the busiest time of her life. “The people at UCF encouraged me to be a mom, work and grow my skillsets. I’ll always be grateful for that.”

In her job underwriting loans for the big banks, Inez also noticed one obstacle after another whenever she tried to get funding approved for Black-owned businesses.

“My bosses would literally tell me to pull loan policy books off the shelves,” she says. “I knew what was going on. They were finding reasons to deny the loans necessary for these Black people to grow their businesses.”

So, Long would go to the Black business owners in person, after work, and share her knowledge about developing strong financial statements. She also met the president of BBIF, who offered Inez a job. Friends said she’d be foolish to leave a great banking job for a not-for-profit organization.

“I prayed about it off and on for a year,” she says, “until it became clear that at BBIF I could help a lot more people. What I saw during the loan underwriting process at the banks still motivates me today to continue to work to break down long-standing barriers in the financial industry.”

She’s helped owners of IT firms, restaurants, hair salons, child-care centers. They’re engineers, attorneys, contractors, manufacturers, and builders of commercial properties and affordable homes. One young graduate of UCF started a garbage service and needed a loan so he could hire people and expand. This business is now a million-dollar business.

The entrepreneurs receive other assets from BBIF that they won’t receive directly from a traditional bank: training and counselling.

“We spend time with the owners for two reasons,” Long says. “First, we can help them to become stronger managers. Plus, if I see a person every month, it’s very difficult for them to not pay back the loan. That’s important, too, because we have investors to repay.”

Major corporations, including Starbucks and Google, have recently partnered with BBIF. They see value in an organization with a 96% success rate. They also see what Long has seen all along: an opportunity to invest in hard-working people. The partnerships reflect progress. Some of the business owners that BBIF supported 25 years ago have passed the companies to their children, creating second generation owned businesses.

“My parents had instilled in me the lesson, or obligation, of sharing. I’d like to think I’ve done that, as they taught me.” — Inez Long ’98MBA

“That’s extremely satisfying,” Long says.

As for the children she bathed and fed while pursuing her master’s degree at UCF, all three have also graduated from UCF.  So has a nephew and the niece that she and Fitzhugh raised after Long’s brother passed away.

“As a child, I watched my mother give clothes to less fortunate people in our neighborhood, and my dad share the fish he’d caught,” she says. “I could have remained in banking and made a very good living, but my parents had instilled in me the lesson, or obligation, of sharing. I’d like to think I’ve done that, as they taught me.”

Lindo grew up in Jamaica and says her interest in public health and personal experience growing up on the island fueled her desire to look at what works bests to help build the nursing capacity in the region.

Nurses are key in helping the region best prepare for public health challenges. Epidemics of non-communicable diseases, such as diabetes and hypertension, as well as communicable diseases, such as COVID-19, Chikungunya and Zika, face this region and its healthcare systems need strengthening. Being on the front line, nurses can help inform policy makers, and research provides good data for what works.

“Through research, nurses promote or advance evidence-based practice, build knowledge to enhance quality of care and patient safety, and create mentors for future generations of nurse scientists,” she says.

That’s one of the lessons she passes on at UCF through the many courses she teaches and with the students she mentors. However, this year she’s on loan to the ����ֱ�� of Bahamas where she is teaching courses and conducting research as part of her 2021 Fulbright Scholar Award.

“The World Health Organization’s 2016–2020 Global Strategic Directions for Strengthening Nursing and Midwifery lists developing nursing and midwifery research as an area of high priority,” she says. “We are currently working on research project designed to assess the quality of nursing documentation at a public hospital in the Bahamas as the template on which capacity can be built.”

Once her research has concluded, she plans to publish her results with hopes of seeing some of the recommendations adopted by the university and others through the region.

UCF’s reputation as a metropolitan research university, especially in nursing, is why she joined the College of Nursing in 2018. Before that she was an associate professor at Barry ����ֱ�� in Miami. She also taught and was the program coordinator at the ����ֱ�� of the West Indies School of Nursing in Kingston, Jamaica.

She has doctorate in public health and is a registered nurse. Before arriving in the United States, she also served as a research consultant to the Ministry of Health and Early Childhood Commission of Jamaica. She has led or co-authored more than 30 peer-reviewed papers and presented at dozens of international conferences on nursing research, education, and maternal and perinatal mortality and workplace health.

