Farida Ali
Columbia University Farida is a committed activist for social justice who focuses her efforts on issues surrounding poverty and immigration, especially as experienced by women. In May of 2007 she completed her bachelor’s degree, a double major in Asian American and Comparative Ethnic Studies at Columbia University’s Center for Ethnicity and Race. Much of her academic work has centered on exploring ways in which U.S. immigration policies have shaped Asian American communities and the lives of women within them. She considers this an especially vital topic since Asian women are one of the largest groups presently migrating to the United States. As a resident of Queens, NY, Farida works with such organizations as the Philippine Forum, Bridge to Life, Asian Americans for Equality (AAFE), the Justice 4 Immigrants (J4I) Filipino Coalition, and the National Alliance for Filipino Concerns (NAFCON), a national alliance of Filipino organizations, institutions and individuals in the United States. Plans for the future include a law degree, which Farida intends to use to expand the scope of her activism and advocacy, and increasing involvement in the planning and implementation of programs designed to benefit women, immigrants, and the poor.
Rudi Batzell Columbia University Rudi Batzell grew up in the rural Midwest, first in Milan, Michigan and later in East Troy, Wisconsin. He graduated from East Troy Public High School, where he played football and ran track, and served as President of the Student Cabinet and the National Honor Society Minerva chapter. Rudi currently attends Columbia University, where he is majoring in sociology and history. Labor history and the sociology of class formation are his main interests, which he has pursued in a wide variety of contexts, from Russian peasants, to American slaves, to industrial laborers and undocumented immigrant workers. In the spring of 2007 Rudi coauthored a paper with Professor Karen Barkey of the Sociology Department at Columbia titled “Comparisons Across Empire: Critical Social Structures of the Ottomans, Russians and Habsburgs,” to be published in the forthcoming Empires in Contention: Sociology, History, and Cultural Difference edited by P.F Bang and C.A. Bayly. In addition to his academic work, Rudi is also involved in political activism on campus for immigrant rights, peace, and workers rights, and he volunteers as a teacher for Harlem fifth-graders in a conflict resolution program. Also during the summer of 2007, Rudi will be a History Scholar at the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History in New York City as part of a six-week research program on early African-American abolitionists. Rudi plans to pursue a PhD in either history or sociology after graduating from Columbia.
Denise Bailey-Castro
University of Pennsylvania
Denise Bailey-Castro is a rising junior at the University of Pennsylvania, double majoring in Economics and Urban Studies, with a minor in Mathematics. A native of New York City, Denise attended the prestigious Chapin School on Manhattan’s Upper East Side as an A Better Chance Scholar, thus exposing her to lifestyles and opportunities that differed drastically from what she had previously seen growing up in the South Bronx. It was at Chapin that she became interested in exploring economic disparities and inequalities, specifically inner-city poverty. Her interests continued as an undergraduate at Penn as she sought answers to the roots and outcomes of urban poverty and its debilitating effect on all facets of life, from education to health care. As an Economics major, though she enjoys exploring these issues from an economic and political perspective, Denise is also able to extend these historical debates on such topics as the “culture of poverty” and welfare, into Urban Studies classes that attack these issues from a cultural and social standpoint. Outside of the classroom, Denise has held various internships at BusinessWeek Magazine, The Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, and JPMorgan (this summer), has served as a Paul Robeson Leadership Institute Fellow and two-year Goldman Sachs Scholar, and is actively involved on-campus as a mentor in the Big Brothers Big Sisters Program, the NAACP, and the women’s basketball team. During the spring semester of her junior year, Denise looks forward to studying abroad in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where she hopes to become involved with a microfinance organization and use her research for her senior thesis in Urban Studies on microfinance as a solution to urban poverty in the United States. After college, Denise would like to either join the Peace Corps and work on business development initiatives and microfinance projects in South America or give back to her community as a math teacher through Teach for America, before pursuing a joint MBA/MPP degree and combining a future in economic policy and corporate philanthropy. Through interdisciplinary study and a multi-faceted approach, she believes that structural barriers can be broken, change is possible, and poverty can be eradicated through education and activism.
