Alumni
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Haydon Tucker
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Haydon has cultivated a love for service to others since childhood, but this love began to manifest itself with more direction as she began working with her school’s community service program in the ninth grade. Following that day, she spent every weekday afternoon tutoring elementary school students in the low-income west side of Chattanooga. Through this experience, Haydon gained countless friends, a passion for social and educational justice and for the inner city, and a new appreciation for the empowering nature of education and literacy, a principle that guided many of her future service endeavors.
Upon arriving in (and soon falling in love with) Nashville, Haydon began working with similar educational and social issues with students in East and West Nashville. Partnering with The After-school Program and Preston Taylor Ministries (PTM), she tutored and mentored elementary school students both individually and in classroom settings. She spent a summer working in-depth with PTM as the Assistant Program Director, and became more deeply involved with one-on-one mentoring of elementary school girls during the school year. After participating in a couple of service trips to Jamaica throughout high school, Haydon furthered her interest in international service work while working to fundraise and prepare for mission trips to Monte Plata, Dominican Republic. Throughout this time, she began to partner more with Kids Alive International, an organization providing care for children in deep poverty and dire situations worldwide, and began to learn more about effective service worldwide. Since beginning this partnership, she has spent a summer living and working in Monte Plata, partnering with the same school and children’s home that she has visited the past two years during spring break.
Haydon is immensely grateful for the opportunity to pair her service endeavors with her classroom lessons and Ingram meeting discussions. She could not be more ecstatic to be included such a driven and interested group of Ingram Scholars and is extremely thankful for Vanderbilt and the Ingram family’s generosity.