A Q&A with Fulbright College Alumnus Steve Darr
Steve Darr
Executive Director and Founder of Peacework,
1977 Graduate of the Fulbright College with studies in Psychology and Social Work,
2015 Johnson Fellow at the University of Arkansas, and Fulbright College Campaign Arkansas Committee Member
In this conversation, Darr talks about the importance of perseverance; creating Peacework, which has connected more than 1,000 U of A students to international experiences in Belize, Vietnam, Cameroon, South Africa, Malawi, Bosnia, the Czech Republic, Mozambique, and Mexico; his efforts through Alliance for Excellence to advance racial parity in higher education; his passion for and devotion to fostering diversity, equity and inclusion; and how his time at the U of A didn’t teach him what to think, but “how to think, and that … has made all the difference.”
Q: Can you tell us a little about your career, what you studied in college, and how the two relate to one another?
Darr, center, with Walton College graduate Jean Hobby and Chelsea Clinton at a reception in Washington, D.C.
I remember sitting in the office of Dean Murray Smart. After a year of studying architecture, I wanted a change. In reality, I was a victim of spring in the Ozarks. This was my one regret at the University of Arkansas. I was choosing between two majors when, in fact, I could have studied both.
I learned academic inquiry in Greek, the language. I learned writing from Joel Freund in Experimental Psychology. Development Psychology was a rare course I remember almost verbatim from four decades ago. My course on Aging with John King is coming in handy as we speak! The instructor in Speed Reading trained our minds to read a page at a time. Why everyone didn’t take that class is beyond me.
I didn’t learn what to think, but how to think and that, with apologies to Robert Frost, “has made all the difference.”
After Fayetteville, I spent three years at Duke University, a summer in the Foreign Service School at Georgetown, and a summer in archeology, but none were as intensive as the time I worked in pediatric intensive care at Ochsner’s in New Orleans.
I loved Fayetteville and briefly returned to work construction on Barnhill Arena and the new Walton College of Business. In the end, I found myself in Virginia because it was so much like Arkansas and I finally got that architecture degree, a master’s at Virginia Tech.
Then everything changed at 7:30 a.m. on April 21, 1989.
Q: What made that particular date so pivotal in your career?
Darr in 2015, when he was selected as a Johnson Fellow at the U of A.
I had spent two years searching for a partner in the Soviet Union to participate in a bi-lateral peacemaking project involving the two Cold War superpowers.
And that day, at that precise time, Yuri Alexandrin of the Soviet Peace Fund called me at home. They were ready to participate.
Four months later, 16 university students from the U.S. and the Soviet Union met to work together in war-torn Nicaragua. Under the world’s watchful eye, the group rebuilt five houses destroyed in the war and called the project “Peacework” – работать во имя мира in Russian and Trabajo de Paz in Spanish.
Since that day, Peacework has reached over a million people around the world with over 30,000 student volunteers from 150 sponsoring academic institutions and corporations working with 72 community partners in 28 countries. Those projects have generated over $100 million in development assistance and cross-cultural engagement.
Peacework is about working alongside one another and recognizing everyone’s talents and resources to make the world a better place. Peacework is about equitable and sustainable development as a context for experiencing the amazing diversity of cultures and customs all over the world.
Today, Peacework projects are located in the townships of South Africa, the Mekong Delta of Vietnam, sprawling cities of India, sugar cane fields of the Dominican Republic, the Sacred Valley of Peru, and our hallmark program, a 15-year-long multi-disciplinary academic partnership between the University of Arkansas and the coastal community of Dangriga in Belize.
Q: How did the U of A help play a role in your goal to create Peacework?
Darr, in the back row center, with the Peacework leadership team in Belize.
None of this would have happened as it did, none of it, without the endearing friendships and professional connections I made in the Fulbright College and at the University of Arkansas.
The 15-year partnership with the community of Dangriga was launched in a conversation with the U of A’s former director of the study abroad program, DeDe Long, in the driveway of professor emeritus Don Voth’s house, within in view of Razorback Stadium.
I never thought that studying at the University of Arkansas would be so much more than a degree, but I was wrong.