Miya Cain
Yale University
Miya Cain is a rising senior at Yale University from Miami, Florida. She is a psychology major, specializing in the behavioral neuroscience track, and her latest research involved comparative cognition at the Santos Capuchin Lab. Community service is an important part of Miya’s college career: she mentors New Haven 8th graders in a group called Power Now, teaches high school students about health issues as a community health educator, and is a friend to the mentally challenged as part of the Best Buddies program. Miya also spent the summer after her freshman year volunteering at an orphanage and teaching at an elementary school in Costa Rica. Music is another important part of her life; she has been singing and touring for the past three years with the New Blue, Yale’s oldest female a capella group and has been in several musical productions at Yale, including The Wiz and Semele. Miya just returned from study abroad in Spain and this summer will be working with the UN Convention for Biodiversity in Montreal, where she hopes to gain a greater understanding of how to impact international and local policy.
Lorena Castro
University of California, Los Angeles Lorena Castro is a senior at the University of California Los Angeles, where she is majoring in Sociology and a minoring in Political Science. She is a Ronald McNair scholar who is currently developing a project on the identity formation of second-generation youth of Mexican descent. Specifically, she will look at the relationship between identity formation and Mexican nationalism, and she will examine the ways in which Mexican nationalism and identity are expressed. This research will evolve into a Senior Thesis. Lorena is the daughter of working-class Mexican immigrants and the oldest of two. She was born and raised in South Los Angeles, an area troubled by inadequately funded schools. Lorena endured a 35-mile commute to Woodland Hills, CA for seven years in order to attend a better-resourced middle school and high school. This personal relevance combined with the importance of education in reducing social inequality led Lorena to work with an academic enrichment program, Higher Achievement, in Washington, D.C. Through this program, Lorena taught fifth and sixth grade math and literature to students of color from poorly funded schools in the Washington, D.C. area. This experience strengthened her passion and desire for social change through education. In an attempt to reduce the social inequality that plagues many communities like her own, Lorena intends on pursuing a PhD which will provide her with the training necessary to become a professor, create new knowledge, and work for social change.
Alfredo Fletes
Georgetown University Alfredo Fletes is a rising junior in the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, majoring in culture and politics with a concentration in Latin America. Hailing from South Gate, California, a working class, immigrant suburb of Los Angeles, Alfredo grew up attuned to the needs of Latino immigrants in his community. He interned with the South Gate City Manager’s office, where he researched the effects of mayoral takeover of school districts as an avenue for education reform. At Georgetown University, he served as a bilingual tutor for the DC Schools program, and co-founded My Tiger My Heart, a non-profit clothing collective that raises money and awareness for social ills in America, such as hurricane Katrina relief and comprehensive immigration reform. Galvanized by a campus speech by Chris Simcox, founder of the Minutemen Civil Defense Corps, Alfredo interned at the Washington, DC office of Church World Service Immigration and Refugee Program, an interfaith NGO that advocates comprehensive immigration reform on Capitol Hill. There he planned advocacy visits with congresspersons and senators, and wrote policy fact sheets and analyses for the organization. After making a short documentary on the relationship of Latino day laborers and Black residents in Washington, DC, Alfredo became fascinated by the social organization of undocumented immigrant day laborers, and hopes to pursue further research on the issue. This summer, Alfredo will be launching the Justice for Immigrants campaign at his Catholic church, a community-based organizing effort in support of comprehensive immigration reform. In his spare time, Alfredo enjoys going to concerts and stuffing his mouth with spicy food.
Fagan Harris
Stanford University Fagan Harris is a sophomore from Baltimore, Maryland. An American
Studies major with an emphasis in education, Fagan has also started
writing his honors thesis out of the Stanford School of Education.
Currently the Vice President of Stanford Students for Relief, and a
member of Stanford Students taking On Poverty, Fagan is active in the Stanford community both on and off campus. Fagan has also tutored second language learners at East Palo Alto Elementary. In the summer of 2005 and 2006, Fagan was a curriculum writer for the Anne Arundel County Board of Education (Maryland), specializing in English Literature curriculum development. A 2006-2007 Chappell-Lougee Scholarship winner, Fagan will be developing his research on alternative reform schools and behavioral norms in Pittsburgh throughout July. For the remainder of the summer, Fagan will also be interning at a Baltimore law firm and will also be working on several
political campaigns throughout the summer.
