When a WashU student becomes a St. Louis Fellow, they make a commitment to serve St. Louis effectively and responsibly, immersing themselves in the community and finding ways to contribute to positive progress in the region. As part of this commitment, St. Louis Fellows participate in Engage STL Days, during which they visit local neighborhoods and engage with community members.
In listening to and learning from local St. Louisians on these trips, the Fellows are able to strengthen their connection with the community. This summer, the St. Louis Fellows took three Engage STL Day immersion trips into St. Louis neighborhoods, where they learned from local leaders about the people, culture, opportunities, and challenges of their communities. These communities included Cahokia Mounds, South Grand, Cherokee Street, The Ville, and the Old North neighborhood.
Following the first Engage STL immersion trip on June 2, the Fellows headed to the Metro East for an overnight retreat at Toddhall Retreat Center in Columbia, Illinois.
“The framework for the Fellows retreat can be summarized as this: to do effective work in the St. Louis community over the summer, we also have to do effective interpersonal work as a cohort of St. Louis Fellows and intrapersonal work as individuals,” said Sarah Nash, Community Engagement Manager for the Gephardt Institute.
“At Gephardt, we believe it is important to be aware of our own social identities and positionalities when we enter and engage with the St. Louis community, so a core objective of the retreat is for Fellows to get curious about their own stories and identities and to then to share them with each other.”
At their retreat, Fellows completed a series of activities that explored their personal definitions of community engagement, asked them to dissect cycles of socialization, and challenged them to consider their experiences with power, privilege, and oppression. Sessions also sought to deepen self-awareness and highlight self-care practices.
“I was able to build an everlasting bond with my fellow St. Louis Fellows during group discussions, late nights games, and sharing S’mores around the campfire,” said St. Louis Fellow Hertier Umuragwa ’27.
Among the activities that Fellows completed was body mapping: A process of creating body maps using drawing, painting, or other arts-based techniques to visually represent aspects of our lives, bodies, and the world we live in.
Fellows completed this activity alongside their peers and were encouraged to walk around and talk to each other, making it deeply communal. In this process, they considered their roots, aspirations, and the experiences that made them who they are.
“2023 was the first year that we piloted an overnight retreat as part of the St. Louis Fellows Program and the impact was felt so strongly that we decided to include it every year,” said Nash. “The retreat provides an opportunity for the Fellows to really focus on building community with each other, and it serves as the concluding ‘spring training’ for the Fellows in which they learn about and practice a variety of skills—both personal and professional—so that they are well-prepared for their summer internship with a local civic or nonprofit organization.”
On June 4, the final day of the retreat, students were asked to reflect on what they learned, and to connect this knowledge with the internships they were gearing up to embark on.
They reported learning that it is possible to look after yourself while working in the nonprofit and social justice sectors; that mistakes are learning experiences; and that by taking care of your well-being, you can better show up presently for your community.
“I could not have asked for a better retreat,” concluded Umuragwa. “I enjoyed seeing and walking on the Cahokia Mounds, with their beautiful landscape and learning their history .”