Symone Gosby ’11

EMBARKING ON A LIFE OF SERVICE 

Symone Gosby ’11 is the Program Coordinator for Asia on Vital Voices Global Partnership’s human rights team. She empowers and supports women leaders on the front lines of global anti-human trafficking efforts. Her journey beyond GDS, while less than a decade old, has carried her across Asia—“from Kazakhstan to Thailand, Singapore to Japan”—focused on human rights and disability advocacy. She’s a former Fulbright Research Fellow, a 2019 Thomas R. Pickering Foreign Affairs Fellowship finalist, a Korean-English translator, and has recently landed professionally back in DC, where her advocacy journey first began at GDS.

GLOBAL CITIZEN

“To know Symone is to be drawn in by her ever-present smile, her creative ideas, and her determination to succeed,” said Lower/Middle School P.E. teacher and volleyball coach. “I have fond memories of teaching and coaching Symone in Lower and Middle School respectively. She easily connected with teammates through her joy, kindness, and humor, and then organized and mobilized them to achieve a common goal.” 

Symone studied Chinese all four years of High School and began teaching herself Korean with language exchange partners online during her Junior year. “Language learning has been a consistent thread in my life. Learning Chinese and Korean really opened up my mind beyond GDS, my community, and the United States to instead see the world and see myself as a global citizen,” she explained.

A Chinese exchange program during High School revealed Symone’s interpersonal aptitude and interest in cross-cultural engagement. “Even though I hosted one student, I remember growing close to all the students,” she said. “I wanted to know more about all of them. I like to make those person-to-person connections.” 

When it came time to look at colleges, her knack for languages led her to concentrate on schools that offered both Chinese and Korean language study on campus. Ultimately, she attended Smith College in Massachusetts. “At Smith, I was able to have a lot of international opportunities, including an internship with Korea’s congress, called the National Assembly, studying abroad, and I was also able to participate in the World Expo in Yeosu, South Korea in 2012.”

As for her interest in advocacy, Symone made an important start in High School, in particular with her participation in the National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS) Student Diversity Leadership Conference (SDLC). “I am grateful for the opportunities I had to participate in SDLC two years in a row. I always remember that I felt really energized after those in-depth conversations with people from public schools and private schools, as well as people from different economic backgrounds.” SDLC is designed to promote ongoing leadership building and networking around social justice work long after the weeklong conference ends.

A TASTE OF FOREIGN SERVICE

During her Junior year at Smith in 2014, Symone was accepted into the Charles B. Rangel International Affairs Summer Enrichment Program, which encourages “the application of members of minority groups historically underrepresented in the [United States] Foreign Service” and women to increase diversity in the field of international affairs.

During the six-week program, they visited various government agencies and international nonprofit organizations, one of which was Vital Voices, a global partnership founded in 1997 to empower women as community leaders to solve the world’s biggest challenges. 

Following her 2015 graduation from Smith College with a BA in East Asian Studies, Symone returned to Korea on a Fulbright Research Fellowship. “What brought me back to Korea after graduation was my research on the human rights of people with disabilities. “I was drawn to that work because I myself am a student with a learning disability.”

While at GDS, Symone’s teachers helped her recognize her dyslexia and ensure that support systems (and documentation) were in place. Symone learned to self-advocate with encouragement from home and school, and she developed strategies that allowed her to be successful through High School and at Smith. Interestingly, she’s found that dyslexia has had a more limited impact on her language learning aptitude in Korean and Chinese. Throughout her exchange program through the Council on International Educational Exchange (CIEE), she found accommodations comparable to what she had grown familiar with at Smith. The self-support strategies now in her adult and professional life have been evolving along with the nature of the work.

When Symone had first traveled to Korea as a college student and an intern, she had been told that disabilities in general were a taboo subject there. Not long after her arrival, however, she met the head of the host school’s disability advocacy group. She was surprised to see all the students with visible disabilities and students with invisible or no disabilities participating in advocacy work together, given what she had been told about the stigma. “It really seemed that the ways disabilities were thought of in Korea were changing,” she said. Symone observed some lingering generational differences in the way people reckoned with disabilities. After learning about the impact of the disabilities rights movement in the late 1980s in Korea, she submitted a Fulbright Research proposal.

The Fulbright program brought Symone back to Korea for only ten months of research, but Symone knew she wanted to experience Korea for longer and not as a student or researcher. She wanted to learn what it was actually like to live there. She ended up taking a job in digital media, conceptualizing, writing, and creating YouTube videos for international K-Pop fans from the summer of 2016 until the end of 2017. 

