Hometown: Richmond, VA

Major: Program II Storytelling as Resistance: Healing Cultural and Diasporic Trauma through Narrative

Since joining RSLP how have you grown as a leader? 

Being a part of RSLP has allowed me not only to grow as a leader but to wrestle with the very meaning of that word; to see leadership not as hierarchical stratification but as a practice of nurturing community, of building something—and doing it together—in a time of struggle and destruction. Remembering the activist Ella Baker’s affirmation that “strong people don’t need strong leaders,” I’ve come to understand and practice facilitative leadership: the idea that communities have embodied knowledge through their lived experiences with oppression and that the task of a leader is to make space for dialogue and collaboration. For this I am continually indebted to the Sunflower County Freedom Project in the Mississippi Delta, where I spent my Community Summer teaching and organizing youth, as well as to my fellow Robbies, who have come to be my closest friends and with whom I have shared so, so much soul-filling joy and laughter—they have opened up my world and shown me what community really means.