Class of 1996 Profile: Scott Pryor

As part of the celebration of the 15th anniversary of the YTI Class of 1996, YTI alumni are interviewing each other, discovering and recording what is happening in the lives of our YTI family today. If you are a member of the class of 1996, and would like to participate in this project, contact Sara Toering at sjtoering@gmail.com

Scott is interviewed here by Sara Toering:

Scott spent his senior year of high school being home schooled. Along with several other YTI 1996 alum, he also attended EPU for two summers in Washington, D.C., a program designed to examine common threads among Jewish, Catholic and Protestant traditions regarding religious teachings that encourage work toward the common good. After graduating high school, Scott spent a fall playing the open mic circuit in Boston, MA and then moved to Guatemala for several months where he learned Spanish and volunteered at a Methodist orphanage. In the fall of 1998 Scott entered Guilford college where he majored in religious studies and sociology and spent a semester abroad in Mexico studying Paulo Freire’s thinking and community development. Scott graduated in 2002 and summed up his Guilford experience in the following way: “If YTI was my introduction to activism, then Guilford was the place where I started putting it into practice in stronger ways.” In college Scott got involved in trying to keep a bookstore from being outsourced, did prison justice work, spent a summer with fellow 1996 alum Hannah Loring-Davis at the Center for Non-Violence in California and another summer working with migrant farmworkers in western North Carolina. After a brief jaunt to Missouri upon graduation from college, Scott returned to Greensboro, NC where he worked for three years as an organizer for the Greensboro Truth and Community Reconciliation Project. Since 2005 Scott has been primarily teaching high school Spanish and history and playing and recording music full time—his third album, “If We Set Out Now” is available at www.scottpryormusic.com. Scott currently resides in Austin, TX where he is playing lots of music and pursuing a masters in American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.

YTI definitely affected Scott’s life. Scott described how YTI functioned as a rite of passage for him—an entrance into adulthood in the sense that he associates YTI with his whole worldview being opened up and reconfigured. He learned to question things he had taken for granted in the past, for example, he learned to question institutional racism. “Simply put-YTI is a marker for when I was introduced to themes and issues and passions and interests that have continued to preoccupy me since then.” Scott also described the friendships that YTI created in his life, friendships that are “like family at this point and lord willing will continue to be for many years to come.”


The question that Scott is struggling with now—one he described as “pervasive and ever present”—is his ongoing discernment process about vocation and balancing his artistic practice with making a living. Although he is open to the possibility that discernment may never be done, he is wrestling with what balance looks like, and whether balance is worth shooting for or even cultivating an expectation about. How do we balance our passions/gifts with being 31 and having to make a living and put roof over our heads? Scott shared his reflections on the rampant growth and disparity of wealth in the world at large, and the ways in which we often have a disproportionate sense that incredible wealth is actually the norm rather than the exception because most of us do not encounter the 90-95% of the world that is not experiencing wealth. At the same time, Scott shared that he, like many of his peers, is realizing that he desires certain comforts/aspects of having money. He is wrestling with that reality and how he is leading his life in a way that is not financially self-sustaining. What function does money or should money serve in our lives? What kind of energy does our money generate? How is our money used?



After a long discussion about the various issues and questions that Scott raised about the world, he asked me to share a very specific message with all of our 1996 alumni: “We should all get together in Cannon Chapel for a hoedown!”