Jones, a New York Times best-selling author, has written four novels, most recently An American Marriage, which is on Barack Obama’s summer reading list and an Oprah’s Book Club Selection. Jones, a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, has also been a recipient of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, United States Artist Fellowship, NEA Fellowship and Radcliffe Institute Bunting Fellowship. Her third novel, Silver Sparrow was added to the NEA Big Read Library of classics in 2016. Silver Sparrow “unveils a breathtaking story about a man’s deception, a family’s complicity, and the teenage girls caught in the middle. Set in a middle-class neighborhood in Atlanta in the 1980s, the novel revolves around James Witherspoon’s families – the public one and the secret one. When the daughters from each family meet and form a friendship, only one of them knows they are sisters.”

Several units from the UCF College of Arts and Humanities, including visual arts, performing arts and history, will host programming, as will UCF Libraries.

The NEA Big Read: Central Florida brings together several Central Florida institutions. Several units from the UCF College of Arts and Humanities, including visual arts, performing arts and history, will host programming, as will UCF Libraries.

Seminole County Public Libraries will host daytime and evening book-discussion groups at each of its five branches for a total of 10 book clubs early next year. Six additional book clubs are planned at the Orlando Museum of Art, the UCF Africana Studies program, Black Man’s Candor, Afro Artistry, and two at the Florida Department of Corrections’ Central Florida Reception Center.

“2021 marks the 10^th anniversary of the publication of Tayari Jones’ award-winning novel, Silver Sparrow,” says Keri Watson, director of the NEA Big Read: Central Florida. “Jones’ book … offers an excellent opportunity for UCF to bring impactful programs that celebrate the role of literature in our community. Our programming will coincide with UCF’s celebration of Black History Month and we are working with Africana Studies to bring the Big Read to a new campus audience.”

Watson has been leading UCF’s Big Read initiative since receiving the first programming grant in 2015. An art historian, Watson takes a broad, interdisciplinary view of how literature influences and is influenced by other disciplines. The novels UCF has read are Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (2016), John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (2017), Dinaw Mengestu’s The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears (2018), Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven (2019), and Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried (2020).

Other principal investigators on the grant include Julia Listengarten from the School of Performing Arts, Scot French from the Department of History, and Shannon Lindsey from the UCF Gallery. Fon Gordon, director of UCF’s Africana Studies program, which is part of the Department of History, will also be involved with program planning. The team is organizing more than 20 events related to this year’s novel, including discussions, an art exhibit and a production of Dominique Morisseau’s play Blood at the Root.

An initiative of the National Endowment for the Arts in partnership with Arts Midwest, the NEA Big Read broadens our understanding of our world, our communities, and ourselves through the joy of sharing a good book.

As an actor, producer, director, documentary filmmaker and professor, Major has worked with well-known actors such as Brad Pitt, Richard Pryor, Eddie Murphy and Redd Foxx of Sanford and Son fame.

Today he is finishing up a full-length documentary about the 2012 shooting death of 17-year-old Travyon Martin in Sanford, Florida. An early cut of the film won the Grand Jury Prize, Award at the Orlando Urban Film Festival last year.

But perhaps his most important contribution since arriving at UCF in 1995 has been the impact he’s had on Hollywood. Some of his students have graduated and now are actors, producers, directors and talent agents in the film and theatre industry. One even has her own popular YouTube show shot in Australia.

The secret to his success?

“Help them learn to think and to network,” Major says from his office in the . “Nothing is given in this business. You have to look for opportunities and hustle. It works. We’ve got several UCF graduates living their dream because they are smart and they work hard.”

They include:

It takes talent, passion, hard work and help, Major says. He knows first-hand how important it is to network and have someone mentor you in order to succeed.

Through the years he worked with and met people such as Harry Belafonte, Dolly Parton, Robert De Niro, Francis Ford Coppola, Bob Mulligan, Alan J. Pakula and James Earl Jones on a variety of projects from the stage to the big screen. Each individual taught him something and most helped him connect with the right folks for the next step in his career.

To help his students make those connections, he helps arrange invitations to the Director’s Guild of America Awards for pending graduates and recent alumni.

Earlier this month, Hailey Winslow ’08, a radio-television alumna, met Major and several other UCF alumni at the awards.

“Here we were with some of Hollywood’s top people and there’s a table of UCF students,” Winslow says. “We spent a couple of hours after the awards with (director and screenwriter) Peter Farrelly. That’s just amazing and that’s because of Professor Major.”

