Joe and Mary Borgo
Joe Borgo came to Ohio State as an undergraduate and earned a degree in French in 1970. He went on to get a master’s degree from the Ohio State College of Social Work (then known as the School of Social Work) in 1972 and spent a long and meaningful career in social work. Joe and his wife Mary have created a charitable remainder trust to support future generations of Ohio State students. Part of the funds will go to the Department of French and Italian to create an endowed scholarship, and the remainder will support scholarships in the College of Social Work.
We are grateful for and honored by the Borgos’ generous contribution and are pleased to share a little bit about Joe’s and Mary’s professional and personal lives.
“Majoring in French was expedient, but also reflected something very important to me.”
Joe learned French in Montreal where he attended high school. His parents thought that Joe would follow in the footsteps of his uncles, who were priests, and cousins, who were archbishops in the Vatican Diplomatic Corps.
He was supposed to study French for four years in Quebec, then move on to Salamanca for Spanish, Heidelberg for German, and then to the American Pontifical Institute in Rome, so that by the time he was ordained he would have five languages. “But by the time I finished high school, I wasn’t sure that I had a vocation for the priesthood,” says Joe, “and I decided to stay on in Quebec because I really loved it there.”
Joe left Montreal at the end of his junior year and transferred to Case Western Reserve. He was nine credit hours short of graduating at the time he was drafted. As Joe was about to join the army, the Air Force recruiters appealed to him. They suggested that with his knowledge of French he should go to Vietnam and that he could join the Air Force as a psychiatric technician.
Joe served in this role for four years, and he grew to find the work meaningful. During his service, Joe came to know the Chief Social Worker of the unit, who happened to be a faculty member in the School of Social Work at Ohio State. He became interested in pursuing social work further.
By the time Joe left the air force, he had a wife and child, and finishing his undergraduate degree at Case Western was expensive. Because of his new connection at Ohio State and his Ohio resident status, he decided that the logical thing to do was to finish his undergraduate degree at Ohio State. Given his French immersion in earlier education, the quickest way to graduate was to finish his bachelor’s at Ohio State with a French major.
Though this was a practical choice, Joe considers his time in the French department to be very meaningful. He formed close relationships with faculty and really took this opportunity to discover French culture.
“Joe had a lot of great friends in the French department,” says Mary. “They were absolutely wonderful and very supportive of a young man with a wife and a child who was working and going to school full time.” Joe fondly recalls Professor Calmut and Professor Williams, who served as his advisor for his undergraduate thesis on the poetry of Saint-John Perse.
“Majoring in French was expedient,” Joe explains, “but it also reflected something very important to me. And this is one of the reasons we decided to donate to the university.”
Upon graduation, Joe received a scholarship to pursue graduate studies in French at Yale University. “It was a very difficult decision for Joe not to continue studying French,” Mary recalls. However, by that time Joe’s experience in the Air Force had cemented his choice to pursue social work.
“It’s not the career I envisaged when I first enrolled in the School of Social Work, but It’s been very satisfying.”
Joe started his career at the Franklin County Mental Health and Mental Retardation Board, who offered to fund his pursuit of a PhD in Social Work. Joe began working and studying full time, but after two years, a colleague in the PhD program who was from Montreal suggested that Joe pursue a job opportunity at the Shawbridge Youth Centers in Montreal.
Joe returned to Montreal to serve this agency as Director of Professional Services. Shawbridge Youth Centers was the largest English language agency for delinquent and emotionally disturbed children. “It was very progressive at the time,” Joe explains. “It provided the whole continuum of care from closed security units, to open residential programs, to community-based street outreach.” Joe’s responsibility was to ensure that a high quality of services was provided to clients.
After two years, Joe became Deputy Executive Director, and two years after that he was promoted to Executive Director. “I accomplished a lot of very important changes while I was there,” says Joe, but after eight years he stepped down, because he believed that it was good for agencies to have turnover at the top.
Following a couple years of working with a management consulting firm, Joe stepped in as Executive Director of Covenant House in New York City. A few months after he took on the role, he found the organization in turmoil. The budget dropped drastically. Joe had to lay off half the staff, but he managed to stabilize the program and ensured that it could keep offering its services.
His next big opportunity took him to Austin, Texas, where he joined the Texas Department of Protective and Regulatory Services as Deputy Executive Director. Despite great accomplishments, after two years his time in this role ended due to a change in state government. He took an opportunity to work with a management consulting company and continued working in consulting for the next 20 years, especially in the areas of child welfare and juvenile justice.
