When Michelle Gallaga moved to the U.S. from the Philippines with her two young kids in 2010, she didn’t know anyone in her new home.
“We had to start a life and really try to navigate being an immigrant and all the hardships that come with it,” she says.
“When you move to a different country at 40,” she adds, “people already have their own friends and their cliques, and so I never really got to form my own group of friends.”
Not having completed college, she found, limited her opportunities, and she encouraged her kids to pursue the degree she hadn’t attained. Once they had left home to do so, however, it didn’t sit quite right with her that she had pushed them to do something that she herself hadn’t been able to.
And so, as a birthday present to herself, Gallaga enrolled at Berkeley City College, and not without some apprehension.
But it wasn’t the first time that the graduating Global Poverty & Practice student had enrolled in college.
Gallaga had attended the University of the Philippines Conservatory of Music in Diliman as a voice major, while belonging to the Philippine Madrigal Singers, an a capella choir that took her around the world for festivals, world tours, and competitions.
She spent seven months away from the Philippines during the group’s 1989 tour and found it difficult to re-enroll in classes after returning, choosing to stay on with the choir for another three years.
She eventually did go back to school again, this time for music theory, but dropped out after joining a cover band.
In 2000, Gallaga got married, retired from singing, and gave college another shot, studying education to become an elementary school teacher. For two years she taught English in rural schools with poor infrastructure and limited educational resources.
“I loved the experience of being there and being around the enthusiasm of the children,” she said. “It was so fulfilling and so humbling. There was something about giving yourself to it that you get so much out of.”
But a divorce brought an end to the calling she had begun to develop, and she had to drop out again. Eventually, she moved to the U.S.
Now, years later in Berkeley, Gallaga was quickly discovering that she loved being back in the classroom.
With so much more life experience to apply to her lessons, the curriculum clicked in a way it hadn’t before. In 2023, she transferred to UC Berkeley to study sociology.
But making the most of her time at the country’s top public university was difficult while working two jobs: one providing translation and interpreting services for San Francisco government agencies, and another assisting a social entrepreneur pushing for equity in the psychedelics space. She could only attend class two days a week — not enough to build relationships or finally find community.
That is, until she met Valerie Moss, the Blum Center’s Assistant Director of Student Affairs, at a Global Poverty & Practice minor tabling session on campus. Examining and addressing poverty immediately struck a chord with Gallaga and harkened back to her experience teaching students in underserved schools.
Her first class, GPP 115: Global Poverty: Challenges and Hopes, “blew my mind,” she said.
Its lessons about understanding 20th-century development and 21st-century poverty alleviation left her feeling like “I was living a lie all my life,” she laughed.
This is it, she thought during that first semester in the minor. I want to learn more.
Her biggest lesson, she said, has come this current semester. She had arrived at GPP believing that the only way to make a difference in poverty alleviation was to do work that produced obvious, immediate results.
But “you may not see those results right away,” Prof. Khalid Kadir counseled in her Global Poverty & Practice Capstone Course. The impacts may not appear for generations, he said, but the important thing is that you took action.
The minor’s appeal, however, went beyond its curriculum.
“GPP is like family to me,” Gallaga said. “It was my only way to meet more students and build relationships.”
Her standing in the program led Prof. Clare Talwalker to recommend her as an advisor to her peers in the minor, to which she enthusiastically agreed.
“Joining the minor was the smartest thing to do,” Gallaga said, “because GPP gave me the community that I needed to really feel like I belonged at UC Berkeley.”
For her practice experience, a core component of the program where students apply what they learn, Gallaga volunteered with Spiral Gardens, a small, nonprofit community garden providing fresh, nutritious produce in a historically redlined Berkeley neighborhood and food desert — a place she herself had lived in for 10 years.
Each Sunday, she would give tours of the garden to new volunteers, helped them get their own small garden projects off the ground, and mentored them. She grew food for her geographic community and gained the social community she had spent years looking for in the Bay Area and had begun to find in GPP.
Volunteering with Spiral Gardens also put into practice the lesson Prof. Kadir had imparted. Her biggest takeaway from GPP, Gallaga said, was “that I was there. I was a part of something. I did what I could, and I’ll keep doing what I can. And that’s enough. That’s what matters.”
After graduating this month, she plans to stay in the poverty-alleviation and nonprofit space. “Being able to keep working with organizations that help other people will always make me feel like I belong,” she said.
Her son graduated from UC Irvine in June, and her daughter will graduate from UC Santa Cruz next June.
“When I told my son, ‘I got into UC Berkeley!’ he was so jealous because he got rejected from Berkeley,” she recalled with a laugh. “But when I told him I got in, he said, ‘Mom’s the GOAT!’” — the greatest of all time.
And come December 20, when Gallaga crosses the stage to receive her diploma, they’ll be there to celebrate her degree.
