Our locations beyond the main portal campus in New York City include Accra, Ghana. Silver School of Social Work students regularly travel to Tanzania during their winter and summer breaks in order to work at the Tanzania Children's Rescue Center, a safe haven for children founded by an NYU undergraduate.
Lindsey Darnell
With an academic concentration in black cultural identity in North America at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study, Lindsey Darnell saw the opportunity to apply what she was learning to a firsthand experience in Africa. While abroad at NYU in Ghana, Lindsey took a course called Documenting the African City, through which she and her group created a 15-minute documentary film on the topic of identity politics. They interviewed and filmed African Americans living in Ghana, Ghanaian professors and university students, and other local residents. Lindsey says, “Having the opportunity to document the ideas and perspectives of so many individuals was truly an eye-opening experience.”
Since graduating, Lindsey returned to her hometown of New Orleans, where she became the archive and library assistant at the Amistad Research Center. Housed at Tulane University, it is the nation’s largest independent archives of manuscripts, photographs, oral histories, books, periodicals, and works of art about the history of African Americans and other ethnic groups. Currently, Lindsey is the program coordinator at the Neighborhood Story Project, a nonprofit organization in partnership with the University of New Orleans. She works with writers to create documentary books about their communities using oral histories and photography. Lindsey says, “What I experienced in Ghana has influenced my professional decisions. Traveling and exploring in an unfamiliar place removed me from my comfort zone and therefore changed me. Learning about other people’s cultures is now my comfort zone.”