Over 1,000 students at the University of Arkansas have had experiences in Belize, Vietnam, Cameroon, South Africa, Malawi, Bosnia, the Czech Republic, Mozambique, and Mexico through Peacework that many would say “changed their lives.”
That first phone call in 1989 set the stage, but DeDe Long, Don Voth, Curt Rom, Amy Farmer, Chuck Adams, Hoyt Purvis, and many others are on a long list of Arkansas faculty and administrators who supported this approach to global engagement. Many will remember faculty members Joe Ziegler and Steve Neuse who made sure global education was valued at Arkansas.
The University of Arkansas introduced me to Bob Nash and Janis Kearney, champions of racial equity, Janet Harris and colleagues at the Winthrop Rockefeller Institute, and Dean Skip Rutherford of the Clinton School.
But there’s another career connection that stands out.
Peacework enabled me to employ 17 U of A graduates like Jessica Rice, Donna Stone, Jonathan Dunkley, Emily English, Mervin Jebaraj, Laura Sossamon, Hunter Riley, and Maria Lester and place them and dozens of others in project management positions literally all over the world – and that is a significant part of the Arkansas connection.
And finally, I got to serve as the 2015 Johnson Fellow at the U of A thanks to Marcia and Jeff Johnson and serving on the Fulbright College’s Campaign Arkansas Committee has been special.
Arkansas “has made all the difference.”
Q: What have been one or two of the most interesting or exciting accomplishments for you in your career or life post-college?
Darr, right, with colleagues in Vietnam.
One accomplishment was founding Peacework. I knew that college students could use the knowledge they were acquiring to make a difference in the world while serving alongside peers in another country.
Moreover, even a short experience abroad would make a difference in how students would see the world the rest of their lives. Thus, Peacework got its start in a refugee settlement in Esteli, Nicaragua, in 1989 and today more than 30,000 students have participated in a wide range of health, business, education, agriculture, engineering, and other development projects worldwide.
Another accomplishment was founding Alliance for Excellence. Alliance for Excellence was founded in 1986 in response to the 50% gap in college participation among black and white students in our part of Virginia.
In four years, black student enrollment increased up to 133% and more than 25,000 students have celebrated successes that some may not have had otherwise because of Alliance for Excellence.
Q: Can you tell us more about the work you do to advance diversity, equity and inclusion?
It started in Little Rock. I don’t know why it was so deeply personal, but it was. Maybe it was the sense of social justice that was so much a part of my upbringing. I was greatly affected by scenes of racism and racial disparities. Even at a young age, I knew the city of Little Rock was largely divided by black and white and I knew it wasn’t an accident of history.
It was a personal tragedy for my cousin who had been a student at Central and who bemoaned the white violence when nine black students enrolled in 1957. Like the entire world, I was also shocked when Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated in nearby Memphis and shocked again when Robert Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles.
I was just a kid then but quickly awakening to the world’s problems. I later learned that my father, a banker, joined the Board of Trustees of Philander Smith College soon after King’s assassination. I have a million questions I wished I had asked him.
My family was traveling through Memphis on another occasion. I was looking out the back window of my parents’ car and saw from a distance white police officers beating a Black man in the middle of a street. I don’t remember why I was there, but I will never forget that image.
I later read Why We Can’t Wait by Martin Luther King, Jr., and joined an amazing group of Black and white church youth in Little Rock working for healing and non-violence in the community. People like the Reverend Bob Scott served as a conscience for social justice in my small circle.
Maybe those experiences altogether made it personal.
I was working with community colleges when I came to Virginia and discovered that the enrollment rate of black students was 50% lower than white students. That also meant there were significant disparities in economic opportunity.
I remember thinking, “Why can’t we finally get this right?”
I clearly understood the complexities, but surely, we could to better than this. That realization led to a series of meetings with Black church leaders and four community college presidents about how to close that gap.
I was completely convinced that Black churches, being pillars of the Black community, had to be the centerpiece. The four community college presidents understood that racial equity was a fundamental moral standard as well as a cornerstone for economic opportunity and growth. It was also a mandate of the community college system in Virginia.
