During her summer 2004 service-learning experience in Tanzania, Jaime Pelusi met with elders and other residents of the village of Bishesha (left). During a visit to Karagwe, Pelusi cared for a six-month-old, HIV-positive orphan named Heruma and helped to build a community facility where Heruma and other orphans could stay while waiting to be placed with families.

It’s Talent Show day at Peoples Oakland, and as people begin to assemble, organizer Jamie Pelusi is busy moving furniture and plugging in a karaoke machine. As Pelusi sets up the sound system and fiddles with the dials on the machine, a large woman dressed in bright pink wanders over, picks up the microphone, and begins singing to the beat.

“It works!” the woman calls out, looking at the microphone and breaking into a little dance. Pelusi is delighted.

Peoples Oakland is a nonprofit agency located on Oakland’s Bates Street that helps adults with mental illnesses make a smooth transition into community life following hospitalization. Pelusi, 22, who graduates today with the Bachelor of Arts in Social Work degree, has logged hundreds of hours there as an intern, developing activities and interacting with mentally ill people ages 18-65. Not all of Peoples Oakland’s 250 clients (or “members,” as Peoples Oakland staff prefer to call them) regularly participate, but about 80 of them drop in on any given day for counseling, yoga classes, cooking demonstrations, money-management advice, job-skills coaching, or just to socialize.

“I think there’s a stigma in society about mental illness,” says Pelusi, a tall, suntanned young woman with long curly hair, who has been volunteering at agencies or with Special Olympics since her days at Hampton Middle School in Hampton Township. “You and I wouldn’t think twice about participating in our community, but for them it’s a real struggle just to step out their door. Peoples Oakland is a great place for them to take that first step, to meet other people who are dealing with the same issues they are, and to be in an environment where they feel comfortable.”

Pelusi says she has always been outgoing and drawn to other people, traits she laughingly credits to being Italian on both her mother’s and father’s sides. And in her black prairie skirt, flip-flops, turquoise beads, and small nose ring, she looks every bit the compassionate young social worker—or overseas volunteer. In addition to working with people with mental illnesses, Pelusi participated in a Global Service Learning project in Tanzania during summer 2004 and an International Mission on Business to Australia last summer. Her service-learning experience in Tanzania helped her earn a certificate in Africana Studies from Pitt.

Pelusi also is the starting goalkeeper for Pitt’s women's soccer team; for three of her four years here, she was the team’s cocaptain. Pelusi has been named a Big East Academic All-Star and has participated on Pitt’s Student Athlete Advisory Committee and with the Fellowship of Christian Athletes—all while maintaining a cumulative 3.9 QPA.

“Jamie is the type of student who reminds me why I wanted to teach,” says Rafael Engel, associate dean for academic affairs in Pitt’s School of Social Work. “She is clearly within the top 1 percent of students I have taught during my 18 years at Pitt.”

“My personality is such that I can't just sit still. I can’t just not do anything,” Pelusi admits. Maintaining a full schedule of academics, athletics, and community service “wasn’t difficult because I was doing what I liked to do,” she explains.

International service ranks high on the list of things Pelusi loves. Through a friend who accompanied her to Tanzania, Pelusi met Mbao Ngula, a Zambian woman who came to Pittsburgh to launch Project Educate, a nonprofit, nongovernmental agency, funded through the Pittsburgh Foundation, that provides books and cash assistance to educate young women in Africa.

After one phone conversation with Ngula, Pelusi asked to work with her, and ended up committing the next year-and-a-half to Project Educate. Pelusi now is busy developing the program, raising money through Rotary clubs, and organizing book drives. At one point, her Oakland apartment was crammed with 55 boxes of donated books.

In June, Pelusi will journey to Zambia, where she and Ngula will train teachers on computers and visit rural villages to educate women about HIV/AIDS.

“It’s been my dream for the past 10 years,” Pelusi says. “I feel blessed to be living it at such a young age.”

Her international work has opened her eyes to other cultures, as well as to the weaknesses of her own. “I think the average citizen in Australia knows more about the U.S. government than the average citizen in the United States,” she observes.

But when asked about her favorite moments during her Pitt career, the conversation returns to Peoples Oakland.

Pelusi believes the agency is helping to shatter stereotypes about individuals with mental illnesses. She recalls how Peoples Oakland encouraged a client to indulge his love of plants—to the point that he practically turned the facility’s fourth floor into a greenhouse, filled wall-to-wall with plants.

“We just let him go and do his thing,” she says.

Pelusi’s athletic abilities came in handy when she organized a Peoples Oakland basketball team. Pelusi marveled at how well the team came together. One client emerged as a leader, encouraging and teaching his teammates; one day at Trees Hall, he even approached a group of Pitt physicians and students to ask if he and his teammates could join in their pickup game.

As Pelusi watched the Pitt and Peoples Oakland groups playing together, she felt more convinced than ever that those with mental illnesses need not live separately from other people, that they can function in society.

“If you’d ask anyone on the street what they thought about people who have schizophrenia, they’d say, ‘Oh, they talk to themselves, they’re crazy,’” Pelusi points out. “But when you meet someone who has schizophrenia, you realize it’s a part of who they are and it needs attention, but so does every other part [of that individual]. These people are artists, they’re working, they’re in class, they’re brilliant people. There’s so much more to them.”

The Talent Show has ended at Peoples Oakland. There have been songs, dances, poems, and funny skits. Pelusi surveys the room with a smile.

“When you focus on these people’s strengths rather than their disabilities, it can really be empowering,” she says. “So they have a mental illness, so what? It doesn’t have to take over their life.”