An alumna of Elon's inaugural Year of Service Graduate Fellows program, Shelby Smith '15 is protecting the residents of Alamance County from COVID-19 as a communicable disease coordinator at the local health department.
As the world stared in the face of its deadliest pandemic in a century, Shelby Smith ’15 was preparing to enter the fight against COVID-19 as a nursing school graduate.
Headlines of more than a hundred thousand Americans dying from the coronavirus and millions more contracting it led the Elon public health studies major to shift her focus from working in a hospital to serving a community she’s come to know well.
“This is the biggest health and equity crisis of probably my whole life, so I have this meaningful way to plug in and use my skills to support that,” Smith said.
Following graduate school in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Smith joined the Alamance County Health Department in a temporary role as a contact tracer, reaching out to residents who tested positive for COVID-19 and anyone who they might have come in contact with.
Smith’s role at the department has since grown as she became its communicable disease coordinator in August, handling the department’s response to diseases such as rabies, gastrointestinal disorders, and of course COVID-19. Smith now oversees a contact tracing suite, helps lead the department’s response to outbreaks and offers guidance to K-12 schools, universities and business about how to proceed during the pandemic.
“It just feels like you’re making a big impact,” Smith said. “At the end of the day, you might be tired, you might have to work every weekend, but those people aren’t going to be passing on the coronavirus to their children or grandparents or to their church because you intervened at the right moment.”
The new position marks Smith’s second stint as an Alamance County Health Department employee. The first came following her graduation from Elon in 2015. Smith was one of four graduates to join the inaugural Elon-Alamance Health Partner program, now known as the Elon Year of Service Graduate Fellows program.
The Graduate Fellows program is a collaboration between Elon and five community partners committed to the health and educational well-being of Alamance County: Alamance County Health Department, Alamance Regional Medical Center, Healthy Alamance, Impact Alamance and Alamance Achieves. The program pairs six graduates each year with one of the five organizations to engage in a year of meaningful service work to positively impact Alamance County.
“Working together with community agencies for the health and well-being of residents of Alamance County was the original goal, and it’s still the goal,” said Laurie Judge, senior associate director of career services for Elon College, The College of Arts and Sciences, and co-chair of the Graduate Fellows steering committee.
Smith matched with the Alamance County Health Department during her service year, working under her mentor and the former director of the department, Stacie Saunders. During the fellowship, Smith focused on community-wide projects like outreach for Affordable Care Act enrollment. She also facilitated the creation of a new five-year strategic plan for the department and wrote grant proposals.
“What the year really taught me is that the harder you try, the more questions you ask, the more innovative you become, and the more you push the boundaries, you’ll find that your ideas will work and that they will become valuable assets to the community,” Smith said.
Smith’s ability to innovate and face new challenges led to another opportunity within the department following her year of service. As a Graduate Fellow, she wrote a proposal for a position focused on infant mortality reduction in Alamance County, specifically considering racial disparities in maternal and neonatal health. It was a position that she would later fill herself.
In one and a half years as the department’s infant mortality preventions coordinator, Smith produced prenatal programming, launched a volunteer doula program and worked to improve access to contraceptives for underrepresented communities. The fellowship did more than put Smith on her initial career path, however.
“For any of the Fellows, the goal is not only the health and well-being of folks of Alamance County,” Judge said. “But also to hope that graduates fall in love with this area and that they decide to stay and work and be members of the community here, and that’s exactly what happened with Shelby.”
In fact, the La Plata, Maryland, native can officially call Alamance County home. After nearly a decade in the area, she recently closed on her first house in the community.
“I felt drawn to the initial philosophy of the program, which is to serve where you live,” she said. “So when I had that option, I really felt like it was meaningful for me to know that I was making an impact for my neighbors.”
Five years after joining the Graduate Fellows program, Smith now has the opportunity, as a full-time communicable disease coordinator, to protect her neighbors from COVID-19 and any other disease that might threaten the community. She hopes to turn her passion for serving others into accessible health care for every member of Alamance County.
“My values are really aligned with the discipline of public health and the health department here in terms of health equity and really helping the most vulnerable and make sure that we actually, truly promote the health of all and not just those who have the money to pay for services,” she said. “I’ve always been drawn to that.”