Staff Spotlight: Danielle Hallahan
For this month’s Sonoran Center Staff Spotlight, we are meeting with Danielle Hallahan.
Hallahan is the Sonoran Center’s Program Manager for Administrative Operations. Since starting at the Center in Fall of 2023, she has become an integral part of the Sonoran Center.
We discuss her passion for disability accessibility and inclusion, the importance of always learning, upcoming projects, diving with sharks, and more!
Hello! Please introduce yourself and give a brief overview of what you do at the Sonoran Center
My name is Danielle Hallahan. I have just going on 4 years at UArizona, and 20 years with the Department of Corrections previously. Currently, I am the Program Manager at the Sonoran Center. That really means I oversee basically anything administrative. That could vary anywhere from budgets to Human Resources to building managing, day-to-day administrative operations, project planning, event planning, etc.
So you wear a lot of hats
Yes, I wear a lot of hats, and I like it that way [laughs].
How did you get involved with the Sonoran Center? How did you get involved?
In my career with the Department of Corrections, I was actually statewide coordinator for the Law Enforcement Torch Run for Special Olympics. When I left the Department of Corrections it was a very deliberate move to something not so crazy. I went and started down at the college of applied science and technology at Sierra Vista. The more I progressed there, and the more that the job changed there, I started to look out for things that inspired me like I was previously with the Law Enforcement Torch Run for Special Olympics. When I interviewed with the staff from the Sonoran Center, the overwhelming feeling was, “That is the place where I want to work. That’s the place where they are doing so much good and I can get passionate about the things that mean the most to me again.” I was just drawn to you guys.
We’re glad you were, and we’re glad you’re here! So is it what you expected? How are you liking it so far?
I love it so far. There are a lot of processes and procedures set up for things that people do but we don’t do them in order, and now we’re able to go back to the roots of, “this is how we get the job done.” I don’t know if you’ve ever heard the theory of the big J job and the little j job - the big J job is the grand scheme of things, we want to get THE THING done; and the little j job is the everyday guts of things. One of the things that I am very good at is taking the guts and putting it into order so it’s not chaos. I’m a chaos controller; a chaos wrangler I guess.
You should put that on your business card! It’s a tough job, wrangling chaos, but someone’s gotta do it.
Have you ever heard the saying, “How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time”? You can only come into work, figure out the one string that needs to be pulled, and sort it out and put it into place. If you try to do it all [at once], you’ll just go crazy.
I think that’s good advice for a lot of things
Life is just chaos. I mean, look at our everyday lives. We may spend 8 hours at work doing a work function but that is not the entirety of our lives. You’ve got a whole family dynamic, and even within there there’s little strings everywhere: There’s the social dynamics, your personal life, your future professional building life. If you jumble it all together, it’s just chaos, but if you can take a step and take one piece at a time and one bite at a time you’re going to figure it all out.
What is your favorite part of working at the Sonoran Center?
Putting the pieces in the right place. I see the potential in people and the program itself, and I see how, for lack of better terms, we just take on the world. Knowing that I can play a part in that is a good feeling.
Looking ahead, what do you see as some of your goals for your time at the Center.
For short term goals: get the processes so everyone knows what to do. That can be little things. The little pieces matter for the bigger picture. Every grant we go for, every proposal, every interaction we make with the community and our constituents, that’s important for the entire team. That’s important for me because the potential for what the Center can do is limitless.
In terms of long term - I want to get back into what makes me happy again. I took a four year break from working with people with developmental disabilities and I missed it. There’s a young man that is part of one of the programs over at ArtWorks. I was walking there kind of aimlessly, I was going to look at something there really quickly. Yumi showed me around, and as we entered the room, this young man was sitting at a desk, and he remembered me. I’d known him for 15 year. He was one of my Special Olympics athletes. His eyes got super big, he jumped out of his chair, and he came running and jumped into my arms. I haven’t seen him in probably 5 years. Knowing that I made that kind of impact on him from long ago and connecting with that again, that’s amazing. That’s a great feeling. That’s the feeling that people forget, and they need desperately in their lives.
My next question was “have you learned anything in your time at the Center” but it seems you’ve learned a lot in a short amount of time
Oh yeah, and there’s so much more to learn. Everyday I’m learning about the different research projects we have going on, the grants we have going on, and all those little pieces help to build the big picture. I like that and I like being part of that.
It’s kind of like a big puzzle, every piece makes a part of the larger whole
Think of it like Legos. You’re building a big Lego set, and if you’re missing a piece - well, you can build something, but it looks a little wonky, right? But when you have all the pieces and they fit where they’re supposed to fit the end product is amazing.
Do you have any advice for people interested in doing the kind of work you do?
Yes. Never stop learning. And that does not mean only learning what you think fits into the job. My previous dean told me a story, and the title of the story is “Stepping on the Chalk”. If you can imagine - everyone plays on a field. On a football field, there’s chalk all the way around it, right? Everyone knows their boundaries. Everyone knows what box they fit in because that’s where they excel. I don’t live in a box. I love all sorts of different things, and when I go out and learn those different things, and bring that knowledge back to what I’m doing, the mindset and perspective of what I’m doing expands. My job, big J, is administrative services. I can read a spreadsheet in excel like no other. Spreadsheets and things like that make me happy, but that’s not who I am. I want to, and this is a silly way to put it… I love dinosaurs. When was the last time somebody asked your favorite dinosaur? When you’re a kid everyone asks you “what’s your favorite dinosaur?” but as an adult you don’t get asked that and so that skillset, that part of your toolbox becomes limited, because you could have different dinosaurs you like throughout your life. So learning and learning things that are not just within your box is the best advice I can give to anybody.
You definitely have to go outside the box sometimes. And now that I think about it, my favorite dinosaur is probably Therizinosaurus
I’ll have to look that one up!
Are there any upcoming projects or things you’re working on that you’d like people to know about?
So many… I’m still learning everything we do. I know that we have a film review coming up in December that I think will be great. It’s with Jimmy Warne and the title of it is “Seven Generations” and the description of it, from what I know, is it’s basically going back seven generations looking at the damage done to the tribes throughout the US and beyond. It was predicted that it would take seven generations to fix the problems, and now we’re at that seventh generation.
Anything else I haven’t mentioned that you want to bring up before we go?
Outside of work, my crazy plan for my future, probably for my 60th birthday, is to go cage diving with great white sharks. I have a stupid obsession with great white sharks, and not many people want to get in the water with big predators.
I don’t know if I could do that!
As long as I’m in a cage, I’m fine.
Outside of that, family is absolutely the most important thing in my life. I’ve got a granddaughter that I’m raising. So keep perspective that your job is 8 hours of your day, but it’s not everything that you have. People lose that perspective quite often.
It’s good to be reminded of that. One last thing, have you thought about your favorite dinosaur?
Mine has always been Stegosaurus
Good choice!