Corbin Laedlein
Rutgers University Corbin Laedlein is a rising junior at Rutgers University-New Brunswick,where he is majoring in Africana Studies and Political Science. Through his experiences growing up in Brooklyn, NY, his travels to Cuba and Brazil, and his studies throughout his academic career, Corbin has become passionate about issues of poverty, educational inequity, racism and racial identity. At Rutgers, Corbin is involved with student groups that deal with such issues and is a founder of Rutgers’ first mixed-race organization. He is also the co-chair of the Galvanizing and Organizing Youth Activism (GOYA) project, which works to promote literacy and to aid impoverished communities on the local, regional and global levels through awareness, activism and volunteerism. In the summer of 2006, Corbin interned for New Demographic, an anti racism training company where he researched topics for their podcast, Addicted to Race. His work that summer culminated with the production of his own episode which explored issues of Eurocentrism in education and since then he has continued to do outreach work for New Demographic. Since the beginning of his sophomore year, Corbin has worked as Dr. Kim D. Butler’s undergraduate research assistant on her project mapping common experiences of African Diaspora communities in the Americas, with the majority of his research exploring trends in post-abolition anti-black violence. Corbin plans to pursue a career in education and to work with youth in Brooklyn after completing graduate school.
Alley M. Lyles
Rice University Alley Lyles is a junior sociology major (with an emphasis in Urban Studies) at Rice University in Houston, Texas. This summer she is working on her senior honors thesis on redevelopment in Houston's Second Ward under the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship and Rice University's Center for Civic Engagement fellowship. During the school year, she is an undergraduate researcher and assistant for Dr. Michael O. Emerson's Center on Race, Religion and Urban Life (CORRUL). This past Spring semester, she designed and created the center's first newsletter and continues to help planning for two urban conferences in the fall. After graduating in May 2008, she plans on pursing her Ph.D. in Sociology. For fun, Alley enjoys traveling, collecting maps, mentoring children and doing word finds.
Ieshaah Murphy
Spelman College Ieshaah is currently a junior at Spelman College with a double major in Sociology and Comparative Women’s Studies. She aspires to become a prosecutor with a concentration in crimes against women and children. Originally from Buffalo, New York, Ieshaah involves herself in a number of civic activities in the Atlanta area. This past year she interned with the Georgia Commission on Family Violence where she was able to develop her awareness of violence against women and its affect on the world community. In addition to her work with the commission, Ieshaah served as a peer tutor for the writing center, a mental health peer educator, and a volunteer english teacher to 8th grade students. In the fall, Ieshaah will be studying abroad in Accra, Ghana, where she hopes to continue her community activism.
Angela Pérez
The City College of New York Ángela Pérez was born and raised in Colombia but has called New York City home for the past eight years. She is currently a rising senior at The City College of New York, double majoring in History (Latin America) and Asian Studies. As a first generation immigrant, Ángela has overcome obstacles preventing her from pursing higher education. She graduated from the nation’s first Early College Program and has demonstrated an unusual motivation to reach her educational goals. She is recipient of the Mellon-Mays Undergraduate Fellowship, the Colin Powell Leadership Fellowship, and the H. Austin & Florence R.S. Kaye Scholarship. She has been awarded the Joan Kelly Prize for her outstanding work in the field of History, as well as the Raoul Wallenberg Humanitarian Award. Ángela has done extensive work on public policy and immigration issues. As an intern for the Center for Community Change (CCC), Ángela saw the importance of grassroots mobilization of previously disengaged and overlooked immigrant communities to enhance democratic participation and representation. Her overall experience at CCC confirmed her desire to pursue advanced research and a career specializing in race, class, and minority groups in the US and Latin America. Ángela is currently working on a research project about the impact of public policies in the dynamics of minority relations, particularly the tensions between African Americans and Latinos in post-Katrina New Orleans. She recently traveled to New Orleans to do field work and will be spending this summer writing an extended paper on this issue at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Ángela’s other interests include reading poetry, traveling, and learning new languages (she’s fluent in Spanish and is learning Japanese).
