Community was an integral part of Anna Matawaran’s experience at Elon, now the alumna continues to embrace those community ideals through the Year of Service Fellows program.
When Anna Matawaran ’25 graduated from Elon University with a degree in sociology and a minor in communications, she wanted to carry on the values instilled in her at the university.
“At Elon, I worked at the Kernodle Center for Civic Life, and that space was huge for me because it taught me a lot about what it means to be civically engaged as a college student and also as a person,” she said. “The Fellows Program stood out to me because of that piece of civic engagement and making a difference in a community that I’ve already lived in and gotten to know for the last four years,”
Matawaran now works with Impact Alamance, a community health legacy foundation created from the merger of Alamance Regional Medical Center and Cone Health.
“I knew Impact Alamance was where I wanted to be,” she said. “It aligns best with my goals.”
Making an impact
The Year of Service Fellows Program is an opportunity through the university’s Student Professional Development Center that allows recent graduates to work at local organizations to improve health, education and economic development in the Alamance County community. Matawaran is one of six Fellows in the program, with three working at Impact Alamance.
Impact Alamance has three focus areas: healthier (focusing on improving community health), smarter (focusing on education) and stronger (focusing on strengthening community partnerships). Matawaran serves on the “stronger” team and functions as a program assistant. One of her favorite roles, she says, has been working on the For Alamance Initiative, a partnership with the Harwood Institute for Public Innovation to help everyday people take action on things that matter to them in their community.
“That has been really rewarding,” she said. “I’ve met so many different people through that, which I’ve really enjoyed. Folks from all parts of the county that I didn’t know existed before the fellowship.”
She is also helping organize a capacity-building series for local nonprofits.
“We work as kind of a convener for all those nonprofits to be able to share resources, find grant opportunities where nonprofit leaders can come and learn about different aspects that can build up their organization,” she said.
A surprise discovery
Community is what originally drew Matawaran to Elon from her hometown of Richmond, Virginia.
“That small community feel was so unique from all the other colleges I looked at, and I knew I wanted a liberal arts education and loved that Elon offered all the resources that it does for undergraduates specifically,” she said. “It’s a beautiful campus. How can you not love it?”
But Matawaran didn’t come to Elon with everything planned out. Her choice in major almost happened by accident.
“On a whim, I signed up for a sociology course my first semester here,” she said. “It was a class on how sociology can look at housing and unhoused people, and that class stood out to me above all my other courses. I fell in love with the way that sociologists think about the world and the problems that it can solve.”
‘Community is messy’
And even though it was “on a whim,” Matawaran credits Elon for preparing her work at Impact Alamance.
“My Elon education gave me the liberal arts background that I needed to step into the nonprofit sphere,” she said. “My degree gave me a lot of the building blocks to understand what I’m hearing from community members and what issues Alamance County is facing.”
She also values the mentorship she found at Elon, including with Karen Wirth, assistant teaching professor of sociology, and staff in the Kernodle Center. Serving as a tour guide, diversity ambassador and eventual campus visit intern with Elon Admissions also helped Matawaran form community at Elon while developing interpersonal and professional skills. Her experiences abroad also further broadened her outlook.
“I studied abroad in Copenhagen for my fall of junior year, and that was where I think I found a lot of independence,” she said.
Now, her work in Alamance County continues to deepen her understanding of the concept of community she discovered at Elon.
“Something that my mentor always says is that community is messy,” said Matawaran. “I love how rich and diverse the community here is; it brings this authenticity to the work.”