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PEACE AND JUSTICE in action
The Office of the Chaplain and Religious Life (OCRL) instituted the Cooper-McElvaney Fellowship in 2015 with the generous endowments of Robert Cooper and William McElvaney. The Fellowship provides students an opportunity to explore and deepen their understanding of social justice work with guidance from OCRL staff and their respective faculty mentors. Fellows engage in 100+ hours of research and/or service related to a justice concern of their choosing and present their findings and reflections to the SMU campus. The overarching goal of this fellowship is to move students from research to long-term action and engagement in peace and justice work throughout their lives. We caught up with the 2020-21 Cooper-McElvaney Fellows to learn more about the impact of their fellowship experiences as they navigated the 2020-21 academic year at SMU.
NIA: What does service look like in a pandemic? This question hung at the forefront of my mind as the world suddenly shut down last March. In addition to being in my sophomore year, I was also the co-director of CHAMP, a Christian mentorship program for a local non-profit named the Dallas Champions Academy. Through this work, I paired college students of color (primarily from SMU) with DFW mentees of color to support them through the college and career readiness process. Halfway into CHAMP’s first year, the pandemic hit, leaving our team at a loss as to what was next. All we had were questions: What new needs would our mentees have? How would volunteer retention change? What on earth was Zoom?
Searching for direction, I applied to the Cooper-McElvaney Peace and Justice Fellowship for the summer of 2020. The Fellowship was an opportunity to explore the fundamentals of faith-based justice work and discipleship. I saw this as a much-needed opportunity to get back to the basics. Through the fellowship, I engaged in conversations and readings that grounded me, helped me cultivate spiritual resilience, and provided answers to the big questions surrounding public service. While it was easy to fixate on the programming and assessment components of leading CHAMP, the Cooper-McElvaney Fellowship helped me realize that mentorship is primarily about caring for the soul. It is about putting people before programs. In our culture, we often glamourize volunteer work by making it about having fun and feeling good. The reality, though, is that service is rarely easy, and sometimes it takes a lot out of us physically, emotionally, and spiritually. Whether we are in a pandemic or not, service looks the same — it looks like persistence, sacrifice, and faithfulness.
There was no better time for me to learn this lesson than during a pandemic. As CHAMP continued into the 2020-21 school year, our mentees faced new challenges, from parents losing jobs to mental health crises. We were constantly adapting and reorienting ourselves around our primary goal of caring for the souls of our mentees. Our SMU mentors were true champions through it all, finding innovative ways to support their students. We have not found answers to all of our questions and concerns; sometimes, the answers change each day! But through the Cooper-McElvaney fellowship, I found a strong foundation and philosophy of service that guides and sustains me.
Nia Kamau ’22 is a junior Human Rights and International Studies Major from Little Elm Texas. Her Residential Commons affiliation is Boaz Commons.
RHONDA: It was January 2020, and so many great things in my life were coming together. I was accepted into the SMU Study Abroad in South Africa Program for the summer, and I was so excited for this once in a lifetime trip.
By February, there was news bubbling up about a “pandemic.”
As the weeks ticked by, the bubbling became more of a steady stream of news about something called COVID-19. I was quietly hoping it would not ruin my plans. On March 1, 2020, I received an email from the university stating that Study Abroad programs were cancelled. Not only had my dreams of going to South Africa been crushed by this strange disease, so too was the opportunity to use the experiences to further my educational pursuits through a national fellowship.
However, referencing Jeremiah 29:11-29, God had a different plan for how I would spend the summer of 2020. Thanks to being a recipient of a Cooper-McElvaney Peace and Justice Fellowship, I was able to study and learn more about COVID-19 and how it was affecting Black and Brown residents in the Southern sector of Dallas. Through the Fellowship, I was able to research the pandemic and develop relationships with several Black churches in those communities who were living out what it means to be in the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, “The Beloved Community.”
Under the auspices of Dallas-based Project Unity, in partnership with Catalyst Health Network and Clinical
Pathology Lab, the organization made COVID-19 testing available at five Dallas-area churches serving the Black and Latin-X communities. Project Unity’s founder, Pastor Richie Butler, of the St. Luke Community United Methodist Church is an SMU grad and current Board of Trustee member. The churches were important because they are often the most trusted institutions in the Black community. Through the organization’s testing and other wrap-around services, such as food distribution, they were able to address the needs of their communities better than a large government run organization.
As a Cooper-McElvaney Fellow, I was able to document and make two presentations on the effectiveness of such community-based programs. In the end, though we have our own “plans,” God often has other plans for us; those which can potentially impact the lives of many more people than which we initially had in mind. I am so very grateful to the benefactors who helped me learn and share this important work.
Rhonda Bellamy Hodge ‘21 is a Master of Liberal Studies student in the Simmons School of Education. She is originally from Phenix City, Alabama.
To learn more about the Cooper-McElvaney Peace and Justice Fellowship and the Office of the Chaplain and Religious Life, visit www.smu.edu/chaplain.