Winslow, now an actress, had one acting class with Major, but he has become a lifelong mentor and friend.

“Professor Major has taught me life skills that I use every day,” she says. “I hear his voice in my head all the time. I’m so grateful to him. He’s not just a professor. He goes ways beyond that. UCF students are so lucky to be able to learn from him.”

Winslow stars alongside her Goldendoodle, Sadie, in Outback & Under, a 12-episode adventure travel show that explores Australia. They wrangle crocodiles, dive with sharks, cuddle venomous snakes and meet a lot of crazy characters along their journey through the land Down Under.

Benjamin Michel ’11, a filmmaker and producer based in San Francisco, also calls Major instrumental in his career.

“He gave me real world advice that helped me be a better film director and overall artist,” Michel says. “And his wisdom has really been a gift.”

Michel took Major’s Black Cinema class in 2009 and would often talk about his goals. Since arriving in California he’s filming or making documentaries about the experiences of African-Americans, Latinos and the homeless. Several of those documentaries have aired on KQED, an award-winning public television station in San Francisco.

UCF theatre grad Lisa Chu ’01 also credits Major with much of her success. She’s an assistant director in Hollywood and has worked on a range of television and feature films including The Big Bang Theory, Westworld and The Last Samurai starring Tom Cruise.

“He started me on my career path to become a Directors Guild of America (DGA) Assistant Director,” Chu says. She met him while a freshman in a general education theater class.  “I’ve been a DGA AD for over 15 years and counting. I would not be who I am without Anthony Major. My life has been blessed with him as a dedicated inspiring educator, a colleague and a truly great friend. He is simply amazing.”

Major’s personal contributions to the local arts scene have not gone unnoticed either. The Black History Committee of Orange County honored Major with its 2010 Excellence in Education Award. The high school he attended, The Booker Performing Arts High School in Sarasota, renamed its rehearsal hall in his honor. He also served as the program director for the Zora Neale Hurston Institute for Documentary Studies for several years.

Central Floridians may also recognize him from his work as director of “A Vote, A Voice,” produced for Florida Sen. Geraldine Thompson. Or perhaps from his teaching, acting and directing in the UCF Conservatory Theatre and his work with Seminole State College Theatre.

His favorite projects are those that tell an American story from an underrepresented community’s point of view. It gives those communities a voice, he said. And he hopes the students he helps continue to help tell their stories.

“It’s good to see them succeed,” he says.

Since 1975, it has been carefully constructed to increase the number of black engineers who excel academically, succeed professionally, and positively impact the community.

of more than 90 members balances numerous volunteer events, two meetings a week, five to six projects a semester, and eight competitions and three conferences each year, in addition to already rigorous course and workloads. While it is a time commitment, members gain a strong network and tools for success.

“Being a black engineer is a dynamic that a lot of us bond over because it’s not as common,” says Kaila Jones, junior civil engineering major and UCF’s chapter president. “The organization teaches us how to carry ourselves so we don’t succumb to [the pressure of] stereotypes [and] so we not only graduate with a degree — we graduate with the skillsets that we need to get a job.”

Academic and Professional Support

NSBE members are often able to do well academically because their active participation with the organization reinforces what they’re taught in the classroom through hands-on applications. Many of the group’s meetings even serve as study sessions.

“After joining NSBE, you realize how many members are actually in your class,” says Melissa Dugas, a junior industrial engineer and NSBE secretary. “So it’s like an automatic study group. You have equals if you’re struggling in a subject.”

Weekly meetings provide members with practices to develop the professional skills through audience-based interviews, resume review and debate sessions. During 70 percent of these events, employees from major engineering companies, such as Northrop Grumman and Duke Energy, visit to give members an inside look at the engineering industry.

“Our last GBM (general body meeting) had a panel for private industry versus government, and I felt that spoke out because it helped to describe what it was like to work in those industries,” Dugas says.

Emphasis on Community Outreach

In addition to developing multidisciplinary projects, such as a thermoelectric generator, the NSBE’s TORCH (Technical Outreach and Community Help) chair, junior Julian Alexander, organizes community-service events focused on pre-college initiatives. These activities are aimed toward getting kids from elementary to high school interested in STEM.

In the fall, the mechanical engineering major put together the annual Walk for Education, during which members went door-to-door in underserved neighborhoods to give children information on how to prepare for college. They also invited them to a park to enjoy some fun STEM activities, such as making slime, volcanoes and moving a hydraulic arm with syringes and fluids.

