The Power of Community

Growing up in Oberlin a stone’s throw from the college athletic complex, Lauren Sands ’24 was familiar with the volleyball program.

When she decided to attend Oberlin, the close-knit community was exactly what she needed to thrive. 

“I thought I wanted to leave my hometown for college. But I knew that playing for Oberlin would be a good experience, and I knew it would feel like home.”

Together with her “focused and dedicated” teammates, she led Oberlin’s volleyball team to their first-ever winning season during her senior year. “We were like, ‘It's now or never,’” she recalls. “‘This is our chance to do something, and we know we can do it.’”

Off the courts, Sands found ways to become a mentor herself. After watching friends in Oberlin City Schools transform with the support of the Ninde Scholars, Sands applied to the same program as a paid employee. 

"Being able to go back into schools where I used to be a student and support students there was an awesome experience," she said. She even spent a summer helping students “gain real-world skills” by cooking nostalgic favorites, like homemade Pop Tarts and Cheez-It crackers.

After graduation, Sands wanted to continue supporting her community and landed on voter engagement work as a pathway toward working in service and policy. She took on the role of Democracy Fellow at the Human Service Chamber (HSC) of Franklin County in Columbus, Ohio.

"It's shown me the other side of work that helps people," said Sands of her time at HSC. "I had always envisioned that work [as] providing services like tutoring, for example, or having that one-on-one interaction. This is showing me how policy impacts people, and how policy can be used to help or hurt certain communities.”

Sands is now a policy associate, which she explains requires “writing updates on policy developments that could affect nonprofits, creating advocacy tools, like sign-on letters to our members of Congress, and anything that we can do to spread awareness about what we hope to see in public policy developments.”

Sands credits her sociology major and Africana Studies minor for providing her “a really solid foundation for understanding the different social issues that are present in a big city” like Columbus.

“I'm working with nonprofits who are addressing so many different social issues,” she adds. “Understanding why these issues may have come to be has been really rewarding coming right out of college into this role.”

Most rewarding of all, perhaps, is the sense of community Sands has discovered in her work and in Columbus. Although she’s now living in a much bigger place, she’s thrilled to find the same closeness she grew up with in Oberlin. 

“I didn't know how I'd be able to find that community,” Sands says. "But I've definitely found it in the nonprofit sector in Columbus."

Kristen Evans is a culture writer and critic who has written for BuzzFeed, The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times, LA Weekly, NYLON, and The New Republic. Learn more about studying sociology at Oberlin.