Victoria Boomer '27 Finds Her Calling at the Intersection of Social Work and Environmental Justice

For Victoria Boomer, a food desert was never just an empty shelf. It was a pattern she could trace across neighborhoods in Houston, a missing piece connecting environmental injustice to the health outcomes she is training to address as a social worker.

Boomer, a senior social work major at Bowie State, spent part of her summer 1,000 miles from campus as a participant in the 2026 HBCU Environmental Justice Climate Corps Summer Program, hosted at the Bullard Center for Environmental and Climate Justice at Texas Southern University. The program brought together approximately 20 students from 15 historically Black colleges and universities to study environmental injustice firsthand in communities across the Houston area, including the Sunnyside and Pleasantville neighborhoods.

Boomer discovered the opportunity through Assistant Professor Michelle Sermon in the Department of Sociology & Child Studies, who posted it on Blackboard alongside several other internships. She said what stood out to her was that the program was open to every major, not just students in environmental science or policy.

"It was all around like a great catch. It was just all green flags for me.

Boomer had never been to Texas. She grew up in New York and embraced the opportunity to spend a summer somewhere new, learning alongside people from backgrounds different from her own. Few students in the program shared her major, which she said sharpened rather than dulled her interest.

"I wanted to look at it from my social work perspective and see how I could connect it to future areas of my life."

That connection took shape through a group project on disaster preparedness, focused on foster homes, summer camps and assisted living facilities. Boomer said she came into the program without a personal disaster plan beyond the basics, and left understanding how many rules and procedures govern emergency response for vulnerable populations, and how many kinds of disasters, from wildfires to floods, those plans must account for.

She said the deeper lesson is about awareness. Many residents in communities most affected by environmental injustice do not fully grasp the scale of the harm around them. Boomer met community members who had stepped into advocacy roles themselves, building shelters, starting organizations and petitioning for air quality monitors in their neighborhoods.

"They took us to different communities just so we could get that real point of view, from people who have actually been born and raised there."

Boomer traced connections between poor air quality, limited access to health care and higher rates of cancer and high blood pressure in some communities, and linked those patterns back to food deserts, areas where residents lack access to affordable, quality groceries. It's an issue she expects to carry into her future work.

"I don't know what field I specifically want to go into after finishing my senior year. But it gave me a broader perspective to see people in all stages and areas of life, and see where I can fit in, especially with policy and people."

Boomer will complete a social work placement this fall with the Department of Social Services. On campus, she is boldly stepping into new leadership roles, serving as co-captain of the Sensations Color Guard flag team and president of the Social Work Club.

She said the HBCU students in the program, despite coming from different schools and cities, understand each other immediately.

"I feel like I found a community outside of the Bowie community. But we still had an HBCU experience, in our own way."

Asked what it means to be Bowie Bold, Boomer did not point to a single achievement. Rather, she points to her decision to get on a plane to a state she had never visited, among strangers, for the sake of learning something new.

"To me, being Bowie Bold is really stepping into that boldness. You don't know who you are until you put yourself into an uncomfortable situation and see how you react, what you learn and how you grow from that."