Alliance for Excellence was born in those discussions.
I had heard about Professor James Cone who was from Bearden, Arkansas. He had become the voice of Black liberation theology, the proposition that theology has a uniquely powerful and liberating expression in the Black church. There was no better voice to launch Alliance for Excellence in 1986.
The alliance took hold. In four years, Black enrollment gained as much as 133% on those campuses. Its measures of success were largely due to leading pastors and educators like Erv Griffin, an Alliance board member who created a program to honor the academic achievements of Black students and at the same time honor the legacy of Black community leaders who had gone before them.
Alliance for Excellence was led by others like the Reverend Thomas Johnson, now Senior Pastor at Canaan Baptist Church in New York City, and educators Muriel Mickles, Gloria Lindsay, Sandy Saunders and many, many others. I knew we could close the gap, but it was just the beginning.
The Martin Luther King, Jr., Self-Development Fund; Crestar Bank; the Titmus Foundation; and the Ethnic Minority Local Church Fund of the United Methodist Board of Global Ministries helped us get started with $200,000. The colleges matched their support over the following 10 years.
Alliance for Excellence was featured at the National Association of Black Educators in Atlanta and the League for Innovation in the Community College in Washington, D.C. and hosted prominent speakers such as the Reverend Drs. James Forbes and Sam Proctor, but the key to the vitality of the program was a committed local group of educators, businesspeople, church leaders, and especially the students themselves.
The chancellor of Virginia’s community college system once said that Alliance for Excellence had done more to achieve racial parity in higher education than any other organization or movement in the Commonwealth.
But for me, years of building partnerships were about to take a turn.
Q: How so, what changed and how did that affect you?
The Obama Administration was coming to an end in the fall of 2016. Alliance for Excellence gathered 22 black student leaders and educators to visit the White House to honor the family that had broken long-standing race barriers. Two of those students were elected to public office the following year.
Back in Danville, Alliance for Excellence was sponsoring a day of workshops on opportunities and challenges faced by black youth.
One workshop was on juvenile justice. A deputy came to talk to the 250 young people gathered at the community college. I was expecting a standard lecture, but instead he talked about “how to survive a traffic stop.”
The next summer, the nation was shocked by the Unite the Right rally. Deadly events in Charlottesville stunned the nation’s consciousness.
I’ve worked closely over the past two years with the Office of Racial Healing at Duke University and hope that leadership from their staff will reinforce efforts to foster racial healing in our communities. Their strategy grows out of the Kellogg-funded Racial Healing Institute of the American Association of Colleges & Universities that also supports diversity at the U of A.
One of their cornerstone programs is the racial healing circle. Participants of various walks of life and different ethnic backgrounds share their personal histories, some of which reveal concerns or even tragedies related to race.
The objective is to better understand one another and the social milieu of each person’s background, whether it’s rooted in joy or pain. Racial healing circles are ultimately about “changing the narrative” of race from one based on a racial hierarchy that has persisted for centuries to a new narrative based on a fundamental appreciation of our common humanity.
My work in DE&I includes support for the University of Arkansas.
Yvette Murphy-Erby, the U of A’s vice chancellor for diversity and inclusion, her staff, the IDEALS Institute, and Romona West in the Fulbright College are driving exceptional, positive change. Their work is vital to the University community.
#Black@UARK is an authentic voice of the black experience at Arkansas and those voices are essential to understanding the realities of race and equity on campus.
When the Fulbright College invited me to join its committee for Campaign Arkansas, I started thinking what could I do with my modest resources to make a difference at the U of A?
I decided that the one thing I could do from a distance was create a discretionary fund that Dean Todd Shields in the Fulbright College could use to advance racial equity and diversity on campus.
Q: What was one of your favorite memories of your time at the college and why?
Darr, right, with his daughter and U of A student Macey, in the town of Cesky Krumlov, Czech Republic.
I have a long list of favorite memories from the University of Arkansas, from watching the Razorbacks to the antics of our intramural basketball team, the Longshots. Here are two unique memories, one heavy and one light.
