As a student involved in dozens of community outreach endeavors, there were moments when Jacobi Cunningham ’03 wanted to sever all ties to his social and civic obligations and focus solely on his studies.
- The McDonogh Report celebrates the contributions of African Americans to the Lafayette community.
No one at Lafayette would have blamed Cunningham, a neuroscience major who served an internship at Harvard Medical School and participated in EXCEL research, for wanting to concentrate on academics. But Cunningham, who is pursing a doctorate in pharmacology and experimental therapeutics at Boston University’s School of Medicine, couldn’t have endured the fallout from his harshest critic – himself.
“I had put myself in a position of leadership, and good leaders don’t quit,” says Cunningham, whose community involvement began his freshman year when he was elected president of his class and nominated as cultural chair of the Association of Black Collegians and joined the Brothers of Lafayette.
“If you’re in a position of leadership, one of your jobs is to speak for the people who are voiceless, and if I gave up, I felt like I was letting down all those whose voices wouldn’t otherwise be heard,” he says.
Cunningham explains that, as student, he felt that a sort of cultural chasm existed on campus because many different cultural groups on campus didn’t know about one another and didn’t interact.
“So my focus was to get people educated about these different cultures and become accepting of the different cultures. I wanted Lafayette to be a microcosm of the world, for it to reflect what was going on in the community surrounding it.”
To that end, he helped found the Lafayette Intercultural Networking Council. The group’s mission was promoting the development of cross-cultural and intercultural exchange by encouraging the collaboration of student groups, administration offices, and academic departments. Off campus he became a mentor to Easton’s youth and participated in dozens of community service activities.
Others recognized Cunningham’s leadership roles in the spread of multiculturalism both on and off campus, and he received the David A. Portlock Award for Cross-Cultural Relationships in 2002 and the Jeffrey Robinson ’80 Leadership Award in 2003.
The awards provided welcome validation for Cunningham’s numerous contributions, but his greatest satisfaction comes from knowing that his efforts continue to resonate.
“At Lafayette, I helped to crack open the shell for change and I can look back on it and say everything I did was for others, for there to be new ideas and a new sense of cultural sensitivity,” he explains.
For Cunningham, working from within an organization or institution to affect change is a way of life. In fact, one of his personal goals is to combat ignorance wherever and whenever possible, he says.
Professionally, that means educating doctors and health-care providers. He hopes his doctoral research into how drugs of abuse – specifically club drugs like ecstasy – interact with chronic stress to affect the brain will advance knowledge on the impact of certain medications on neurological function.
“I hate to see when people are on the wrong medication or when people are strung out from taking the wrong drug,” Cunningham says. “I see myself in a sort of clinical-pharmacological setting where I’m working with people directly, working with physicians on the effect of drug prescriptions. There is so much I want to do – ideally, I will be in a setting where I help advise clinical trials and advise physicians on medications they give to patients and on those drug interactions.”
Socially, he remains a voice advocating cultural understanding. He has taken on an important position of leadership at his A.M.E. church in Boston, where he was recently licensed as a preacher. He also sits on the church’s board of trustees. His continued involvement in Alpha Phi Alpha, the national African American fraternity, allows him to work with various community action groups to stop violence, prevent teen pregnancies, and educate youth.
Cunningham has encountered failure and disappointments along the way, both in his academic and social pursuits. But for every failure, there is a lesson to be learned, he says.
“Sometimes, mistakes are the best part of doing research; sometimes, the best scientific discoveries happen because of a mistake. All you can do is keep the hope that your piece of the pie, adds to the big picture.
“Disappointments, which Lafayette taught me how to deal with, help me to realize that although you strive for what you want, if it doesn’t happen, that’s okay. Sometimes in life, you know you might not see the fruit, but you go ahead and plant the seed anyway.”