Delana Turner
The University of the South
Delana Turner, a sophomore student at the University of the South, is a campus leader passionate about public health, racial justice, and supporting marginalized communities. Through her work as a Bonner Leader and a Roberson Project on Slavery, Race and Reconciliation intern, Delana helped write, receive, and implement two racial justice grants supporting a local project addressing racial injustices and historical tensions between the university and the town’s African-American community. Students were trained in holding sensitive community conversations to capture oral histories, archive these stories, and identify significant lost spaces in the African American community to be memorialized. These conversations uplifted long-ignored voices and stories in the University’s difficult past. Her leadership developing the grant involved collaboration with two academic departments, three campus departments, and community members to bring resources and local and academic expertise together with a shared vision to collect and honor Sewanee’s untold history, and implement ways to institutionalize and sustain this history through a trail system with markers, curriculum developed for the University’s First Year Program, and curricula developed for local schools.
Personal Statement
With the desire to uplift and empower marginalized communities, I have taken an active role on Sewanee’s campus through community-building and education projects. As a Bonner Leader, I work with The Roberson Project on Slavery, Race, and Reconciliation, an institutional initiative that investigates the University’s racial legacies to honor the local Black community’s contributions to the University. I am the student site leader for the Heritage Trail Project. To support this project, I applied for two grants from the Bonner Foundation to reclaim and commemorate spaces that were lost to the Black community. Once this trail is built, it will be incorporated into curricula that highlight local history. Next, as a Diabetes Education Fellow, I collaborate with other fellows to develop educational techniques to manage and prevent Type 2 Diabetes in the surrounding communities. Similarly, as an educator for the Sewanee Multicultural Health Society, I conduct research and organize dialogues to raise awareness about domestic and international health disparities to reduce these disparities. Cultivating relationships and maintaining lines of communication with the community is central to my work and will be essential in my career working with marginalized groups to achieve their maximum potential through social change.
