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News
Duke and NCCU Students Explore Faith and Service in Durham-Based Summer Program
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Photo above: Bridge Internship students and leaders pose in front of a wall in Durham's West End neighborhood with a quote from the Rev. Pauli Murray. Pictured (left to right): The Rev. Bruce Puckett (a program leader), Amiya Stiles, Natorian Green, Lia Lapidot, Georgia Rabin, KheShawn Frith, Daniel Ibrahim (intern with Durham Congregations in Action), and Leyla Urmanova.
This summer, three students from Duke and three students from North Carolina Central University (NCCU) lived together, served at internships in Durham, and learned about the major religions represented in the city. As participants in the Bridge Internship program, they built skills for working across religious and cultural differences.
Now in its fourth year, The Bridge Internship is the result of a partnership among the NCCU Office of Community Engagement and Service, the NCCU Wesley Campus Ministry, and Duke University Chapel.
During a closing celebration for the program, the students explained how they both served the wider community and gained experience in their anticipated professional fields through their internships with local nonprofits.
NCCU sophomore Natorian Green is majoring in education and aspires to run a nonprofit daycare center. Through her internship at the Community Family Life and Recreation Center at Lyon Park, she assisted at an academic enrichment camp for elementary school children and also shadowed the center’s executive director.
“I definitely learned about leadership, project management, and business,” Green said. “I would say I learned about multitasking, but [executive director Dosali Reed-Bandele] said it's really about shifting your focus, so this summer I learned how to better shift my focus.”
KheShawn Frith, a sophomore at NCCU, had two internships related to his major, kinesiology. He worked for the head athletic trainer at NCCU, including tracking an athlete’s recovery from ACL surgery. He also served at a children’s sports camp run by Union Baptist Church in Durham.
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“I was making sure the kids learned how to correctly stretch, run, warm up, and cool down,” Frith said. “We were getting their bodies active because a lot of kids these days want to play video games.”
Duke senior Lia Lapidot is studying biology, psychology, and religious studies. She was not able to attend the closing ceremony for the program, but her internship supervisor described her work assisting with, and evaluating, children’s programs at a homeless shelter.
“One of the things that really struck me, with her assisting with our children's programs, was the way that she embodied [psychologist] Carl Rogers's ‘unconditional positive regard,’” said Chris Pearson, director of programs and residential services at Families Moving Forward. “The way she was able to essentially encapsulate the human experience into meaningful data has been incredibly helpful for us.”
In addition to working for local nonprofits, the Bridge Intern students visited local places of worship representing Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, and Hindu faith communities.
As someone who describes herself as spiritual but not religious, NCCU senior Amiya Stiles said she could relate to aspects of each of the religious communities the group visited.
“It helped me to look at my faith beliefs more deeply and to better understand myself in the world around me,” said Stiles, a social work major who worked at the Durham RYSE Assessment Center connecting teenagers with supportive resources. “A lot of big movements, when it comes to justice, are based on belief systems.”
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For Duke sophomore Leyla Urmanova, who comes from a Muslim family, it was an opportunity to learn about Hinduism, in particular.
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“I knew next to nothing about Hinduism,” said Urmanova, a neuroscience major who did her internship with Senior PharmAssist, a nonprofit that helps older adults obtain needed medications. “In history classes they teach you it's a polytheistic religion, but I got to hear from the Hindu chaplain at Duke that not all Hindus view it as this polytheistic religion of many gods. There's a wide range of beliefs, and that's found, I think, in every religion.”
Duke senior Georgia Rabin, a public policy major, comes from a Christian-Jewish interfaith family. An important understanding she came to over the summer is that religion and spirituality have both an internal and external dimension of transformation.
“A lot of people lean into spirituality because they hope to fix some personal problems or gain clarity on their purpose in the world and seek healing,” said Rabin, whose internship with the North Carolina Council of Churches focused on environmental and energy policy. “But then there's also this sometimes-neglected part of spirituality, which is your responsibility to the world around you to build relationships with people across divides.”
“I appreciated how this program nurtured both sides of that for me,” she said.
The Rev. Bruce Puckett, assistant dean at Duke Chapel, explained that the program includes readings and discussion sessions on faith, character, purpose, and relating to others across differences.
“This summer’s cohort reflected on how their experiences have impacted the ways they want to incorporate bridging into their lives as they finish their university careers and transition into workplaces,” Rev. Puckett said. “Whether they take this into fields of medicine, or early childhood education, or environmental law, or something else, each of them saw ways their experiences with this program will shape how they serve the broader world in the future as bridge builders.”
Another one of the program’s leaders, the Rev. Dr. Gloria Winston, said that encountering different religions and cultures promoted personal growth for the students.
“Watching them grow—in confidence, in compassion, and in their capacity to serve—reminds me that formation doesn’t just happen in classrooms,” said Rev. Dr. Winston, a district superintendent with the North Carolina Conference of the United Methodist Church. “It happens in relationships, in shared spaces, and in the courage to learn from people whose stories are different from your own.”
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The program has attracted interest and support beyond Durham, receiving a grant from Wake Forest University’s Character Education Initiative. The Bridge Internship leaders are using the capacity-building grant to consult with faculty and students at Duke and NCCU to see how the program can deepen its focus on character education and intersect with coursework. Those efforts have included two public conversations last year: "Finding Meaning: Purpose and Metacognition" and “What an Education is For: Character and the Second Curriculum at HBCUs.”
“The overall direction of the Bridge Program is to expand the student experience beyond the summer in exploring their faith, character, and humanity as it relates to their civic lives,” said Calleen Herbert, a leader of the program and the director of the NCCU Office of Community Engagement and Service. “The Educating Character Grant has helped us strengthen this vision by providing the resources to explore how we can intentionally integrate character development and education into the curriculum and throughout the student experience.”