The Top Owl Social Justice Award is given to recognize contributions toward helping the university achieve its mission of creating and sustaining an inclusive community that appreciates, celebrates, and advances student and campus diversity.
This award, selected by the President’s Commission on Social Justice, will be awarded this academic year during the months of December, January, February, and March to recognize the contributions, leadership, and service of a worthy faculty, staff, part-time student, and full-time student.
For the month of January, the Top Owl Award winners are graduate student Mykelle Coleman; Sedell Hairston-Hatton, secretary from the Student Involvement and Leadership Development Office; and Yi-chun Tricia Lin, director and professor of Women’s Studies.
Mykelle Coleman, a second-year graduate student in the School Psychology Program, has shown a passion for and commitment to social justice throughout her time at Southern. For the past two years, she has headed the Counseling and School Psychology Department’s Social Justice/Diversity Committee, a group that designs and coordinates learning experiences to meet these goals. In addition, last year Coleman worked on the On Our Own Turf Project, a Social Justice Committee grant-funded activity that looked at issues of microaggressions, discrimination, and injustice on the SCSU campus. She also developed and led the Clothesline Project, an art-based activity dealing with issues of sexual assault and violence, and a showing and discussion about the film For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf during last year’s Social Justice Month. This year she was a student leader for two major Social Justice Month activities, the Racial Justice Film Festival and the Sleep Out America event, to bring attention to the issue of child, youth, and college student homelessness. She has also helped to provided diversity training to Southern staff.
One of Coleman’s nominators wrote that she “embodies the ideals of social justice and utilizes the core values of SCSU to bring those ideals to her peers and fellow Owls. As a leader in the social justice committee, she has organized events at Southern that promote awareness of some challenging issues that we face today, both as Owls and members of our larger society.” Aside from the activities she is involved in on campus, a nominator wrote, “she exhibits a nurturing nature towards all, accepting and celebrating others constantly. She is a positive spirit who is always there for others. [She] is able to light up a room with her presence while also shining the spotlight on others around her. She has an incredible spirit that Southern is very lucky to have as a part of its community.”
Sedell Hairston-Hatton, who is also known as Dell, was described by her nominator as “such a beautiful person inside and out, and she is extremely helpful! She is very reliable and always willing to go out of her way to make sure those around her get the assistance that they need. She does a lot of behind the scenes work to make sure everything runs smoothly.”
Her nominator added that Hairston-Hatton is “a remarkable person who has a heart of gold, and it is evident that she takes her job not only seriously but has a passion for what she does. I think these are very important qualities to have as a staff member at the University, and she is a wonderful candidate for the Top Owl Award.”
As the director of the Women’s Studies Program, Yi-chun Tricia Lin has been organizing the 64 Days of Nonviolence program at Southern for many years. As part of that program, every spring semester she puts together a wide array of events to promote social justice on campus. Her nominator wrote that Lin “does this work tirelessly and on a shoestring budget” and pointed out that the 64 Days of Nonviolence program predates Social Justice Month by more than a decade. One of the most impressive feature of the 64 Days of Nonviolence, wrote Lin’s nominator, “is the wide array of topics covered, from Indigenous, women’s, and LGBTQ rights, to Black Lives Matter, to increasing social justice for girls and boys. She really is a model advocate for the teaching and learning of social justice on campus.”
Congratulations to January’s Top Owl Award winners!
To nominate someone for a Top Owl award, visit the university’s Social Justice website.