Quinn Rallins
Morehouse College Quinn Kareem Rallins is a leading student activist for the disenfranchised on domestic and international frontlines. Since high school, he has been organizing food and toy drives for the impoverished communities on the Southside of Chicago. Quinn’s passion for service has only grown since he entered Morehouse College in Atlanta, where he has helped hundreds of Hispanic immigrants prepare for the GRE examination. He is also a coordinator and spokesman for Project Get Ready and Do Something (G.R.A.D.S.), which provides college readiness seminars throughout the Atlanta Public Schools. Quinn has worked in some of the most disadvantaged communities in the U.S., ranging from re-building community centers in South Central Los Angeles to repairing homes in the Ninth Ward of New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina. His research on “Empowering the Poor” has placed Quinn on panels alongside world leaders such as former U.S. President William Jefferson Clinton. Honored as a Boston University African Presidential Archives and Research Center Fellow, he has met with several former African heads of state to analyze U.S. African Relations in the 21st century. An international servant, Quinn spent the greater portion of his junior year volunteering in the barrios of the Dominican Republic. Collaborating with several student organizations in the U.S., Quinn raised several thousand dollars in donations for the community orphanage where he volunteered. His devotion to international servitude awarded Quinn the honor as a Student Ambassador to Sierra Leone. Quinn has traveled extensively throughout the country for seminars and workshops on poverty alleviation, post-conflict reconstruction, and the AIDS pandemic. Recently returning from a semester studying economics at Cambridge University in England and conducting research for a European thinktank, Mr. Rallins is excited about completing his senior year at Morehouse and simply serving humanity.
Joshua Stroman
Benedict College A native of Washington DC, Joshua Stroman is a rising senior majoring in political science at Benedict College in Columbia, South Carolina. His academic interests are rooted in his unique experiences as an adolescent and are centered on educational access and quality, economic development and clean government for under-developed African nations and youth participation in utilizing current culture as a force for social re-construction. These interests have manifested in Joshua’s work with the South Carolina Governor’s Office of Executive Policy and Programs as a research intern focusing on strategies to improve the educational environment in South Carolina for minority students, with an emphasis on eradicating achievement inequalities. Joshua is an avid reader and is currently building a personal library which he hopes will one day be housed in a policy development center that he is establishing to offer youth opportunities to understand and engage the advocacy process. Joshua engages in advocacy work for issues such as the Darfur crisis, discovering alternatives for clean energy, and applicable solutions for eradicating poverty, through partnering with Americans for Informed Democracy. Joshua is a recipient of the UNCF Funds for a Brighter Future Scholarship, has recently been named a 2007-2008 Dwight D. Eisenhower Fellow and is a 2007 United States Achievement Academy Inductee. Joshua’s ultimate desire is to work as a social re-constructionist in areas where extreme inequalities and injustices persist. He also hopes to become an academic renowned for scholarship and advancing the full ambitions of social policy theory. These ambitions he hopes, will lead him to either the United Nations or the United States Senate, where he can utilize opportunities such as the Galbraith Scholars Program and his unique adolescent experiences to influence important decision-making processes in a positive and equitable way. After graduating from Benedict College, Joshua plans to pursue a JD/MPP and a PhD in Government and Social Policy at Harvard University with post- doctorate plans of attending the American University at Cairo, Egypt.
Ana Urzúa
University of California, Irvine Ana Siria Urzua is a rising senior at the University of California in Irvine pursuing a bachelor’s degree in Anthropology. On campus she has been involved in such organizations as Movimiento Estudiantil Chican@ de Aztlan (MEChA) and Reaffirming Ethnic Awareness and Community Harmony (REACH), has been actively involved in the UCI Cross Cultural Center, and forms part of the 2006 Cohort of the Summer Academic Enrichment Program. Born in Colima, Mexico and having immigrated to the United States at the age of six, Ana retained a strong cultural identification to her roots and heritage. She strongly identifies herself with the community of Santa Ana, one of the cities that her family first came to upon immigrating to the US, and where she currently serves as community organizer through extensive work at El Centro Cultural de Mexico. For years, Ana has utilized music as a unifying tool for activism and positive social change through her work in a traditional folk music program at the cultural center, namely Son del Centro. Rapid changes in city that were negatively impacting community members sparked Ana’s interest in urban studies. This spring, Ana held an internship with the Affordable Housing Preservation Department of the Latino Economic Development Corporation in Washington DC, where she worked on tenant organizing, coalition building, and advocacy around tenants’ rights. Utilizing her internship and research experiences in DC, Ana will develop research this summer on gentrification and displacement in the city of Santa Ana, to be continued throughout the school year as her honors thesis. Ana is interested in pursuing graduate studies in urban planning and policy, and very much looks forward to meeting and learning from her fellow Galbraith Scholars.
