In May, two of the Hart Leadership Program’s 2023-2024 Hart Fellows – Quinn Smith ’23 and Sophia Chimbanda ’23 – concluded their Fellowships after a year of community-engaged work and research. Ayesham Khan ’23, who is also a 2023-2024 Hart Fellow, will complete their Fellowship year in Cape Town, South Africa, in October. Over the past ten months, Quinn, Sophia, and Ayesham have worked in communities both new and familiar to them to learn from local leaders while conducting community-engaged research around questions of public interest to their partner organizations.
Sophia Chimbanda spent her Hart Fellowship year with the North Carolina Collection, a special archive within the Durham County Library, where she processed several new additions to the collection that help tell the history of activism and organizing in Durham. With a particular focus on LGBTQ+ history, Sophia’s independent research project involved digging into old issues of The Newsletter and Feminary, local publications from the 1970s and 80s, written by and for lesbians and feminists in the Triangle, as well as conducting oral histories with local lesbian activists and community members on their memories and experiences of living in Durham during this time. The oral histories Sophia collected will become part of a library collection available for future research.
Each Hart Fellow is encouraged to make some aspect of their work public through a final project that fits the context of their research, partner organization, and community. For her final project, Sophia organized a panel event, “Sapphic Storytelling: An Intergenerational Conversation,” bringing together dozens of LGBTQ+ people across generations to share their reflections on organizing in Durham in the 1970s and 1980s. As a result of this event, attendees have continued to meet, plan, and collaborate, continuing the momentum Sophia sparked through her own organizing. Reflecting on how her work in the archives translated into new community connections, Sophia writes, “it’s really exciting to see people wanting to continue to engage with each other and carry on some of the work that I hopefully started by putting together Sapphic Storytelling.”
This fall, Sophia will begin pursuing a Masters in Library Science at UNC-Chapel Hill. She shares, “My Hart experience makes me feel more confident and excited to move on to library science school. Of course, the field experience I have working at the North Carolina Collection is helpful as well, and I feel more confident in knowing that archiving and the library space is a career that I’m passionate about. So much of my work this year was diving into local history and so I’m excited to stay here to continue the relationships that I’ve built this year.”
Sophia’s year of community-engaged research and learning exemplifies the goal of the Hart Fellowship: for recent Duke graduates to cultivate their capacity for leadership in community through sustained partnership, critical reflection, and research with a civic mission. 2024-2025 represents the 30th year of the Hart Fellowship. During the year ahead, the Hart Leadership Program will spotlight current and former Hart Fellows in celebration of their work and this programmatic milestone. Next month’s profile will focus on Quinn Smith, who spent his Hart Fellowship year working on Indigenous Land Guardianship. To learn more about Sophia’s project or any other past Hart Fellowship projects, visit our Student Project Database.