Elon Graduates Serve Alamance County Through Year of Service Fellowships

Sam Hinton graduated from Elon University last spring and could have left for a city with bigger opportunities. Instead, she reports to the Alamance County Health Department's Behavioral Health and Substance Use Division, helping staff navigate one of the region's most urgent problems: the opioid crisis.

Hinton, a member of Elon's Class of 2025, is among a cohort of recent graduates now embedded across Alamance County through the university's Year of Service Fellowship program, which places graduates with local organizations for a full year of community work focused on health, education and economic opportunity.

The fellowship offered something her academic background alone couldn't provide, she said: "a more hands-on role here as opposed to research." Hinton came to the position with relevant grounding. As a Lumen Scholar at Elon, she conducted research on immigration policy and health-care access in Alamance County, giving her detailed familiarity with the structural barriers residents face when trying to reach services. That foundation carried over directly into her fellowship work, where she connects research on access barriers with active service partnerships and event planning within the county.

Elon highlighted the cohort in a feature published April 3, 2026. Beyond Hinton's placement, other Class of 2025 fellows are embedded with nonprofit and civic organizations throughout Alamance County, supporting education initiatives, public-health outreach and community development work aligned to locally identified needs.

For county agencies, the program addresses a persistent structural pressure: recruiting credentialed professionals in specialized fields like public health and community organizing to smaller municipalities competing against larger markets. Fellows provide trained, post-graduate capacity at low cost to host organizations, along with a potential pipeline for future hiring. Elon pairs that placement with mentorship and professional development, positioning fellows to remain in the county or return to it once the fellowship year ends.

The model has particular salience in Alamance County, where opioid response demands sustained, specialized attention. Hinton's trajectory, from campus Lumen research to a front-line county health role, is precisely the kind of local talent retention the program is designed to produce: graduates who don't just study Alamance County's problems from a distance, but show up to help solve them.