ELLIOT AND ANN RICHARDSON FUND FELLOWSHIPS IN PUBLIC SERVICE
Fellowship description and application procedures
Meet recent Richardson Fellows in Public Service
Frequently asked questions (FAQs)
Purpose:
Elliot and Anne Richardson Fellowships in Public Service provide outstanding students contemplating a career in public service with the opportunity to spend a year in the U.S. or abroad gaining concrete experience with, and understanding of, the sort of problem or issue that their contemplated public service would address.
For Harvard fellowships, “public service” is defined as work that:
- helps people meet their need for food, shelter, and health;
- improves educational and employment opportunities;
- educates people about their legal and/or civil rights;
- protects the environment and/or wildlife; and/or
- supports the general welfare.
Individually or within an organization, work must ordinarily be nonprofit, nondenominational, and nonpartisan.
Eligibility:
The fellowship is intended primarily for graduating seniors in Harvard College who aim to gain some practical experience in the year after graduation before beginning work or graduate school. In unusual circumstances, students enrolled in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and in other Harvard graduate or professional schools may also be eligible. [For graduate and professional students, eligibility is limited to those candidates who will be on full-year leaves of absence from their programs who will not yet have finished their degrees upon beginning their fellowship projects.]
Benefits:
Up to three awards of $25,000 each will be offered annually.
Restrictions:
The tenure of each Richardson Fellowship will be between nine and twelve months, depending upon the nature of the project and the living expenses necessary to pursuing it, and will normally occur during one academic year. Recipients may not be enrolled as candidates for any academic degree or otherwise engaged in academic study during the period of the fellowship. While recipients may hold other grants or fellowships and/or receive compensation from their organization, they may do so only with the approval of the body administering the Richardson Fellowships and only if the combination of other such funding sources does not exceed the amount of their Richardson Fellowship grant.
Selection Criteria:
Richardson Fellowships are to be awarded to students who show outstanding promise of serving in the public or nonprofit sectors. For purposes of this Fellowship, commitment to serving the public good is a more important defining feature of “public service” than whether a job is on a governmental payroll or within a tax-exempt organization.
As stipulated by the donors' terms establishing this program, each Richardson Fellow should meet the following criteria:
- Each awardee should have personal characteristics that well suit him or her to a potential career in public service and to benefitting from their fellowship year. These characteristics should include drive or energy, caring or a ready empathetic understanding of the plight and position of others, an ability to lead or persuade, and commitment to the public good as distinct from merely private ambition.
- Each awardee should show, whether on the basis of past involvements or in the proposal for the fellowship year, that he or she is seriously contemplating a career in public service, to which the experience gained in the fellowship year would make a valuable contribution.
- Each awardee must present a proposal for the fellowship year containing a well thought-out plan for engaging in non-academic activities calculated to provide direct experience of an important public-policy problem or of promising ways of dealing with public-policy problems. Although such experience may also ultimately aid awardees in their pursuit of higher academic or professional degrees, this potential benefit will not be a primary factor in the selection of awardees.
Procedures
Applications are available in the Fellowships Office at OCS at the beginning of the spring semester and are due on March 12. Applications will be reviewed by a selection committee, which will call finalists for interviews before choosing recipients. A follow-up report is required of all recipients.
Application includes:
- an application form;
- a one-page list of activities or resume;
- a current official transcript;
- an essay of not more than 1,000 words outlining project plans;
- a budget proposal;
- two letters of recommendation; and
- in the case of a proposal to work with an organization, a statement from that organization confirming a place for the student.
The application deadline for 2008-2009 fellowships is Wednesday, March 12, 2008, 12:00 noon, in the Fellowships Office at OCS.
Information Session:
The Fellowships Office will present an information session on
“Public Service Grants” (including the Richardson Fellowships) on
Wednesday, February 13, at 3:00 pm in the OCS Conference Room.
Meet Recent Richardson Fellows in Public Service
Fellows for 2007-08:
Ifunanya Ejebe '07 (Biology; Quincy House)
Ifunanya is spending the year working with the Sickle Cell Disease International Foundation for Research and Treatment in Kumasi , Ghana , helping to implement a health management program for local teenagers with the disease.
Rajan Sonik '07 (Biochemical Sciences; Adams House)
In partnership with Project HEALTH, Rajan is working this year to bring STRIVE programs to New York City —STRIVE is a mentoring, support, and education program dedicated to helping low-income teenagers with sickle cell disease succeed in school and life.
Andrew Sternlight '07 ( Social Studies; Pforzheimer House)
Andrew is spending this year working to expand Higher Edge, a college preparation program in Los Angeles he co-founded and co-directs that helps make elite university education more accessible to high-achieving public school students from low-income backgrounds.
Fellows for 2006-2007:
Mae Bunagan '06 (Social Studies; Mather House)
Mae spent the year after graduation with Centro Presente in Cambridge , Massachusetts , working to establish a Latino Immigrant Workers Center . She helped revise ESL curricula, update information on labor and immigration laws, and establish connections with other immigrant-led organizations.
Joseph Pace '06 (Social Studies; Mather House)
After graduating, Joe spent a year stationed in Cairo , Egypt pursuing two projects in tandem—working with Human Rights Watch to document regional human rights abuses, and working on a web-based publication that features voices from Syria 's activist community.
Amy Pasternack '06 (Biochemical Sciences; Leverett House)
Amy spent the year after graduation working for the Valley Health Center at San Martín, in Santa Clara Valley , California , doing outreach and needs assessment to enhance the clinic's work with the large local community of migrant workers.
Fellows for 2005-2006:
Jie Hae (Jessica) Choi '05 (Eliot House)
In the year following graduation, Jessica spent a year in Seoul , South Korea , working for Citizens' Alliance for North Korean Human Rights on a variety of local and international projects that coincided with her interests in advocacy, education, and relief activities for refugees.
Luz Gonzalez '05 (Currier House)
Adapting the curriculum used by Strong Women, Strong Girls, Luz spent her postgraduate year putting together a mentoring and community service program in Yuma , Arizona primarily for high school girls living in the city's low-income housing.
Danielle Li '05 ( Quincy House)
Danielle spent the year after graduation working as a volunteer for the Seva Mandir/Poverty Action Lab in southern Rajasthan , India , where she helped to assess the effectiveness of several public health interventions through front-line interactions in dozens of rural villages.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs):
Can a student pursue more than one project as a Richardson Fellow?
Yes, and this is a great feature of the fellowship. While an applicant can propose work with a single organization during the year, it is also fair to propose a series of experiences that relate to or illustrate a larger theme, provided the project considered as a whole demonstrates merit, soundness, and practicality. The fellowship has supported proposals of each type over the years.
Can a student pursue projects in more than one location as a Richardson Fellow?
Yes, and this is another great feature of the fellowship. Just as a student may design a series of experiences that relate to or illustrate a larger theme, these experiences may take place in different geographical locations, even including a combination of domestic and international experiences—provided the project considered as a whole still demonstrates merit, soundness, and practicality.
Must the project proposed be policy-oriented?
Not necessarily. The donors' hope is to support experiences that will allow recipients to become more intellectually and practically informed about an issue and/or an organization, ideally in order to contribute to policy-making in the future. But the project itself does not have to be policy-oriented.
May teams of students apply for funding?
Nothing in the donors' terms establishing this program specifically rules out joint applications, but these terms are clear in supporting formative individual experiences, and selection committees have found them much more conducive to evaluating individuals and their proposals than teams and their proposals. In practice, joint applications are probably untenable.
