About Syreeta

Syreeta Cannaday Combs was born in St. Louis, Missouri but grew up in Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania. Syreeta’s mother was a devout Christian and single parent to Syreeta. Her mother worked many different blue collar jobs while Syreeta was growing up as an only child. Interested in History and Chemistry, Syreeta started looking for colleges outside of Bloomsburg. After visiting Hollins, she knew where she wanted to be. Her experience at Hollins was "amazing" and she now credits everything she is really interested in to Hollins. After attending Hollins, Syreeta joined AmeriCorps, where she served on different teams for five months. When she got home from AmeriCorps, Syreeta wanted to continue doing work for others, and was offered a job at a women's center. She became a child's advocate there and worked as a counselor for up to five clients a day. In addition to this, she ran a summer camp for the children she worked with. Recently, Syreeta has given birth to her own baby and has decided to pursue other goals.

Hollins

What made you interested in attending Hollins?

“After I took the SAT’s I started getting a lot of mail from different schools, and I was also, at the end of high school, kind of thinking about majoring in history or chemistry. I was really interested in those subjects, and there were a couple really nice schools I was looking to go to or at least apply to, and then I got a birthday card from Hollins, which I had been looking to visit or planning to visit, and then I got a birthday card. So I decided to visit it, and when I did visit it, it was too beautiful, I loved the students that I met, and I loved the campus, and I loved the size, I just liked the notion of going to women’s college, and I really liked the liberal arts. I was just starting to get drawn to the liberal arts, so once I visited Hollins I didn’t even care about other schools, I only applied to like two other schools, and I didn’t even flinch when I got the acceptance letters from those schools, I just, went to Hollins.”

Did going to a women’s college contribute to you becoming an activist would you say? Why or why not?

“I learned about activism at Hollins, and I learned about different levels of it, and I think that’s where I learned that, it’s definitely where I learned that making a difference in other peoples lives is a really important thing, it also contributed to my love for a small, a really small community, which is why I ended up coming back home, because I realized I already live in a small community, I already know what that’s like.”

Activism

Can you define activism for me?

“The most effective way to be an activist, is to define your personal principles, the things that you think that make you a good person, and then to do your very best to live totally according to those principles. And so, for me, most of my activism takes the form of trying to find the things that I feel are important as a person, like to be a happy, generous person to the children that I work with, or my own child, who is like the most important person that I can probably influence. I probably used to be more convinced before I was a mother before I was in one place, I probably used to think that activism was really, you know, more protesting, or donating a lot of time or money to a cause, but as I’m getting older and kind of lazier, I kind of think it’s just doing the best you can in your day to day life. But I mean, that being said, I also think that it’s important to have a job that is important to other peoples’ lives. It’s not activism if you work by day like doing something awful, like working in a big corporation or polluting the environment, but then you donate a couple hours a week to some cause, I don’t think that counts as activism either, you have to try to live and breath it for it to really count and I mean it’s better that way because that way if you screw up you have another chance tomorrow, like no matter how bad of a person you think you are, if your trying really hard to be a good person, you succeed, so, I think that’s it.”

“It makes it just so much easier to exist in a world with other people if you just all have the same goal of making life better for the people around you even if that means you’re doing different things.”

“I think the thing about my definition of activism that I like so much is that, I don’t have to march on Washington to feel like I’m doing something to make a difference in the world. I’m really a kind of down home activist. I just want to make things better a little bit at a time. And (P) the broad definition of activism, the one that is applying to people that people I know, like Gloria Steinam back in the day, that’s inspirational, that’s totally inspirational, but I think that point of broad social increments like feminism, is to trickle down into everyday life, so that people, down here, at this level (hand gestures down) just regular people, living their lives in a small place, their interactions contain as much of those broad ideas, ideals, as they can.”

What qualities do you feel you possess that help you as an activist?

“I have a strong desire to live according to my principles… Which are, loyalty, respect for life, feminism of course (p) I’m flexible, I’m willing to adapt to change…flexibility is important in an activist… you really have to be firmly devoted to the things you believe and you have to also simultaneously be willing to accept new ideas which is a huge challenge… and a sense of humor (ha) sense of humor helps a lot in jobs like that, and just a warmth for people, just an ability to be around people of different socioeconomic backgrounds, and different ethnic backgrounds, and different walks of life, and just the ability to feel comfortable around them, which is something that you cultivate, it’s not something that you can just be born with, especially if you live in Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania, where everyone is exactly the same {laughs} but yeah I like meeting different people and I like sympathizing with them.”

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