Emma Soneson and Kathy Chacon talk about how Scholars are helping to enhance the community and engage with each other and the wider world.
The Gates Cambridge community is the best part of this scholarship. That sense of community, which is so unique, is the foundation on which public engagement builds. Having access to people from so many different backgrounds helps us to avoid groupthink and brings about more meaningful engagement.
Emma Soneson
Public engagement is a vital part of the Scholar’s Council work at Gates Cambridge and the challenges and opportunities of engagement shift according to global events. When Emma Soneson [2018] was external officer, it was during the pandemic. More recently, Kathy Chacon [2024] encountered a different set of problems as conflict rages around the world.
Emma says: “I had the joy of being the external officer during the pandemic. Some of my approach was inspired by my academic work on mental health and education, with a focus on inequality. The pandemic was a breeding ground for educational inequality. I started to think about how we could start to do something about educational inequality.”
At the time some schools were offering full-time lessons with teachers while other students were lucky to get an hour a day of school and no face-to-face contact. “We thought about how we could use our scholars’ unique talents to do something positive,” says Emma. They came up with a teachathon, an online series of interactive lessons taught by scholars which could be accessed by any young person. With just two weeks to advertise the programme, they were delighted that 100 young people joined the lessons. They enabled young people to access a wide range of knowledge – from cell biology [using the Incredible Hulk as a teaching tool] to astronomy and the history of water – in an accessible way from people who were not much older than them. Emma says: “There were so many subjects they didn’t get to study at school that had barely entered their consciousness.”
The teachathon continued the following year and was part of a Year of Engagement, which Emma spearheaded. The projects scholars got involved with that year were focused more on ongoing activity than a one-off day of action.
Kathy didn’t know about the teachathons. She says: “It’s fascinating to learn about the Scholars Council’s previous initiatives and the extraordinary work of those who came before. It encourages us to do more. I think it’s important to communicate this legacy across cohorts. We have so much to learn from one another in this community.”
Emma’s work itself followed that of previous cohorts, who led initiatives such as the Day of Service which saw scholars volunteering in local projects around Cambridge. She says the evolution of the external affairs role and activities reflects changes in thinking about how scholars interact with the local community, with the pandemic sparking a radical rethink when everything moved online.
Current events
Kathy was only in office for a short time, but she focused on how the community responds to current events. As outreach officer she was a member of Gates against Genocide and as part of that she looked to help students around the world with the application process for Cambridge and Gates Cambridge, particularly people in conflict zones or underserved communities. “Both Gates Cambridge alumni and current scholars recognise that we are not all starting at an equal place and want to do our part to help other students overcome whatever barriers may be preventing them from pursuing higher education at Cambridge. We wanted to demystify the application process, and we worked with the Trust to think about whether we could set aside some places for scholars from conflict zones in recognition of the difficulties they face,” she says. “I could not have had this opportunity without Gates Cambridge. It’s a lifeline and I felt I had a responsibility to extend that opportunity to others.”
Kathy also started up a TikTok platform for the Council and hoped to use it to showcase scholar stories and to encourage prospective scholars from diverse backgrounds to apply. She says reading a story or hearing from someone from their own demographic who is a Gates Cambridge Scholar can be really impactful.
Both Kathy and Emma recognise the need for external and outreach officers to be flexible and adapt to changing circumstances, while building on the learning of previous cohorts. Emma talks about the need for ‘adaptive engagement’ which she says is about “being aware of the circumstances we are living in and how the scholar community has the most meaningful engagement given the global context”.
She states: “The Gates Cambridge community is the best part of this scholarship. That sense of community, which is so unique, is the foundation on which public engagement builds. Having access to people from so many different backgrounds helps us to avoid groupthink and brings about more meaningful engagement. We are living in a very socially fragmented time and any kind of action taken to rebuild the social fabric is something we can be proud of as a community.”
*Photo by Greg Rakozy on Unsplash
**An edited version of this conversation appears in the Gates Cambridge 25th anniversary magazine, which is out here.
