Award Recipients

These two Brandeis undergraduates are presenting information about youth climate action with a focus on positive solutions and hope for the future at the UN Climate Conference of the Parties (COP27) in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt. As a result of this project, Brandeis University has been named a partner institution for the Youth Environmental Alliance in Higher Education (YEAH) program, which annually sends higher education students to the COP. Thus, future Brandeis students will have similar opportunities to learn, collaborate, and share with climate leaders from across multiple institutions around the world.

Fernanda is a Masters's student in the Heller School's Program in Conflict Resolution and Coexistence. Her project seeks to understand how universities can fulfill justice gaps in a transitional justice process by including the community in building ways to deal with the past. Specifically, she will work with the Catholic University of Chile, focusing on truth-telling, memorialization, and institutional acknowledgment
These Heller graduate students represent diverse minority groups from Burma and have personally experienced conflict in their home country. They will collaborate with the Karenni Refugee Peacebuilding Team, created previously with Karpf Hahn funding, to implement economic development activities for refugees living along the Myanmar/Thailand border. The project aims to economically empower the twenty most vulnerable and poorest refugee youth or young adults. The economic development project will be carried out in Karenni Refugee Camp One and Daw Noe Ku (a new camp for internally displaced persons).


Jessica will use her funding to support a senior thesis project in theater. It will be a culmination of monologues, scenes, short plays, and spoken word poetry that explore themes related to race, gender, and sexuality. The entire show, which will be performed on campus, will be comprised of original works created by women and femme artists who share her passion for using the performing arts as a means of social change.