Brodhead, Kentucky, is a town with a population of just over a thousand. It’s more than an hour from the nearest Target, the nearest private school, and the nearest commercial airport. It used to have one stoplight, but it was recently removed.
It’s also home sweet home for University of Notre Dame junior Ella Bussell.
She grew up attending the elementary school where her mom taught first grade and then the high school where her dad was principal. She went to Mass at her county’s one, very small parish. And she developed a deep love for the surrounding Appalachian Mountains as well as the two restaurants in town, such as the Hog Pen, which was built in a renovated barn.
Bussell loves being from a small town, especially the way the community supports and invests in each other. But she also knows the struggles of living in a place limited by structural isolation.
“It’s basically a fancy term for rurality,” she said. “It just means that because of the way that the world has urbanized — and it’s rapidly urbanizing, especially today — we’re driving talent and infrastructure out of more rural areas.”
Bussell now wants to give back to Brodhead and improve life in small towns around the world by researching structural isolation, now with the support of the Obama-Chesky Voyager Scholarship for Public Service.
Created by Barack and Michelle Obama and Brian Chesky, CEO of Airbnb, the Voyager Scholarship gives young leaders two years of financial aid and leadership development to help them launch careers in public service. The highlight of the program is the Summer Voyage, a work-travel experience designed by each Voyager to give them experience in their field.
Bussell will spend her Summer Voyage visiting rural communities in at least three countries in order to observe structural isolation in different contexts, hopefully uncovering strategies for managing resources and overcoming regional challenges.
The experience will be a culmination and continuation of the service and study Bussell has already completed at Notre Dame. In the last two years since venturing away from home, she’s connected with new places, people, and ideas she couldn’t have found otherwise.
“Since I’ve been at Notre Dame, very fitting opportunities have become available to me,” she said. “I get to meet a really diverse network of people and just really enjoy the work I’m doing.”
Finding familiarity far away
When Bussell first came to Notre Dame, she didn’t really know she was from a small town. And she didn’t realize her experience growing up had been so drastically different from that of many of her peers until she went to a different continent.
Through the Kellogg Institute’s Pre-Experiencing the World Fellowship Program, Bussell and seven other Notre Dame undergraduate students traveled to Livingstone, Zambia, for a service-learning experience during summer break after her freshman year. Working with the African Impact Foundation, her group taught local schoolgirls soft skills like leadership and relationship building. They also helped with miscellaneous community service projects, from picking up litter to running a soccer club.
Bussell said she learned a lot from interacting with the different cultures her students came from, but something really started clicking when she heard some of the inconveniences her companions were complaining about, from the slow Wi-Fi to not being able to buy dry-erase markers at the stores in town.
“I was like, ‘Hold up, wait,’” she said, “because that was also what life was like growing up.”
Bussell realized there had to be something more there — a reason she was noticing similarities between Brodhead and Livingstone, a city in a developing country.
Beyond troubles with internet and school supplies, both communities also face problems with access to education. Many high schoolers in Brodhead struggle to find good opportunities to attend college, especially if they want to leave Kentucky, and the closest medical school to Livingstone is a four-hour bus ride away, Bussell said, leading to high dropout rates.
But some of the issues in Livingstone were entirely new to Bussell, like teaching young girls coming from tribes with separate languages and dialects. Though English is Zambia’s official language, the girls often struggled communicating with each other, let alone their American teachers.
Bussell started asking a question she knew would have various but essential answers: “What does it mean to come from a community where you don’t have every resource at your fingertips?”
Of course, Bussell said, living in a small town isn’t all tribulation; in Brodhead, she doesn’t have to lock her car, and it’s easy for her to depend on her neighbors. Small towns teach community reliance and ingenuity.
“There are really beautiful parts of coming from a place like that, but also places where there’s room for improvement,” Bussell said. “And I don’t think there’s much better of a calling than being able to give back to a community that has given you so much.”
Taking advantage of opportunities
Bussell’s plans for her Summer Voyage aren’t set in stone, but she would like to conduct research in Australia, Kenya, and Ireland.
Australia, as an island, deals with physical isolation from the rest of the world, and individual Australian communities in the outback are often separated by miles of bush. Bussell wants to observe that scope of isolation that isn’t present in the U.S. and learn from Australia’s successful education system.
In Kenya, Bussell plans to work with the Rural Afrique Institute Foundation to explore community-driven development and agriculture initiatives. As rurality is almost the standard in much of Africa, with infrastructure divides isolating even urban centers, Kenya provides a key context for Bussell’s research. Ireland will give Bussell a European perspective and reveal challenges that persist in areas with longer histories of development.
Bussell knows she can learn a lot from the facts and figures about rurality that are already available, but actually traveling to rural communities will bring her research to the next level.
“I’ve been blessed with a great work ethic, and if I can learn how to channel it, I can really do something with my life. I really want to make a difference.”
“You can look at data all day long, but until you have a conversation with someone who’s actively experiencing it, it’s really difficult to understand,” Bussell said.
Until her Summer Voyage begins, Bussell has plenty to keep her busy. She has a full class load with a major in political science and three minors: philosophy, politics, and economics; education, schooling, and society; and the Hesburgh Program in Public Service.
Outside of class, Bussell has served in Notre Dame Student Government since her first year, recently becoming the national affairs and political engagement director in the executive cabinet, a role responsible for encouraging her fellow students to vote in upcoming elections.
She’s involved in Undergraduate Admissions as a rural admissions intern, and she’s in the process of founding a student club called Rural Students at Notre Dame, fostering success for the rural students who will come after her.
Since Zambia, Bussell has taken other educational, immersive trips to Geneva, Rome, and Vietnam. And as a Sullivan Undergraduate Saints Fellow with the McGrath Institute for Church Life, she went on a pilgrimage to Poland at the beginning of this past summer.
She’s also an active member of the Transformational Leaders Program, which helped her find many of the opportunities that now fill her resume, and she finds time for her faith, too, leading a campus saint group focusing on Saint Thérèse of Lisieux.
Bussell has a lot on her plate, but she’s right where she wants to be.
“I’ve been blessed with a great work ethic, and if I can learn how to channel it, I can really do something with my life,” Bussell said. “I really want to make a difference.”
