Jessica Sanders is an advocate for respecting individual autonomy and a believer in the unconventional. Her most recent role before her acceptance into MICA’s Social Design Master’s Degree program was as a Traumatic Brain Injury Medicaid Waiver Case Manager for the Brain Injury Association of Maryland. While in this position, she utilized a person-centered approach and collaborated with service provider care teams to help Medicaid clients design a plan for achieving their annual goals.

Jessica previously focused on improving public health as an undergraduate student at Towson University, leading both exercise classes and an Art and Soul art therapy collage workshop while interning at the Joy Wellness Center in Baltimore City. In 2016, she was awarded a bachelor's degree in Exercise Science.

In attending MICA's School of Social Design, Jessica hopes to build on her successes in designing person-centered care plans to achieve similar results on a larger scale: designing community focused initiatives. Person Centered Planning is a goal-forming strategy that focuses on an individual’s strengths rather than their deficits. Person Centered Planning shares similar objectives to Human Centered Design as it focuses on the individual’s wants and needs, placing them before the interests of the planning team. Jessica views Human Centered Design as an opportunity to generate creative solutions with members of a community. For this reason, she is ready to work alongside community members, fellow students, and professionals of social design and other fields to bring a community’s vision to life and to explore the true meaning of designing in the interest of the common good.