“[The goal is to] have them exposed to the science aspect of things and maybe not just think ‘Oh this is a project I have to do once a year for a grade,’ but instead, ‘Oh this is a cool project that will expose me to opportunities that will get me further in the science field,’” Alexander says.

Networking Success

Not only do current NSBE members at UCF extend a helping hand to others, alums from the program often dedicate their time and efforts to helping undergrads who are still finding their way.

Cimarron Carter ’14, a systems engineer for Lockheed Martin and the chapter’s executive advisor, always tells students to include their NSBE experience on their resumes because he’s seen first-hand how it influences their chance of landing a job.

“I have people all the time who are managers at Lockheed Martin right now who come to me and say, ‘Hey, do you know this person? They applied for an internship and they’re currently a NSBE-UCF student,’” says Carter, who earned a degree in information technology. “NSBE-UCF and NSBE in general have such a large network that there’s always bound to be somebody who’s working at a company that you want to work for who was probably in NSBE before.”

Next month, thousands of members across the nation will gather in Pittsburgh,  for the annual national convention. They will apply academic abilities to complete challenging projects, use professional skills to network for internships and jobs, and connect with a community to serve others in need, all while supporting fellow black engineers.

At last year’s conference, an NSBE graduate living in Tennessee handed Jones his business card and told her to call him if she ever needed anything.

“Having that type of support, having that type of motivation is definitely what keeps me going in college — knowing that one day I’ll be at a conference in 10 years telling another college student, ‘You got this. You can do it. Here’s my business card if you need anything,’” says Jones.

It began with a centuries-old slip of paper. Browsing through a shabby book section in a Florida thrift store, Carol Mundy picked up a 1901 edition of The Complete Life of William McKinley and Story of His Assassination. As she carefully flipped through the tattered pages, she found a yellow letter wrapped in wax paper slipped into its spine. Its date: 1870.

The letter was addressed to the 10th Calvary Regiment or “Buffalo Soldiers,” one of the few segregated units in the U.S. Army at the time. Mundy, whose mother was an antique collector, immediately saw the value in the historic piece. The find would start a 25-year occupation.

Thanks to her job with Delta airlines that required frequent travel around the U.S., Mundy, with her daughter in tow, would rent a car in between her 10-hour shifts and search for Salvation Army stores and yard sales. Eventually, the hunt would extend to her personal time and vacations, too, much to her friends’ dismay. “For years my friends didn’t want to travel with me,” she says.

For every piece found, Mundy would research the history behind it and record it carefully. And she has gone to great lengths to document her collection. “I have called Portugal about the Middle Passage, I have called Temple ����ֱ��, I have called Canada to learn how to archive,” she says. “… Pay is not necessary, I just want the history to be told correctly.”

But no matter how much time or space it took up in her home, Mundy never saw her collection as a burden, but instead as her purpose in life. “It’s a legacy for my children and grandchildren that I was given to do on this earth,” she says.

Today, Mundy has entire storage units filled African-American artifacts, but many of her best pieces can be found at the UCF Library. Now part of the university’s special collections and archives, Mundy’s featured relics include film reels of Billie Holiday performing with Quincy Jones and Miles Davis, poll tax receipts, plantation inventories with slaves listed below the livestock and newspapers headlining speeches from Abraham Lincoln.

UCF Library archivist Barack (Suphi) Ogreten said the collection came to UCF in 2009 and the university special collections department is still working on processing all of Mundy’s finds. He anticipates that the finding aid — an electronic guide that will chronicle all of the items and their history, in addition to a short biography of Mundy — will be available in late 2014 or sometime in 2015.

Once the collection is processed, Ogreten said all documents will be available for the UCF community to  be used for academic research in the special collection’s reading room in the library.

“Her collection means a lot to the university, because it has a lot of local Central Florida and statewide historical artifacts and information,” said Africana Studies Program Director Anthony Major.

With both local and national ties, Mundy’s civil rights collection is the one she admires most. Many pieces highlight Florida’s struggle to integrate. “One of the [pieces] in the civil rights collection is about St. Augustine and how they were trying to integrate the beaches,” Mundy said. “That was one of the hardest battles.”

While some of her collection is now part of the university, she continues to show her pieces of history to schools, Boys and Girls Clubs and is in contact with the Smithsonian Museum to have her collection shown there.

“My ultimate goal was to share it,” Mundy said. “You get addicted to history.”