This spring, three University of Tulsa students are wrapping up participation in the Albert Schweitzer Fellowship program. This 12-month experience supports graduate and professional degree students who are committed to addressing unmet health needs in their communities while honing their leadership skills.
The local program is housed at UTulsa’s Oxley College of Health & Natural Sciences and is one of 10 Schweitzer Fellowship sites across the United States.
Two UTulsa College of Law students are part of the 2024-25 cohort: Sarah Brubaker and Dalton Long. They were joined by Roya Taraby, a student in Oxley’s Doctor of Nursing Practice program.
Ensuring dignified memorials and funerals for unhoused people is the focus of Brubaker’s Schweitzer Fellowship project. This issue caught her attention when she was a professor at Phillips Theological Seminary. In that role, she learned of the need for someone to step in when an unhoused or impoverished person dies and there is no one to coordinate a memorial service or funeral.
As a Schweitzer Fellow, she developed connections with clergy willing to conduct remembrance services for indigent and abandoned people. She also organized a community-based remembrance service, which will take place later this spring, for those who have passed away without loved ones. “As much as anyone in our society, these marginalized people deserved to be remembered, to have their names spoken,” Brubaker commented. Looking to the future, she hopes to spearhead a fund to cover the cost of burials for indigent and abandoned people.
For his project, Long partnered with BeHeard, a nonprofit outreach and resource program for unhoused people in Tulsa that provides mobile showers, laundry, haircuts, and clothing. Long collaborated in this work with his wife, Allison, who is also a Schweitzer Fellow and a student in the doctor of osteopathic medicine program at Oklahoma State University.
Over the course of the past year, the Longs gave training sessions to BeHeard staff and volunteers on several topics, including temperature-related illnesses, wound care, sexual health and STIs in Oklahoma, and the law pertaining to duty to rescue, self-harm mandatory reporting, reproductive health, and the criminalizing of homelessness. They also forged connections between BeHeard and the UTulsa legal clinics, OSU Specialty Clinic, Take Control Initiative, and HOPE Testing Center.
“Working with BeHeard reinforced the gratitude Allison and I feel for our current season of life and the privileges we enjoy,” Dalton Long remarked. “And we were humbled to learn that some BeHeard volunteers were able to use the information we had shared during our temperature-related illness session to help rescue a man who was found in a dumpster during February’s winter storms.”
Outside of their Schweitzer Fellowship project, the two volunteer as many hours as they can with BeHeard, cleaning showers and providing direct services to clients.
Tulsa also is home to thousands of Burmese people who have chosen to build new lives in the area. Drawing on her medical knowledge, Taraby centered her project on increasing diabetes prevention among members of this sizeable community. For this work, she collaborated with the Tulsa Health Department’s Community Outreach Program.
“Congratulations to Sarah, Dalton, and Roya for their hard work this year as Tulsa Schweitzer Fellows,” said Emma Morris, the program’s director. “As they’ve worked to address critical unmet health needs, they’ve built connections, engaged the community, and made a real difference in improving health outcomes here in Tulsa. We are so excited to see where these Fellows go next!”
UTulsa’s Schweitzer Fellowship program launched in 2016. To date, 124 Tulsa Schweitzer Fellows have contributed more than 21,000 hours to improve the lives of over 8,000 under-resourced Tulsans in partnership with over 70 Tulsa and Eastern Oklahoma nonprofits, schools, and clinics.
