Photo courtesy of Q. Hailey ‘21
By Rebecca Gagnon '23
Staff Writer
“What does it mean to be whole,” Q. Hailey ’12 asked herself. “How do we find wholeness in this period?”
These are some of the questions Hailey contemplated when deciding what topics to discuss in her series, Womanist Worship Sunday Exploring Wholeness. Each month has a separate topic revolving around self-care. In March, Hailey will focus on wellness dealing with personal, financial, family and other struggles.
Hailey is a full-time staff chaplain at New York-Presbyterian Brooklyn Methodist Hospital. The duty of a hospital chaplain is to offer religious guidance and services to patients and their families. Hailey also serves as a current Association of Clinical Pastoral Education Anton Boisen Scholar. She is now running the Womanist Worship Sunday at Mount Holyoke, using all of the skills she has gathered to help students discuss wholeness.
Hailey was asked by Mount Holyoke to lead a 2020 Martin Luther King Day service. “I came to this service from a womanist perspective,” Hailey said. “That was like, ‘Oh this is what we need. This is what we have been missing and this is what I have been looking for, is this specific lens to bring in some other students and get them involved.’”
While reflecting on the MLK Day service, Hailey and Annette McDermott, the dean of the Office of Religious and Spiritual Life, discussed the possibility of running a series of events at Mount Holyoke after Hailey mentioned her work with advocacy and mental health. Hailey was asked to send a layout of her ideas for the series and what she would like to discuss.
Hailey explained that her current work revolves around the pandemic and how people will move forward. This is part of what inspired the Mount Holyoke series. “I was thinking about what I hear most in the hospital and what I am feeling in myself that I would like to talk about,” Hailey said. “A lot of the things I have come across are people feeling broken, confused, and people having mental health issues, so that got me thinking about wholeness.”
Although Hailey has embraced this career path and aims to make underrepresented voices heard, this was not her original focus.
As a child, Hailey was involved in numerous activities, but the one thing that truly captured her heart was basketball. “I played basketball my whole life,” Hailey said with a smile. “It was through basketball that I realized that I was queer. I was able to be around other queer folks and that slowly helped me grow into my own.”
Although Hailey discovered this part of herself through basketball, she was forced to hide it from her family. Hailey recalled tip-toeing her way through conversations with her family, never knowing how much or how little to say. When her mother found out that she was queer, Hailey said it took years for them to navigate their relationship. “It’s crazy growing into our relationship as mother and daughter and her accepting 100 percent of me,” Hailey said.
From a young age, the church has been a great part of Hailey’s life. “Religion, theology and God have been a part of my life through my family,” Hailey explained. “Deacons, pastors and different types of folks involved with the church have been a major source in my life.” Yet, Hailey did not entertain the idea of becoming professionally involved with the church. Instead, she pursued business. Hailey first went to community college, where she got an associate degree in business administration. Convinced she was going to business school, she began looking into others, and her adviser told her to look into Mount Holyoke. Although she was not interested at first, she toured campus.
“When I came up for that visit that my community college sent me up to, there was a major snowstorm,” Hailey recalled. “Everything was frozen over, and I remember walking to the bridge between the gym and Torrey [Hall] and that waterfall. The waterfall was frozen over and there were big crunchy icicles, and I remember looking around and going, ‘Oh my God, this is gorgeous.’ Stepping onto the campus, I fell in love with the atmosphere.”
In her time at Mount Holyoke, Hailey coached basketball, worked with the Division of Student Life and founded the Women in Color Trailblazers Leadership Conference. This organization, according to the Mount Holyoke College website, “seeks to empower self-identifying women of color across the Five Colleges, Pioneer Valley and beyond; including faculty, staff and community members. This conference provides a space to celebrate the lives and accomplishments of women/girls of color while additionally opening dialogues and raising consciousness on issues relating to race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, class,” and more.
At the end of her Mount Holyoke career, Hailey applied to business school and was rejected. Tanya Wallace ’94, a former chaplain and the rector of All Saints’ Episcopal Church, approached Hailey and asked her what she was doing after graduation. When Hailey replied that she didn’t know, Wallace gave her the option to join the Union Theological Seminary. This was where Hailey later received her master’s in divinity with a focus in womanist queer ethics. She also worked for the Lawrence House, an intentional Christian living community sponsored by All Saints’, and now works as a full-time staff chaplain at New York-Presbyterian Brooklyn Methodist Hospital.
“My work history is all over the place,” Hailey said with a nod, “but the one thing that has been consistent is an advocacy component around mental health and trauma. So while I was at Mount Holyoke, I worked through the [Community-Based Learning program] with a place called Western Mass Recovery and Learning Community. They focused on non-medical model peer advocacy, so they taught people how to come off psych meds the right way [and] trained people how to take back their own accountability and be responsible for themselves, [all things] that the medical model in mental health doesn’t [teach].”
Although Hailey’s career history has had its ups and downs, she has found a way to help others, and that is something that she brought to Mount Holyoke as a student and now brings as an alumna through her wellness series.
“It’s open for everyone,” Hailey said with excitement. “It is Black feminist and womanist in nature so the language is going to be geared toward marginalized persons or from my own experience. I am very vulnerable. I have no issues sharing parts of me because I feel like the more vulnerable you are able to be when you are speaking to others, the more vulnerable they are able to be toward themselves.”
Registration information for upcoming events in the series is available on Embark.