Ask Samantha Gross Dorf to describe a typical week and she starts, without hesitation, at home. Mornings mean getting her son, nine, and her daughter, fourteen, out the door, a routine she describes candidly as “challenging” some days. She and her husband, Lee, split the load before either of them opens a laptop. 

Her days rarely repeat. One week she’s scheduling faculty. The next, she’s coordinating an alumni visit or working with the sheriff’s office on a student program. “It’s pretty much different every day,” she says. What stays constant is the belief underneath all of it: what happens outside the classroom matters just as much as what happens inside it.

Samantha Gross Dorf is a 2026 Bucks County Parent Women of Influence Award Winner

Bucks County Parent’s Women of Influence Awards celebrate exceptional women making significant impacts in our community. Samantha was nominated by a colleague and selected based on her achievements and dedication to creating positive change. Each Women of Influence Award Winner has committed to support Family Focus Media’s core values. Together, we are committed to fostering a sense of belonging and empowerment for all families. All backgrounds, races, genders, and sexual orientations are welcome and safe with us.

From Faculty to Dean

Samantha Gross Dorf joined Bucks County Community College in 2009 as a part-time faculty member in history. Today, she is Dean of the School of Social and Behavioral Sciences, a role she stepped into on an interim basis in January 2022. She was named permanently to the role one year later. In between, she built something that has quietly reshaped how the college supports its students. 

Before the pandemic, Samantha co-created a basic needs program. It started with food pantries and has grown into a safety net covering all campuses, with snacks and hygiene supplies included.  She also helped launch a Bucks Student Emergency Fund that pays overdue bills, emergency child care, and car repairs directly, no paperwork maze, before a small crisis becomes a dropped class.

The $300 Problem

The idea for the emergency fund took root before the pandemic. Samantha read research showing that a $300 expense, a car repair, a missed shift, was often the difference between a student staying enrolled and disappearing from the roster. “That would be the difference between a student pursuing higher education leading to a career and not,” she says. “That was just so heartbreaking to me.” 

When COVID hit, that urgency sharpened. She and colleagues in the foundation office built the emergency fund almost in real time. Alongside it, a meal-delivery partnership kept groceries in parenting students’ hands every Friday when nothing else on campus was open.

The experience of one student has stayed with her ever since. This young mother was pursuing a social work degree, grieving her father, and raising a son with serious medical needs, largely on her own. “She was such an inspiration to me when things were tough,” Samantha recalls. For instance, Samantha remembers the moments she wanted to scale back a holiday giving program called Bucks Holiday Helpers because the lift had gotten heavy. “I think of her and I remember putting together boxes of baby toys… I have to keep going because events like this can help students to feel good about their holiday in some way, or to experience a little less stress.” This student has since graduated and has finished her bachelor’s degree.

A $150,000 Win for Parenting Students in Bucks

That instinct, building what the research says is needed, and sticking with it, led directly to Samantha’s proudest recent win. In 2025, she led the college’s successful application for the state’s Parent Pathways grant. With this grant, Samantha secured $150,000 in scholarships and support for parenting students, the first time the college had received the award. 

“My experiences as a working mother during COVID led me to think more deeply about the students we serve at our community college, particularly those raising children while pursuing their educational goals,” she notes. “I recognized that many parenting students faced obstacles far greater than my own and often without the support systems I was fortunate to have.” She later redirected her doctoral research at Immaculata University toward the same question: What do parenting community college students actually need to persist?

Building Bridges Beyond the Campus Gate

Samantha is quick to point out that the college can’t do this work alone. It also doesn’t try to. 

Bucks partners with the Bucks County Opportunity Council through Coaches on Campus, which places the nonprofit’s coaches directly inside student services, so a referral doesn’t mean crossing town on top of everything else. “We recognized that there were amazing organizations, like BCOC, who could help our students so much more”, she notes. “This program has made real and substantial changes in students’ lives.” She now serves on BCOC’s board of directors. The seat lets her watch that partnership, and the county’s broader anti-poverty work, up close.

Samantha is candid about the fact that this kind of role has gotten harder to sustain hands-on as her title has grown. “As my role changed, I’m not managing these things anymore, but I keep a close eye on them,” she says of the programs she helped launch. It’s a familiar tension for anyone who builds something and later has to hand pieces of it off. Samantha navigates it by staying attached to the people, not just the programs.  Along the years, I’ve definitely had people say, ‘You’ve been like a mentor to me,'” she says. “And I’m like, ‘I didn’t know I was mentoring you.’”

What Holds it All Together

Samantha rarely talks publicly about the personal reason all of this feels urgent to her. In her mid-twenties, a genetic disorder had destroyed her liver, and she underwent a life-saving transplant. “I know that not everyone waiting for an organ gets a second chance at life like I did,” she says. “At the absolute worst moment of a family’s life, my donor’s family made the selfless decision not to allow another family to suffer a great loss. I wanted to make sure that I lived the rest of my life putting good into the world to honor my donor, his family, and all those who were not able to receive the gift of life like I did.”

Lee, then her boyfriend of under a year, spent his lunch breaks and evenings at her hospital bedside, laptop open, so he could be there every day. Twenty years later, she says he is still a true partner. “He is definitely supportive and very proud of me.” Her children, she says, are proud too, even if her fourteen-year-old plays it cooler than her nine-year-old does.

Teaching, Still

Outside of work, Samantha leans on close friends, the occasional hot Pilates class, and reading, her mental reset from a job that rarely slows down.

She still teaches when she can and thinks of herself as someone who wants Bucks County’s community college students to know their path is a legitimate one. “There’s still the stigma of, this is 13th grade,” she says. “I want people to know that the quality is not less because you’re at a community college.”

Asked what she’d tell a parenting student standing in her office ready to quit, she doesn’t reach for a speech. “I’d have questions for them,” she shares. “What support do you need? Don’t quit.”

Twenty years after a transplant gave her a second chance, Samantha Gross Dorf is still finding new ways to give someone else theirs: “What happens outside the classroom matters inside the classroom. You can’t leave it at the door.”

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