Civic Dispatch: Boomeranging Back to Jasper - One Walker Countian’s Long Journey Back Home
By: Melaina Munson
For many, talking about staying in their hometown often is accompanied by a sigh of regret, but not for Sydney. Her face lit up with enthusiasm as she told me, “I was born here, raised here, tried to leave a few times but just kept coming back like a boomerang.” She laughed and added, “You know, Jasper always gets the best of me,” Her laughter echoing throughout the room.
Sydney Banks is a Jasper native who was raised here alongside her two sisters. Although she looks back on her childhood fondly, growing up, she always dreamed of leaving Walker County.
“That’s the dream growing up, everyone hears stories of people who moved to New York City or somewhere,” Sydney says. When she was younger, “everywhere and everything seemed so much better than here, but I didn’t have a way out.”
Yet, when I first met Sydney through my work as an intern in the Jean O’Connor-Snyder Internship Program in Walker County, as part of the Mathews Center’s partnership with UA’s New College and the Walker Area Community Foundation, she couldn’t have been more excited to tell me about Jasper and her work in the community.
But her path to that sense of pride and purpose wasn’t always so clear.
In high school, Sydney felt stuck without anyone to look up to. She had no one who had achieved what she wanted or to help guide her onto the right path. Despite this, she followed in the footsteps of her friends and attended Bevill State Community College and then later transferred to the University of Alabama. At school, she studied accounting but spent most of her time trying to explore what life had to offer.
Sydney looks back at that time in college with laughter, mostly confused by how she was able to make it through college. She told me lots of stories and jokes that she really lived life to its fullest. “I mean, I was that friend who everyone would joke that they’d call me one day, and I’d just randomly be in Mexico.” Outside of traveling, she worked her way through college as a lifeguard and a waitress and landed a job in Birmingham at Barringer CPA after graduating with a degree in accounting.
With her new life in Birmingham and an impressive job she never thought she could have, Sydney said, “I really thought that’s what I wanted, you know.” Despite all this, she found herself constantly daydreaming of moving—not to an exotic country or a major city—but rather the place she’d always called home. She finally realized, “I had done all the meeting new people and exploring, but nothing compared (to Jasper)... I started to appreciate the simple things because when you start getting to all these bigger places, nobody cares about you.”
After searching for a job in Jasper, she found a role at Kellum Wilson & Associates PC and finally returned home.
“Coming back to Jasper was the best decision I ever made,” Sydney said. “I mean I’ve been all over and the people just don’t compare.”
At Kellum Wilson & Associates PC, Sydney’s work focused on auditing non-profits. This led her to become involved with The Collective, a group of 50 young professionals in the Walker Area community who work with the Walker Area Community Foundation on leadership development. After this introduction to the foundation, she became involved in grant reviewing.
While telling me about her non-profit work, Sydney suddenly lit up, every hand gesture becoming more animated as she said, “I wish I knew this was something that existed when I was younger.” She explained how it felt like the perfect way to channel her servant heart, and it has truthfully transformed how she sees her community.
During her first grant review, she evaluated a battered women’s shelter outside of Birmingham. She shared a moment she had sitting in the rooftop garden at the shelter while at one of her first site visits. All around her were beautiful plants, and she remembers watching as one of the clients’ sons came rushing up to her, hugging his mother as they were finally reunited. In this moment, with tears in her eyes, she was able to see the important work that these non-profits did for her community.
“I mean it’s just such a full circle moment,” she said. “Yeah you can read about it on the internet, but when you see it in person and get involved yourself, it’s just really crazy.”
She credits the work she did with changing her perspective on life and her community.
“I think that while everyone doesn’t need to be a grant reviewer, they need “to see the people in their community; it really changed my whole perspective on life.”
When asked how her experiences have changed her view on Jasper, she told me that when she was younger, she “Hated it. You have this idea that there’s this whole other world out there and that Walker County sucks.”
Now, she is passionate about retention in Jasper and showing young people that Jasper is not a bad place to live. A strong believer in “everywhere you go is what you make of it,” Sydney says, “Of course you can leave, but I’ve been in tons of places and nowhere compares. People here care about you, and that says a lot because most people are just living for themselves, but not the people here.”
By working with non-profits, she’s realized that lots of places are stagnant and think they’re fine with just keeping on. But the people in Walker County?
“We try to do something just a little bit better every year, and that really makes all the difference.”
Photo Credit: Walker Area Community Foundation
Melaina is a sophomore Chemistry major at The University of Alabama, participating in the Randall Research Scholars Program and the McCollough Program for Pre-Medical Scholars.
This summer, she was placed with Northwest Alabama Mental Health, supporting their transition to becoming a Certified Community Behavioral Health Clinic (CCBHC). Her role involved helping integrate mental illness and substance use disorder treatment, developing 24/7 mobile crisis teams, and improving patient access to mental health care.