Farida is a committed activist for social justice who focuses her efforts on issues surrounding poverty and immigration, especially as experienced by women. In May of 2007 she completed her bachelor’s degree, a double major in Asian American and Comparative Ethnic Studies at Columbia University’s Center for Ethnicity and Race. Much of her academic work has centered on exploring ways in which U.S. immigration policies have shaped Asian American communities and the lives of women within them. She considers this an especially vital topic since Asian women are one of the largest groups presently migrating to the United States. As a resident of Queens, NY, Farida works with such organizations as the Philippine Forum, Bridge to Life, Asian Americans for Equality (AAFE), the Justice 4 Immigrants (J4I) Filipino Coalition, and the National Alliance for Filipino Concerns (NAFCON), a national alliance of Filipino organizations, institutions and individuals in the United States. Plans for the future include a law degree, which Farida intends to use to expand the scope of her activism and advocacy, and increasing involvement in the planning and implementation of programs designed to benefit women, immigrants, and the poor.
Rudi Batzell grew up in the rural Midwest, first in Milan, Michigan and later in East Troy, Wisconsin. He graduated from East Troy Public High School, where he played football and ran track, and served as President of the Student Cabinet and the National Honor Society Minerva chapter. Rudi currently attends Columbia University, where he is majoring in sociology and history. Labor history and the sociology of class formation are his main interests, which he has pursued in a wide variety of contexts, from Russian peasants, to American slaves, to industrial laborers and undocumented immigrant workers. In the spring of 2007 Rudi coauthored a paper with Professor Karen Barkey of the Sociology Department at Columbia titled “Comparisons Across Empire: Critical Social Structures of the Ottomans, Russians and Habsburgs,” to be published in the forthcoming Empires in Contention: Sociology, History, and Cultural Difference edited by P.F Bang and C.A. Bayly. In addition to his academic work, Rudi is also involved in political activism on campus for immigrant rights, peace, and workers rights, and he volunteers as a teacher for Harlem fifth-graders in a conflict resolution program. Also during the summer of 2007, Rudi will be a History Scholar at the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History in New York City as part of a six-week research program on early African-American abolitionists. Rudi plans to pursue a PhD in either history or sociology after graduating from Columbia.
Denise Bailey-Castro is a rising junior at the University of Pennsylvania, double majoring in Economics and Urban Studies, with a minor in Mathematics. A native of New York City, Denise attended the prestigious Chapin School on Manhattan’s Upper East Side as an A Better Chance Scholar, thus exposing her to lifestyles and opportunities that differed drastically from what she had previously seen growing up in the South Bronx. It was at Chapin that she became interested in exploring economic disparities and inequalities, specifically inner-city poverty. Her interests continued as an undergraduate at Penn as she sought answers to the roots and outcomes of urban poverty and its debilitating effect on all facets of life, from education to health care. As an Economics major, though she enjoys exploring these issues from an economic and political perspective, Denise is also able to extend these historical debates on such topics as the “culture of poverty” and welfare, into Urban Studies classes that attack these issues from a cultural and social standpoint. Outside of the classroom, Denise has held various internships at BusinessWeek Magazine, The Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, and JPMorgan (this summer), has served as a Paul Robeson Leadership Institute Fellow and two-year Goldman Sachs Scholar, and is actively involved on-campus as a mentor in the Big Brothers Big Sisters Program, the NAACP, and the women’s basketball team. During the spring semester of her junior year, Denise looks forward to studying abroad in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where she hopes to become involved with a microfinance organization and use her research for her senior thesis in Urban Studies on microfinance as a solution to urban poverty in the United States. After college, Denise would like to either join the Peace Corps and work on business development initiatives and microfinance projects in South America or give back to her community as a math teacher through Teach for America, before pursuing a joint MBA/MPP degree and combining a future in economic policy and corporate philanthropy. Through interdisciplinary study and a multi-faceted approach, she believes that structural barriers can be broken, change is possible, and poverty can be eradicated through education and activism.
