Holly Smartt, Sullivan Alum and Mentor 

In the winter of 2010, Holly Smartt was doing what most students do after the acceptance letter arrives: scrolling a college website, trying to imagine the person a campus might draw out. Mary Baldwin’s graduation awards page stopped the scrolling. One award, in particular, felt less like a plaque and more like a mirror held up to a future self.

“That was the first time I ever heard of the Sullivan Award,” Smartt explained. “And I said, ‘Wow, if I got that award at graduation, I would be on the way to being the type of human and person I feel like I should be.’”

It is the kind of sentence that could read as naïve, if it were not delivered with such steady candor. This was not an audition for sainthood. It was a way of naming a need many people carry but rarely say out loud: the desire to be useful without seeming showy, the desire to live in alignment with values even when life offers easier paths.

Service was not a new idea discovered in a college brochure. It had already been stitched into ordinary life: youth group, mission trips, food banks, work in Appalachia. Not the romantic version of service that lets a person feel heroic, but the weekly version, the kind that makes you tired and makes you pay attention.

At Mary Baldwin, the work continued in quiet, practical ways: civic engagement efforts, an election night broadcast, an interfaith group. None of it comes with the adrenaline of a crisis, which is why it might be overlooked. But the world does not only need people who respond to emergencies. The world also needs people who build the muscle of community, the habit of care.

The first real encounter with Sullivan programming still makes Smartt laugh. A professor, Bruce Story, ran out of an office and announced that a sticky note with Smartt’s name had appeared. “I was told you would maybe be good to go on this retreat, to go on the Ignite retreat,” Smartt remembered. The immediate reaction was blunt: entrepreneurship was not the world that made sense. “That’s not me whatsoever,” Smartt said at the time. But the social part did.

That was early Sullivan in its modern form, the moment when the Foundation was leaning into the idea that service could be fueled, strengthened, and multiplied by imagination and execution. Ignite happened first. Then, a few weeks later, came graduation. As senior class president, Smartt lived in the world of logistics, including the mundane questions, like where parents would sit. A week before commencement, the college president called Smartt in and shared the news that the Sullivan Award would be presented at graduation.

The irony is that, in the middle of all that affirmation, the future still felt uncertain in a familiar, graduating-senior way. “I graduated not knowing what was next,” Smartt said. “I had been rejected from every PhD program I’d applied to. Didn’t have a job lined up.” Then came the line that reveals what mattered most. “But I was like, at least I’m becoming a good human and I think at the end of the day, that’s what matters.”

There is a certain kind of courage in that sentence, because it refuses to pretend character pays the bills. It simply refuses to let uncertainty become an excuse to abandon the values that got a person this far.

When the path ahead is unclear, people with a service instinct often do the same thing. The work becomes the next step.

Teach For America came first, followed by an initial rejection. The “no” did not stop the effort, but it did reroute the next move. AmeriCorps opened a door through a literacy program then known as Metro DC Reading Corps, now connected to The Literacy Lab. In Washington, D.C., the work was K–3 literacy tutoring, pulling kindergarten through third-grade students for one-on-one sessions, building skills one small victory at a time.

It is the kind of work that can change a child’s trajectory without anyone ever writing an article about it. Literacy is not only a school metric. Literacy is access. Literacy is dignity. Literacy is the ability to interpret the world instead of being trapped inside it.

A second year followed because continuity mattered for the students. Then, with more clarity about where the calling fit, another Teach For America application went in, and this time acceptance came. Training happened in Philadelphia. Teaching followed in Camden. Later came Prince George’s County, Maryland, with fifth grade English language arts and social studies as the daily terrain.

Teaching, in the abstract, is often described as “inspiring.” Teaching, in reality, can be punishing in its intimacy with other people’s hardship. Smartt described students whose lives were shaped by forces far beyond a classroom, including immigration trauma and the fear of deportation. When people talk about burnout, the word often means exhaustion. What teachers in that position face is something deeper: the strain of witnessing, day after day, how unevenly the world distributes safety and opportunity.

By 2018, administration did not feel like the right direction. Something else began to take shape, a different way to serve, one that could broaden impact without abandoning the mission that had drawn Smartt into classrooms in the first place. The question that kept returning was not, “How do I escape this?” It was, “What is the driving point of why I am here?”

“It really was access to information,” Smartt said. “And I was like, so what are ways that I can make a broader impact with access to information? And I was like, oh, library science, like that makes sense.”

