A boundless sense of what can be accomplished

Last fall, Afua Atta-Mensah took First Year Seminar students in Prof. Gail Woldu’s “Hip Hop America” class on a walking tour of the South Bronx. When she noticed some of them looking over their shoulders in apprehension, she asked them why. “This is my home,” she told them.

 “Afua was a lynchpin for the seminar,” says Woldu. “She has street smarts. She could go from a project in the city into a board room meeting.”

It is a transition she makes routinely. Atta-Mensah (her first name is pronounced Ah-FEE-ah and means Girl Born on Friday in Ashanti) spends Fridays working in the office of Trinity President Evan S. Dobelle. “I like President Dobelle.  He’s cool.  We’ve disagreed in the past, but he listened to the students and worked for us. I will always respect him for that,” says Atta-Mensah, who’s worked with Dobelle since her first year on the executive board of Imani, the black student union. She helped revive the Black Alumni Mentorship Program and establish the Black Film Festival and Black Student Union Conference, which this year drew 150 representatives from schools throughout the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic states.

 “She is a force of nature,” Dobelle says. “She came to Trinity and did everything possible.  I couldn’t be more proud of her.”

 Pulling up the community
Atta-Mensah, a President’s Fellow in sociology, is headed to Fordham Law School in the fall. “I definitely feel blessed,” she says. And with characteristic humility she adds,  “There are so many people out there who are smarter than I am, but I got this opportunity, so I’ve got to do something to pull the rest of my community with me.” Atta-Mensah has been pulling people up since she arrived at Trinity and she’ll continue her outreach this summer through Welcome Freedom, a five-week camp she conceived and will direct on campus.

As a senior student admissions associate interviewing prospective applicants to Trinity, Atta-Mensah noticed that many candidates had taken SAT prep courses, resulting in stronger scores.  “I just felt that historically disadvantaged applicants weren’t getting the help they wanted and needed to prepare for these tests,” Atta-Mensah says. She thought that a summer camp focusing on SAT preparation, reading, and writing skills would help kids from Hartford’s North End. “Valeriano Ramos, director of community service, told me to write a proposal. I went back to ‘The Lab’—which is what I call my room—and started writing,” Atta-Mensah says. Her proposal won $35,000 in start-up financing from Trinity’s 1634 Fund, an endowed gift from Evelyn and Rodney Day III, ’62 that supports Trinity partnerships serving Hartford youth. The project is also slated to receive funding from additional sources.

All Welcome Freedom campers will learn Web page design, stock market investing, and Africana history. They will take weekly field trips, including a visit to Washington, DC, and a Wall Street tour with Cornell Burnett ’99, research analyst with Salomon Smith Barney.

But that’s not enough to satisfy Atta-Mensah. She solicited the Princeton Review to train six Trinity students to teach the SAT prep class. She went door‑to‑door to bodegas in the neighborhood and asked owners to pay her campers $50 to design Web pages for their businesses. Atta-Mensah tapped the Sankofa Kuumba Cultural Arts Consortium in Hartford’s North End to teach African dance, Lambda Theta Phi to pay for a salsa instructor, and Trinity Athletic Director Rick Hazelton to set up afternoon sports. Imani and Trinity College Black Women’s Organization will each buy 15 SAT books.  “I bothered everybody,” Atta-Mensah says.  But she didn’t quit there. When the 40 camp openings filled and the waiting list grew, she actively tried to find other city programs for youth who could not participate in Welcome Freedom.

 Inspiration and motivation for others
“Afua’s an inspiration, not only to students but also to others in the community. She has the intelligence, the drive, and the passion to work for social justice,” says Alta Lash, director of the Trinity Center for Neighborhoods. After completing an internship with Lash, Atta-Mensah designed an open semester program for herself with Associate Professor of American Studies Jerry Watts. She did course studies with him and worked with the Sanctions Committee of the Community Court, community problem solving committees, and city ministers seeking alternatives to incarceration for troubled youth. After visiting the Benjamin E. Mays Institute, a school for boys within Hartford’s Fox Middle School, Atta-Mensah pushed Imani to bring bright and at-risk black and Latino boys to Trinity to participate in classes and see role models on campus. “It was a tremendous experience for them,” says Sadiq Ali, the Institute’s founder. “Atta-Mensah’s been a big sister to all the boys,” he notes. This year, she set up a reading and dialogue program, which brings Imani members to the institute to discuss works they and the younger boys have read. Atta-Mensah is now on the Institute’s Council of Directors.

“Afua sees the need children in the community have for role models. She’s pulled a lot of students into the Boys and Girls Club at Trinity College,” notes Diane Martell, director of the First Year Program. “Afua doesn’t shy away from tough situations. She likes to dive in. She’s one of those people who’s part of the solution, not part of the problem. She’s a person who’s going to make positive changes wherever she goes. Everyone who meets her knows that,” Martell says.

Education is freedom
Life at Trinity has not been all community outreach efforts. Atta‑Mensah also studies hard. She completed a thesis on police brutality, served as teaching assistant for two courses, and was appointed to the Student Life Association Leadership Hall of Fame. She wants to be a civil rights lawyer but plans to commit the next few summers to establishing Welcome Freedom in other cities.  “My Dad used to always tell me, ‘Education is your freedom,’ so we’re going to start welcoming it.”

 –Mary Anne Chute Lynch