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Shmona Simpson studied for both a Masters in Global Health and a DPhil in Clinical Medicine at the University of Oxford. During her time here she was Chair of the Black Rhodes Scholars Association. She currently works as a Global Health Fellow at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in the USA.

The Oxford Pastorate serves a remarkable community with experience and expertise across a range of subjects. Dr Shmona Simpson was a member of our Christian Leadership and Service cohort in 2013/14. Shmona now works in research and development, specializing on tools and strategies to tackle pathogens with epidemic and pandemic potential. Shmona has also written a powerful op-ed ‘In Solidarity with Black Lives Matter’ for the Global Policy Journal which you can read at the link below. I caught up with Shmona via Zoom:

Shmona, tell me a little about yourself – where you grew up and how you came to Oxford and into the Pastorate’s orbit:

I am a Jamaican heritage woman and I grew up between Jamaica and the Cayman Islands. I came to England when I was 18, lived in London and studied Biomedical Sciences. The first time I came to Oxford, for a Masters programme in 2009, I came to study Global Health. We had 19 nationalities on our programme and that was so enriching and took me to Vietnam for work. And then I worked with Public Health England before returning to Oxford for the DPhil programme on a Rhodes Scholarship, funding I was fortunate to have. I attended St Aldates, I met the Revd Kate Seagrave [Pastorate team 2013-2017], and then I joined the Pastorate Christian Service and Leadership community The Pastorate created a very unique space with other people who wanted to delve into the Word and who wanted to understand and foster a better relationship with God, so it was an opportunity to do that in community. It is true that even in my time there was not tremendous diversity in Oxford and that was reflected in the Pastorate. So, it was a very wholesome community in many ways and maybe not so in others. I thank you guys for the way in which you bring us into your home and into your care and provide space for us to be in community – I would definitely add that plug for the Pastorate!

Thank you, Shmona! We will come back to issues of diversity but, first, tell me something about your current work. I know you work on pandemics and, indeed, on coronaviruses among other things:

Yes, sure. I work on pathogens. I think they’re very clever – tiny things that continually outsmart us, they are probably the most dangerous things on this planet. Since leaving Oxford I’ve been working with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and my primary remit is programmatic innovation, problem solving and strategy development. One of my favourite projects was developing a blueprint for pandemic preparedness – how do we accelerate the development of vaccines, diagnostics and therapeutics in case of a pandemic. I love what I work on – for such a time as this!

You’ve just written an extremely powerful article calling on the global development community to respond in new ways to the hugely important conversation around race that’s been re-ignited by the killing of George Floyd. Could you offer us an introduction to that article and why you felt compelled to write it?

That piece was a spiritual outpouring. We spend a lot of time focusing on humility in the faith – the Lord says when we do good things, we should not be loud about it, we should do them quietly. To check yourself, would be a modern way of putting it. Asking about your intentions, why you do the things you do. So, I felt impassioned to ask the development community, “Are we really here to serve and who are we serving? Are we serving ourselves or are we serving people?” Often the way we measure success is grounded in a very self-serving model. Maybe our approach is very paternalistic, and we should change our ways to create more of an enabling environment for the people we’re trying to serve. The Word shows that this is particularly important for Christian agencies, to ask why we serve and how we measure success.

Checking ourselves is not something we can outsource to others. Nonetheless, we at the Pastorate would welcome wise words from someone like you who has been through the Oxford experience, knows us and has a different perspective. What advice would you give us about what we could do, even in small ways, here in Oxford?

Well, there’s ‘macro’ Oxford, ‘Christian’ Oxford, and Oxford ‘Pastorate’, so I’ll do the three! Having spent five years of my life in the Oxford institution, I’ll say it’s deeply rooted in its past, very proud of its legacy, and filled with colonial money, colonial curricula, and colonial architecture, so you have to understand that as a space it’s not entirely enabling for people who’ve been brutally colonised. It’s a hostile environment as you walk into it. Its posture tells one side of a story. The irony is that, propelled and funded by this legacy, the World also rates it as the best university. Yes, the best students academically from all over the world deserve to attend the “best institution” and utilize that capital. However, there’s a lot of dissonance for anybody who comes to this place as a black woman, representing two categories that the institution has historically discriminated against. Oxford should use this time to remedy the ways in which it has participated in and benefitted from discrimination. The second level is Christian Oxford - we cannot deny that the micro-environment we have in the church is fed and shaped by that Oxford institution. I do remember some very jarring moments in the church around race and gender. The church in Oxford has to reckon with the low diversity there, given the irony that the majority of Christians in the world are African, and the ‘average’ Christian is a black, African woman who does not have wealth. And for lots of people the Christian church does feel hostile because of the way Christianity came to many African people. We must grapple with the fact that the Word has been used to legitimize oppression. For the Pastorate itself, because we have this opportunity to engage one-on-one it can be a very healing environment to explore the legacy of Christianity, how it is very different for all of us, how we as peoples come to faith differently, and explore the complexities of the faith. These things are hard but they do plague us all. If we’re going to be supporting students in Oxford of different races, it’s important to know they come to these things differently, and to engage and to meet them there because that can be very powerful work. And, indeed, powerful ways of bringing more people to the faith. My smartest friends at Oxford would ask me, “how are you Black and a Christian? How are these things both part of your identity?” So, I would love the Pastorate to call us to act and to engage around these issues, to create an enabling environment around these discussions. There’s a lot of work to do to equitably support people of colour. Sorry, that’s an incredibly long answer to a simple question!

Not at all – and it’s definitely not a simple question! Thank you, Shmona. I’m so grateful for your time.

Read Shmona’s article, ‘In Solidarity with Black Lives Matter, The Development Sector Must Reform’ here https://www.globalpolicyjourna...