Goluboff Announced as Interim Executive Director of the Shepherd Higher Education Consortium The professor of cultural anthropology will serve a dual role leading Community-Based Learning and the SHECP Consortium.

By Brian Laubscher
January 5, 2024

Sascha L. Goluboff, director of community-based learning (CBL) and professor of cultural anthropology at Washington and Lee University, has been named the interim executive director of the Shepherd Higher Education Consortium on Poverty (SHECP). Goluboff succeeds Tim Diette, who led the program since the nonprofit returned to W&L’s campus in 2021. Diette is transitioning to his new role as dean of faculty at Hampden-Sydney College.

Goluboff has been a member of the W&L faculty since 1999, most recently teaching courses in cultural anthropology within the community-based learning program. Among them is a cultural anthropology class titled Narrating Our Stories: Culture, Society and Identity, which she taught at the Augusta Correctional Center and involved both W&L students and incarcerated individuals. She is trained as an instructor in the Inside-Out model from the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program, which facilitates dialogue and education across profound social differences; she currently serves as the program’s Virginia state coordinator.

“I am excited to lead the consortium,” said Goluboff. “When I first came to W&L, I watched in admiration as Professor Harlan Beckley led the building of this wonderful program. As my work in poverty studies has deepened through my community-based learning initiatives and own class offerings, I feel I am well suited to work with the amazing SHECP team to continue to offer robust programming for our affiliated faculty, staff and interns while also developing new offerings to facilitate even more networking and scholarship opportunities year-round. As we plan our 2024 internship season, I look forward to a wonderful summer of learning and growing together.”

Goluboff has presented her work in numerous journals, workshops and public exhibitions. She is the recipient of several grants and fellowships from the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and the American Philosophical Society, and she serves as chair of W&L’s Community Engagement and Service-Learning Committee. Her past university service also includes serving as head of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, as well as interim head of the Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies program.

Goluboff’s prior leadership experiences make her uniquely qualified to serve a dual role as head of both the SHECP and CBL programs. As SHECP’s director, Goluboff will serve as a key ambassador and advocate for the consortium. She will work closely with SHECP’s governing board, council and member schools to continue preparing students for a lifetime of diminishing poverty and to further connections between faculty, staff and students across the field.

“Professor Goluboff has distinguished herself as an excellent teacher-scholar in anthropology and leader of our Community-Based Learning program,” said Chawne Kimber, Dean of the College. “These achievements bring cultural domain knowledge for Shepherd and a strategic sense for the impact that Shepherd programs across the country make on their local communities.”

Goluboff holds bachelor’s degrees in sociology and anthropology and Russian studies from Colgate University, master’s and doctorate degrees in anthropology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a Master of Fine Arts in fiction writing from Pacific University.

“We are excited to welcome Sascha to SHECP and to continue the wonderful work we are doing to support our schools, faculty and staff, and students in expanding and improving educational opportunities related to poverty studies,” said Mindy Wilson, chair of the SHECP governing board. “Her wealth of administrative and community-engaged learning experience will be an asset as we move into our 26th year as an organization.”

About the Shepherd Higher Education Consortium on Poverty (SHECP)
The Shepherd Higher Education Consortium on Poverty (SHECP) is a consortium of colleges and universities committed to the study of poverty as a complex social problem by expanding and improving educational opportunities for college students in a wide range of disciplines and career trajectories. SHECP member schools support undergraduates as they move toward a lifetime of professional and civic efforts to diminish poverty and enhance human capability. For more information, please visit www.shepherdconsortium.org.

In 2021, Washington and Lee University (W&L) was selected as the new academic home of the Shepherd Higher Education Consortium on Poverty (SHECP) following a competitive application process. The move marked a return of SHECP to W&L’s campus, where the first Shepherd Program was established thanks to a 1996 gift from W&L alumnus Tom Shepherd ’52 and his wife, Nancy, and where the consortium was established in 1998 as the Shepherd Poverty Alliance under the leadership of Harlan Beckley, the Fletcher Otey Thomas Professor of Religion Emeritus at W&L.