There is something quietly radical about choosing librarianship in an era when so many people believe information is free simply because it is everywhere. The truth is that access is not the same as abundance. Access means knowing what to trust, how to find it, how to interpret it, how to use it, and how to invite others into that knowledge without condescension. That philosophy became concrete through a Master of Library and Information Science from Syracuse University, followed by a return to Mary Baldwin University as Instruction and Outreach Librarian.

Of course, life did not let that transition happen neatly. In early 2020, the classroom chapter ended and then the world shut down. “Covid happened, and everything shut down,” Smartt said. Libraries were closed. Hiring froze.

If this story has a pattern, it is this: when one door closes, the loss does not get romanticized, and movement does not stop. Work came next at a public charter school with a mission centered on financial education, including helping families bridge generational wealth gaps. It was not the original plan, but it mattered, and it kept Smartt close to students.

Then came the chapter that, in the telling, sounds like the kind of plot a novelist would reject for being too tidy. In 2023, Courtney Carlton from the Sullivan Foundation called, trying to reconnect after a long stretch of missed communication caused by an outdated email address. At the time, fertility treatments were underway at home, alongside the private grief and hope so many couples know too well. Multiple failed attempts and miscarriages had worn the season down.

A decision was made to attend a Sullivan event anyway, partly because Sullivan still felt like home, and partly because a break from heaviness was needed. Lunch happened with a chaplain, and the conversation drifted to library science. The chaplain mentioned that positions might be opening at Mary Baldwin.

A couple of weeks later, an interview followed for a library job at Mary Baldwin. That same week, news arrived of a pregnancy.

Even writing that sentence down can feel intrusive, like stepping too close to someone else’s sacred ground. But the detail belongs here not for sentiment, and not as a plot twist, but because the moment reveals what Sullivan can do at its best: create space for people to come up for air, reconnect with identity, and remember what still can be given.

The move back to Mary Baldwin came next. Campus became daily life again, this time in a role that fits the longer arc of vocation. Doctoral work in higher education also began. The research focus is connection and belonging in college, a topic that feels less academic the moment you picture the students who eat lunch alone, who do not know how to ask for help, who feel invisible even in crowded rooms.

Returning to Sullivan as an alum was not only nostalgia. It carried readiness to invest. Smartt described leaving a Fellows weekend feeling “so hopeful,” struck by students’ big ideas and the lack of cynicism. But what stood out most was not the polish of the projects. It was what the students were asking for underneath all the planning: community, authentic connection, and mentors who told the truth about struggle.

Mentorship followed, and in that role, something revealing happened. Listening came first, for what was missing in the room. Then came the offering of what was available.

During a Year Three gathering, a tension appeared that many students feel but rarely name: the gap between entrepreneurship talk and the lived realities of students who do not have a safety net. Smartt described students pointing out that many successful founders of enterprises had families, friends, and networks that could catch them financially. That cushion was not a given for many students in the room. What those students were naming, without the academic term, was a difference in position: who has connections, who has a fallback, who can fail and still be okay.

So the mentor did what comes naturally. Experience got translated into language. A research framework surfaced, something called positionality, offered as a tool rather than a lecture. In plain terms, positionality became the awareness that each of us occupies multiple identities and social positions, some of which confer power and some of which create marginalization, and that this awareness should shape how we enter communities and how we claim to “help.” An impromptu session took shape the next morning, assembled with late-night research in a hotel room, because that is also part of the ethos here: if something matters, you do not wait for perfect conditions.

What makes this story powerful is not that it is a straight line. The power is in a faithful line. There are pivots, setbacks, serendipities, and seasons of uncertainty. There is work that looks like progress and work that looks like survival. There is grief and renewal, rejection and return.

Threaded through all of it is the same decision, repeated in different forms: to keep choosing the kind of life built around service, not as a brand, but as a practice.

Back in 2010, Smartt saw a description of an award and imagined it as a marker of becoming. In 2014, the award arrived at a moment when nothing else felt settled, and the timing mattered. In the years since, the meaning has been lived in the unglamorous places where service always ends up living: classrooms, tutoring sessions, hard conversations, late nights, and the slow work of helping people find what they need.

Today, the job title places Smartt in a library, but the vocation has always been bigger than a building. It is about access, belonging, and dignity. It is about helping students and communities move from being acted upon to being equipped. It is about making sure the next person has a clearer path, a stronger voice, and at least one reliable person who says, without hesitation, I’m here.

Smartt once said that receiving the Sullivan Award would mean being “on the way” to becoming the kind of human that felt necessary. The quiet truth is that the Smartt did not arrive through one award or one weekend retreat. Smartt was built through years of showing up, and through the choice, made again and again, to keep walking toward the work.