Pamela Kirwin Heintz ’91, G’08 came to Syracuse University to finish the bachelor’s degree she began decades earlier at Smith College. Little did she know the journey she was about to undertake would foster her engagement with thousands of undergraduate students and become her life’s work.
As the University’s Mary Ann Shaw Center for Public and Community Service celebrates 30 years, Heintz, associate vice president and the center’s founding director, is preparing to retire from the career that has been her passion. Looking back on the past three decades—and the legacy she is leaving—fills her with pride, awe and gratitude.
Pamela Kirwin Heintz (Photo by Amy Manley)
Heintz brought a trove of lived experience to the reboot of her educational journey—as a mom, a real estate agent, a community volunteer and an elected member of her town’s planning board. She met with Bea González, former dean of University College (now the College of Professional Studies) and an advisor at the time, who told her policy studies might be a better fit for her than the economics studies she had started at Smith. González connected Heintz with Bill Coplin, professor of policy studies in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. Heintz remembers being the only adult student in Coplin’s PAF 101 class.
“I loved the work,” Heintz says. “It gave me an academic framework around the actual work I’d been doing, and it helped me understand much more how to think about doing this kind of work.” Under Coplin’s mentorship, Heintz finished her degree and continued to dive deeper into community-focused work.
Planting Roots for Community Work
Around the same time, Kenneth and Mary Ann Shaw came to Syracuse as Chancellor and associate of the Chancellor. In a video for a recent 30th anniversary celebration, Mary Ann Shaw said there was a feeling on campus that students and faculty wanted to be involved in work that extended into the community.
“My husband and I knew we needed to corral this initiative and desire,” she said. The students needed to be involved in something that was meaningful and something that would contribute to their growth and learning as students but also prepare them for a world that was quickly changing.
The Shaws soon found the right person to lead this new initiative. “I then had the great opportunity to meet Pam Heintz. I just thought, ‘this is the woman,’” Shaw said. “The center would not be what it is today without Pam Heintz. She really made it happen and developed this legacy.”
The early years were filled with strategic work, building collaborations with faculty members and community organizations to incorporate service learning into coursework. Over the years, the center has worked with as many as 70 courses and collaborated with the Center for Teaching and Learning Excellence to pair teaching faculty with undergraduate student consultants for an exchange of perspectives on teaching and learning in a particular course.
The first Shaw Center cohort, which engaged in literacy work in the community, numbered 13. Currently, the Shaw Center has 351 student tutors and volunteers who work more than 10,000 hours with two thousand students in Syracuse city schools. The center also supports 96 community organizations, collaborates with 150 campus partners and coordinates student volunteers connected to 17 service-learning courses.
Outreach includes literacy initiatives; Balancing the Books, a Whitman School of Management collaboration that teaches students financial literacy; a STEM initiative; and a nutrition initiative. Public relations and service-learning interns work collaboratively to build connections between the Shaw Center, the University and the community.
Since 1993 the University, through Parking and Transit Services, has collaborated with the Shaw Center to support a detailed daily transportation network to get all Syracuse students to their tutoring and community placements. In 1993, the service transported 15 students and in 2024 transported 875 students.
To make this all happen takes a strong leader who can think strategically and find solutions. At the 30th anniversary celebration, Chancellor Kent Syverud said Heintz has led the Shaw Center quietly, effectively and loyal to the values of the University. “I think Pam has been a treasure to this university,” said Syverud, who chose Heintz as this year’s recipient of the Forever Orange Award, which she received at the One University Awards ceremony on April 11.
Fostering a Sense of Belonging
In addition to building and guaranteeing the quality and efficacy of Shaw Center programming, Heintz has played a huge role in nurturing the center’s interns and tutors.
Maria J. Lopez ’05, G’12, assistant director of scholarship programs in the Office of Multicultural Advancement, served as a leadership intern at the Shaw Center during her undergraduate years. As such, she supported the entire office.
“It was there that I first learned what it meant to work in a place with real purpose,” Lopez says. “The Shaw Center provided me with an invaluable window into how civic engagement, nonprofit organizations and public policy intersect to influence educational access. Through my work, I had the opportunity to meet community leaders, build relationships with local organizations and gain a deeper understanding of the Syracuse community.”
Lopez says Heintz and the Shaw Center staff were instrumental in fostering her sense of belonging on campus.
“For nearly 25 years, Pam Heintz has remained a mentor, advocate and supporter,” Lopez says. “She spoke my name in important rooms and fought for me when my financial aid package was insufficient to keep me enrolled. Pam believed in the Shaw Center as a living-learning classroom where, if students are given the space to develop their ideas, they will thrive.”
As a mentor, Heintz always reminds her students that they will never truly know the impact they are having on the children they work with.
“We’re just doing it one kid at a time—and that’s all you can do,” she says.
What’s next for Pam Heintz? She is still deciding that. But you can be sure that whatever it is, it will involve making the community a better place.
This article was originally published May 1, 2025 by SU Stories here.
