Meet Our Scholars
Sydney Rinehart
University of Michigan-Ann Arbor
Social Work
She/Her/Hers
Flagship
Rand Skolnick Endowed Scholarship
Sydney Rinehart is a bisexual woman who was born and raised in Illinois. She graduated from the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) in 2019 with a bachelor’s in applied psychology, where she first came out and found her queer family while serving as a volunteer and president at the InTouch Crisis and Support Hotline. As an undergraduate, she served on five research projects pertaining to social justice, inequality, and healthcare access. She designed an emergency room intervention to educate friends and family of rape survivors in support techniques, and she interned as a group co-facilitator with individuals convicted of domestic violence as an alternative to incarceration. Currently, she works at the Northwestern Juvenile Project, a longitudinal study of mental health needs and outcomes of youths after incarceration. She is the founder and co-director of Galentine’s Day, an annual celebration and fundraiser for cis and trans women and gender non-conforming people. In the fall, Sydney will begin her master’s degree in social work at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, where she will work as a graduate student instructor for a women and gender studies course. She will work with Dr. Ashley Lacombe-Duncan, coordinating community-based participatory research projects focused on understanding and addressing barriers to healthcare access among LGBTQ+ people, with a particular focus on trans women living with HIV. Sydney believes in a community response to justice that restores, repairs, and rebuilds while divesting from systems of punishment. She will use her career to pursue new pathways to justice.