Purpose in Practice | Hayden Dawes
Purpose in Practice | Dr. Hayden Dawes
By Luna Vanaman
July 22, 2024
Dr. Hayden Dawes had no idea he would be someone with a PhD or find himself in the field of social work and social research. There was a moment in his life when he thought he was on the path of being a vocal performer. “I am a proud graduate of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where I was at the School of Music. So ever since I was little, I had a microphone in my hand and I would love to entertain anyone who walked through the doors. I also had leads in musicals and all of those things. So I always knew I had this passion to be with people and to express and to connect in that way,” he remembers. He truly believed music would be where his passion would lie and where he might shine brightest. “There’s a story from my voice teacher, a lovely, beautiful woman named Levone Tobin-Scott. She said, ‘Hayden, if you want to be successful at music, you need to eat, sleep, live and breathe music.’” He thought he did just that, but Ms. Tobin-Scott disagreed, saying, “No, you don’t.” He concedes that Ms Tobin-Scott “was so much wiser than I was back then.”
It would be years later when he was working in retail sales that a customer engaged him in a conversation put him on the path to earning his recent doctoral degree from the School of Social Work at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “She said. ‘Hayden, what about your job do you like?’ I said, I really like connecting with people.” It is this drive to connect to people and the human experience that defines the core of Dr. Dawes’ research; work he was engaged in at UNC when the world experienced the Covid-19 global pandemic. “During the pandemic, the world is getting smaller. We’re having to wear masks, there’s a lot of different, political discourse that’s very harming to see those images on the news of what it means to be a person of color, what it means to be a queer person, and all those other identities that was happening during that time. So as a way of practice, to sort of help myself feel better, I started writing permission slips to myself, and I noticed that made myself feel better.”
With this project of radical permission, he created an online community for queer people of color who might find themselves experiencing a distinct level of stress from having two oppressed identities. “I didn’t see that there was a lot of people talking about this idea of self-permission, giving oneself permission and I said, well, what I’m doing is like bringing people together in a community. So, I worked with folks at Odum to develop a screening survey online [for] people that have symptomatology of depression and anxiety”
The Odum Institute for Research in Social Science which Dr. Dawes mentions was founded in 1924 at UNC Chapel Hill and has always envisioned social research as having a broad reach across a multitude of disciplines. With its mission of expanding UNC’s impact and improving the lives of people in North Carolina and around the world, Dr Dawes was able to find support that fit perfectly with his own vision for his research. “Yeah. So, you know, thinking about what social science really is, It helps us answer the question of who are we? And not just who we are in terms of our identities, our communities, our groups, our nations, but also thinking about how are we living in the world? How do we create a more fair, a more just society while at the same time helping people? You know, I think sort of both accept the conditions as they are, but move forward so that we can actually live so much more harmoniously while we’re answering those questions of who are we? I had a vision of some of my projects, but sometimes the instrumental sort of knowledge and tools that were needed, I had to seek help and support with that. So, the Odum Institute was the best place for me to get that support that I needed.”
Though it was not a traditional path to a PhD in social work and social research, Dr. Hayden Dawes has finally found the light that Ms. Tobin-Scott wanted him to find all those years ago. “One of my top values is compassion. I said, wow, this is who I am. This is where I’m supposed to be. I’m a gay black man. And I’m like, wow, this is actually an asset to this field in this discipline. I have not turned back and so I have found the thing that I eat, sleep, live and breathe.”
Dr. Dawes will be putting his purpose in practice in a new role at Bryn Mawr College as an Assistant Professor in the Graduate School of Social Work and Social Research.