DRAWN HOME TO DC

Following the Fulbright research and her digital media production work, Symone had a few soul-searching months between jobs. During that time, she found herself reading an article about DC’s missing girls. In March 2017, a dozen Black and Latina children went missing in the city. The Black community in particular was enraged by how little the police department publicized the case. A Time article by Maya Rhodan from that year quoted Natalie Wilson of the Black and Missing Foundation as saying, “Black children who go missing receive less media attention than white kids,” Wilson said.  

“I remember thinking to myself, ‘What the heck is going on? Why are girls going missing in DC?’” Symone said. She began learning about human trafficking in DC. The stories about these missing girls—and human trafficking so close to home—resolved Symone’s pivot back to a human rights focus. Upon her return home, when going through her old papers, she found Vital Voices in her notes from the summer enrichment program and applied for an internship position. 

VITAL VOICES

“Vital Voices Global Partnership is an international NGO that focuses on women’s leadership,” Symone said. “We have a global network of more than 18,000 women with whom we work in different capacities, whether focusing on political and civil engagement, economic empowerment, or human rights. My focus has been human rights.”

Symone joined the organization as an intern and at the end of her five-month internship, she was hired as a Program Assistant and promoted in 2019 to Program Coordinator.

“Symone’s passion, integrity, and dedication enable her to work meaningfully with women leaders from around the world to create positive change as it relates to eradicating gender-based violence (GBV),” said Jennifer Guzman, Program Manager on the Human Rights team at Vital Voices. “Symone is not afraid to speak up for the needs of others. She asks tough questions of leaders and holds them accountable to promises of change. These qualities, among others, allow Symone to create open, safe spaces where our partners can freely discuss the challenges and successes they experience in their work with victims and survivors of GBV.”

The day we spoke, Symone had earlier supported a webinar call with 17 women leaders to review last year’s needs assessment, which gathered information on how Vital Voices can continue to support leaders who are providing direct services to survivors and/or addressing the root causes of GBV in their communities. The women on the call also discussed how their work is being affected and their needs are changing during the pandemic. 

“My favorite part of the program has been focusing on women leaders who are at the forefront of addressing human trafficking in their communities, whether it’s sex or labor trafficking. I’ve valued working directly with the women and seeing how the work I’m doing affects them and ultimately their communities.”

“Symone is a great listener, a skill that easily enables her to create and foster meaningful relationships with the women leaders in our Vital Voices network,” Guzman said. “The energy and enthusiasm that Symone brings during every global program she helps to coordinate and implement is unrivaled.” Guzman also noted Symone’s commitment to professional growth and lifelong learning, a foundation GDS strives to lay in every student. “Her self-awareness and proactive spirit enable her to reflect on her own strengths and areas of improvement, ensuring continuous growth in her professional capacity.”

Symone assists with programmatic logistics and implementation for Vital Voices’ Global Freedom Exchange, which hosts 15-25 women at a time in the United States for a two-week, three-city tour to areas that are implementing unique anti-trafficking efforts. During her first year with the program, Symone began with the group in Washington, DC before heading down to Immokalee, Florida where there are large immigrant populations from Haiti and Mexico. The program wrapped up in Dallas, Texas. 

“During the program, the participating fellows have a really good opportunity to see different models of how people and cities are addressing trafficking,” Symone explained. “At the same time, they are able to build a network of international anti-human trafficking leaders that they can bounce ideas off of going forward as they continue to build their work.” Not unlike the start she made early in High School with SDLC, the Vital Voices Global Freedom Exchange creates important spaces for ongoing connections between leaders in this advocacy work. “Even though the context might be different, the root causes of trafficking are similar in their countries,” Symone added.

LEARNING LIVES OF SERVICE

Working in DC as an adult, Symone is now seeing how little of the city she understood between home in Columbia Heights in Northwest and a straight commute to GDS. “I definitely felt like I only saw a small part of DC, and I definitely didn’t know about organizations like Courtney’s House that help survivors of trafficking in the DC area. I was always thinking about how we could fix problems globally, but I never thought, ‘How could we fix this in DC?’ I would have liked to have known more about what was happening across DC as a student.” 

Symone remembered the Wednesday community service from her High School years, during which students engaged in what she called “surface-level service projects.” She was thrilled to learn about the current, robust Community Engagement and Experiential Learning Program, the Policy and Advocacy Institute, and especially the work of the GDS Summit on Consent and Sexual Assault.

“That’s what I love about GDS. It’s always so innovative. You don’t hear about other high schools having that type of forum. It shows that GDS is serious about the work, has made it a program that goes deeper, and connects it to the students’ learning. And not just book-smarts either. They are actually getting that ‘street-smart.’ I love GDS.”

Learn more about Vital Voices Global Partnership at https://www.vitalvoices.org/.