I am indebted to people like Don Voth, a life-long friend and U of A professor emeritus.
Don Voth taught in Rural Sociology at the U of A and now lives in Albuquerque. I met Don my freshman year at a little church in Fayetteville and soon got to know his wife, Elnora, and young sons Mike and Tom. Don and Elnora also adopted a young man from Vietnam after the wave of refugee resettlement in 1975. Don and Elnora had met in Vietnam around 1960 while both were serving as Mennonite volunteers.
When I founded Peacework in 1989, I couldn’t think of a more important context historically and culturally for understanding, peacemaking, and reconciliation than Vietnam.
Don and I traveled there in 1996 to meet partners and plan projects that have now exceeded 1,500 participants and $7 million in arrangements and supplies, many participants having been affiliated with the U of A.
One of our projects in Vietnam involved construction of several small buildings in a hospital complex in the coastal town of Nha Trang. Don and Elnora met there. The clinic set on the South China Sea was eventually renamed the Khanh Hoa Rehabilitation Hospital.
Elnora passed away in 1999 and the following year Don and I took another amazing team of volunteers to restore one of the older clinic buildings. At the conclusion of our work, the hospital administration surprised Don by naming the building for Elnora.
The generous and peaceful spirit of people like Don and Elnora is contagious. Their compassion and sense of social justice has informed my own and inspired my modest work for peace in a volatile world.
The other experience that comes to mind is simply unbelievable.
I was studying quietly one afternoon in the library of the Presbyterian-Disciples campus ministry center on Maple Street. It was early fall of my freshman year. Suddenly, I heard shouting outside.
I looked out the window just in time to see a woman in beads, shawl, and sandals running into the building where I was. After she caught her breath, she asked if I knew anyone who could drive a school bus.
My first car was a school bus, so I was game. She needed someone to help start and move her bus from a field in West Fork to Eureka Springs.
I found my roommate, Kevin Brown, so I’d have a ride back. The bus had been stripped of its seats and contained beds and appliances. Pots and pans hung on the walls. Kevin and I got it started after a few tries and we headed up the road.
As we crossed the Carroll County line and approached Eureka Springs, the woman pointed out a dirt road for us to follow. We drove down the dirt road for at least a mile or two and then turned left through a gate and into a large grassy field.
Now, I swear what you read next is true. As we turned into the field, naked people were everywhere. The woman with us leaned out the bus door and shouted, “Get your clothes on!”
And that’s when I realized that Kevin and I, two naïve young freshmen boys, had just unknowingly delivered an old bus to a nudist camp.
Q: Now that you’ve achieved so much in your career, what advice would you give to students?
Darr dressed for riding his BMW K1600.
After reaching the pinnacle of his coaching career, Jimmy Valvano was fighting terminal cancer. Toward the end of his struggle, he shared one piece of advice: “Don’t give up; don’t ever give up.”
It doesn’t matter what your dream is or how you hope to make a difference in this world, I would echo his words, “don’t ever give up.”
On the other side, if the emotional burden of life seems like it’s just too much, find help now. Remind yourself, “Don’t give up; don’t ever give up.” There are people who care about you. You’re not alone.
Q: What do you like to do during your time outside of work?
I love taking my kids out on the lake in our boat. Don’t tell anyone, but sometimes I go down to the marina and just sit in the boat by myself or with the dog.
I love riding my BMW K1600 through the Blue Ridge Mountains. I love making the trip to Fayetteville as often as possible.
The kids love to come and attend a Razorback game. Every year, we try to guess which football game will not be played in pouring rain and we are always wrong, and we try to guess which basketball game will not be played inside during an ice storm and we are always wrong.
Q: What’s up next on the horizon for you?
Someday soon I will hand the leadership of Peacework to a new generation, and wouldn’t it be nice if that person was a graduate of the University of Arkansas!?
Q: Is there anything else you’d like to add or let readers know?
This is an incredibly difficult time for many people in our communities and even around the world.
While people are struggling with dire health and economic challenges, know that the University of Arkansas and the Fulbright College are cornerstones on which you can depend.
More than a building or a campus, we are community.