Student Leaders Dylan France '24 and Andi-Rose Oates '26 Becoming Agents of Change Who Amplify Black Voices (Podcast)
Syracuse University has a proud and storied tradition of honoring Black History Month through a series of engaging and thought-provoking student-run programs, events and discussions occurring through March 3 on campus.
The theme for this year’s celebrations is “Existing Outside the Lines: The Colors of Resistance,” and through a lens of intersectionality as art, student organizers like Dylan France ’24 hope to express both the rich diversity present within the Black community, and the broad spectrum of color that Blackness holds.
“If you look across campus, there’s so many students from so many different backgrounds doing all these amazing things. To highlight that creativity and the different leadership efforts from students, that’s the goal: to showcase all these different avenues and outlets while demonstrating how we’re existing beyond the lines of what, traditionally, blackness is looked as,” says France, a dual major studying finance and real estate in the Martin J. Whitman School of Management.
France and sophomore Andrea-Rose Oates ’26 are among the many passionate and talented Black student leaders who have become agents of change for their peers during their time on campus. And France and Oates are committed to helping train a new generation of student leaders.
France serves as the comptroller for the Student Association, is one of two undergraduate representatives to the Board of Trustees, belongs to both the Renée Crown University Honors Program and the Black Honors Society, and is a member of the Black History Month Committee.
Oates is an energetic leader of Dimensions, a peer-to-peer mentoring program geared toward self-identified women of color. Ever since she was a child, Oates has been inspired to do good and make her community a better place. But that drive intensified in the summer of 2020 after George Floyd died in police custody in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
“That’s when I became passionate about my advocacy work, whether it was talking about the issues affecting the Black population within America and the world, really focusing on that and getting more involved with not only my advocacy, but my direct action to bring about change in these issues,” says Oates, who is studying both public relations in the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications and policy studies in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs.
On this “’Cuse Conversation,” France and Oates discuss what fueled their involvement as student leaders and how they hope to inspire other students to become agents of change, explore what their Black heritage and Black culture means to them, share how they found community on campus and offer up their highlights from the Black History Month celebrations.
Check out episode 157 of the “’Cuse Conversations” podcast featuring France and Oates. A transcript [PDF] is also available.
