“Big scholarships are the type of thing that you apply for and you think you aren’t going to get…I applied for this and didn’t tell anyone except my mom that I had applied,” Coleman said. 

Junior Sydney Coleman was selected as one of the 100 Obama-Chesky scholars in the second cohort of the program. The Obama-Chesky Scholarship for Public Service was funded by a $100 million contribution from Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky to the Obama Foundation. This year marks the second cohort of scholars, made up of 100 college juniors from around the country. The program lasts two years and has the overall aim of fostering emerging leaders in public service. Students earn up to $50,000 in financial aid toward their junior and senior years of college, allowing them to pursue a career in public service with less financial burden. Additionally, scholars receive a $10,000 stipend and free Airbnb housing to pursue a summer work-travel experience, a fall summit to meet other scholars and access to a network of leaders in public service. 

Coleman is excited to begin the fellowship and pursue her passion for public service. Coleman is a first-generation college student originally from Atlanta, Ga., and is studying anthropology and sociology with a minor in English. For Coleman, family experiences motivated her to pursue public service and eventually apply for the scholarship. 

“My brother has behavioral health challenges, so when he was growing up, my mom was having a really hard time finding services for him because mental health is only a newly mainstream concept,” Coleman said. “In school, he was always getting in trouble, and he eventually ended up going to prison.”

In this struggle to find her son services, Coleman’s mother started a career in mental health advocacy in Georgia.

“I’ve watched her for the past decade, advocating for parents of children with behavioral health challenges and having to be a champion for Black families,” Coleman said. “Coming from a background where you’re a person of color, it is a lot harder when it comes to mental health challenges.”

Her mother’s mental health advocacy work inspired Coleman, allowing her to experience the public service world from a young age and prompting her to follow her own service-related passions.

“Watching her do that work for the past 10 years has been a really big inspiration for me because, since I was young, she was always taking me to her conferences and work meetings,” Coleman said. “Even though I’m not going into the mental health field, I’ve always known that I have a bigger purpose than myself. In the work that I do, I want to make sure that I’m serving my community and giving back.”

Coleman plans to give back in her career through criminal justice reform, as the system has had a large effect on her family.  

“My brother has been in jail since I was 5 or 6 years old. Knowing his story, it almost feels like he never had a chance to have any greater success than ending up in jail,” Coleman said. “There are a lot of people who feel like our prison system targets them…my brother is in jail, serving a life sentence; my dad has been in and out of jail. A lot of the males on my dad’s side of the family have done time in prison. You realize that that’s not normal, and that should not be normal.”

This passion for reform is also driven by Coleman’s understanding of the system’s effect on Black communities.

“I recognize the role that the prison system has played and continues to play in the lives of Black people has only served to tear families and communities apart and strip them of opportunities for a better future,” Coleman said. “We all understand that people should be held accountable for their actions when they commit harm, but many of the actions that have been classified as criminal behavior were only deemed so because people had the intent of putting Black and Brown bodies in jail for the purpose of monetizing them.”

During her time in college, Coleman has built upon this knowledge with classes like Policing in America with Laurie Woods — one of her favorite professors at Vanderbilt. 

“The course put a lot of things into perspective and gave me the language to use when talking knowledgeably about this topic,” Coleman said. 

In addition, Coleman’s experiences with the Black Cultural Center built upon her passion for criminal justice reform. A group from the BCC took a trip to Montgomery, Ala., to the Legacy Museum, a museum focused on the pipeline from slavery to mass incarceration. 

“Seeing what felt so intimate and close to me blasted onto a wall was such an emotional experience,” Coleman said.

Coleman plans to design her summer voyage over planning sessions in the upcoming months and is looking into different organizations with which to work. 

“I would like an internship with a nonprofit organization already working to reform our criminal justice system and/or end mass incarceration,” Coleman said. “A couple of these organizations include the Southern Center for Human Rights, the ACLU and the Vera Institute of Justice…I’m also open to designing my own project.”

In addition to planning her summer voyage, Coleman is looking forward to the scholarship’s summit taking place in November in Chicago, where she’ll get to meet former President Barack Obama and the other members of her cohort. In the more distant future, Coleman plans to attend law school and later work with a nonprofit organization in criminal justice reform.