“It’s not the career I envisaged when I first enrolled in the school of social work, but It’s been very satisfying,” Joe affirms.
“Both Mary and I have had a life-long appreciation of French culture.”
Through it all, French has continued to be significant to Mary and Joe. “Both Mary and I have had a life-long appreciation of French culture,” he says. “My favorite era is the early to mid-20th century – Apollinaire, Rimbaud, Pradels, Aragon – particularly the French poets.”
Mary studied French for five years in high school while growing up in the Irish Republic. She could read in French quite well, and she remembers reading some of Joe’s French textbooks while he was finishing his undergraduate degree.
Mary is particularly fond of French cinema. “When we were at Ohio State, they used to have a really nice cinema where they played many French movies by all the great directors,” she notes. “I loved the movies of François Truffaut and all the movies of that time. I also love fashion, and I love watching the classic French movies, the clothes were so incredible – the jewels and clothes and the style.”
“I also love French cuisine,” Mary adds. “When we first moved to the U.S., I used to throw the most elegant French dinner parties.” One of her favorite recipes is salmon with sorrel sauce –“‘saumon à l'oseille.” “It’s the easiest, most delectable way to serve salmon,” she asserts.
Joe and Mary’s daughter, Siobhan, was educated in Montreal from first grade on. She went to Mount Allison University and spent her junior year abroad at the University of Strasbourg. “We were really impressed, because she had to take all of the same exams as the native speakers, and she passed all of them,” Mary recalls.
Siobhan now lives in Dublin, Ireland, where she works as the head of personnel for Ireland’s largest non-profit organization serving the homeless. “I think bringing her up in Montreal was one of the best things we ever did for her,” says Mary. “She had an incredibly good immersion in French, but also in the other immigrant groups that lived in Montreal.”
Mary and Joe are also very well versed in Italian culture. Joe has Italian heritage. His grandparents on both sides emigrated from the North of Italy, and he has traveled to the area to reconnect with relatives still there. “My parents spoke Italian when they didn’t want the kids to understand. So, I’ve always said that one of these days I will pick up Italian,” he says with a laugh.
“The education that I got at Ohio State was very important, both in terms of my career, but also in terms of general knowledge.”
Throughout their lives, Joe and Mary have built upon their time at Ohio State, and their main motivation for giving to the university is simple – just to give back. “The education that I got at Ohio State was very important, both in terms of my career, but also in terms of general knowledge,” Joe explains.
Their contribution to the College of Social Work will create three scholarships: one focused on community organization, another on social policy, and a third on spirituality. Each reflects a significant part of Joe’s approach to social work.
Community organization became the focus of Joe’s career. In the Air Force, Joe worked as a psychiatric technician, and his original plan upon joining the field of social work was to become a family therapist. However, he realized that, while working on the individual level is important and can be effective, one must attack issues systemically in order to bring about broad social change. So, Joe’s focus shifted, and he became a community organizer.
Social policy allows individuals, families, and communities to gain access to resources that will help them achieve a better quality of life. “We can’t forget the social dimension of social work,” Joe explains, “the emphasis on social policy and advocacy is something I want to help inculcate within the profession.”
The third scholarship focuses on spirituality, something that has become critical to Joe’s understanding of social work. “I think a really important component of the helping professions is spirituality,” he states. “Helping professions are all about relationship building, and I think that the spiritual dimension is critically important and helpful to being able to cultivate the necessary level of intimacy with another person.”
Giving to the Department of French and Italian is important to Joe and Mary for their sheer love of languages and their admiration for students who study them.
“I love other languages and other cultures, and I think it is really important to give people the opportunity to experience that,” says Joe. He feels that many students go to college and put the emphasis on preparation for a job rather than learning about the world. “Studying languages is so important, but it’s a field a study that is not necessarily career-focused. When someone makes the commitment to become a French or Italian major, I think it’s important to support that,” he says.
Mary echoes this sentiment and adds that studying languages affects the way people think. “I believe that when somebody studies another language, it does something very interesting to their brain,” she says. “It moves the words around and it makes them think about how people tell stories, how words are put together. And it’s very hard, so I admire students who do that.”
“This is our way of paying it forward and helping another young person. And hopefully, some of those young people will be in a position later in life to also give back,” Mary concludes.
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Joe and Mary have been dedicated to social work and French culture throughout their lives. At times these fields have seemed unrelated, but at closer look they are rather complementary. It is all about building connections through which we can learn from those who have a different way of thinking, ground our work in a respect for one another, and enact positive change based on the lessons we learn through diverse individual relationships.