Miya Cain is a rising senior at Yale University from Miami, Florida. She is a psychology major, specializing in the behavioral neuroscience track, and her latest research involved comparative cognition at the Santos Capuchin Lab. Community service is an important part of Miya’s college career: she mentors New Haven 8th graders in a group called Power Now, teaches high school students about health issues as a community health educator, and is a friend to the mentally challenged as part of the Best Buddies program. Miya also spent the summer after her freshman year volunteering at an orphanage and teaching at an elementary school in Costa Rica. Music is another important part of her life; she has been singing and touring for the past three years with the New Blue, Yale’s oldest female a capella group and has been in several musical productions at Yale, including The Wiz and Semele. Miya just returned from study abroad in Spain and this summer will be working with the UN Convention for Biodiversity in Montreal, where she hopes to gain a greater understanding of how to impact international and local policy.
Lorena Castro is a senior at the University of California Los Angeles, where she is majoring in Sociology and a minoring in Political Science. She is a Ronald McNair scholar who is currently developing a project on the identity formation of second-generation youth of Mexican descent. Specifically, she will look at the relationship between identity formation and Mexican nationalism, and she will examine the ways in which Mexican nationalism and identity are expressed. This research will evolve into a Senior Thesis. Lorena is the daughter of working-class Mexican immigrants and the oldest of two. She was born and raised in South Los Angeles, an area troubled by inadequately funded schools. Lorena endured a 35-mile commute to Woodland Hills, CA for seven years in order to attend a better-resourced middle school and high school. This personal relevance combined with the importance of education in reducing social inequality led Lorena to work with an academic enrichment program, Higher Achievement, in Washington, D.C. Through this program, Lorena taught fifth and sixth grade math and literature to students of color from poorly funded schools in the Washington, D.C. area. This experience strengthened her passion and desire for social change through education. In an attempt to reduce the social inequality that plagues many communities like her own, Lorena intends on pursuing a PhD which will provide her with the training necessary to become a professor, create new knowledge, and work for social change.
Alfredo Fletes is a rising junior in the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, majoring in culture and politics with a concentration in Latin America. Hailing from South Gate, California, a working class, immigrant suburb of Los Angeles, Alfredo grew up attuned to the needs of Latino immigrants in his community. He interned with the South Gate City Manager’s office, where he researched the effects of mayoral takeover of school districts as an avenue for education reform. At Georgetown University, he served as a bilingual tutor for the DC Schools program, and co-founded My Tiger My Heart, a non-profit clothing collective that raises money and awareness for social ills in America, such as hurricane Katrina relief and comprehensive immigration reform. Galvanized by a campus speech by Chris Simcox, founder of the Minutemen Civil Defense Corps, Alfredo interned at the Washington, DC office of Church World Service Immigration and Refugee Program, an interfaith NGO that advocates comprehensive immigration reform on Capitol Hill. There he planned advocacy visits with congresspersons and senators, and wrote policy fact sheets and analyses for the organization. After making a short documentary on the relationship of Latino day laborers and Black residents in Washington, DC, Alfredo became fascinated by the social organization of undocumented immigrant day laborers, and hopes to pursue further research on the issue. This summer, Alfredo will be launching the Justice for Immigrants campaign at his Catholic church, a community-based organizing effort in support of comprehensive immigration reform. In his spare time, Alfredo enjoys going to concerts and stuffing his mouth with spicy food.
Fagan Harris is a sophomore from Baltimore, Maryland. An American 
Corbin Laedlein is a rising junior at Rutgers University-New Brunswick,where he is majoring in Africana Studies and Political Science. Through his experiences growing up in Brooklyn, NY, his travels to Cuba and Brazil, and his studies throughout his academic career, Corbin has become passionate about issues of poverty, educational inequity, racism and racial identity. At Rutgers, Corbin is involved with student groups that deal with such issues and is a founder of Rutgers’ first mixed-race organization. He is also the co-chair of the Galvanizing and Organizing Youth Activism (GOYA) project, which works to promote literacy and to aid impoverished communities on the local, regional and global levels through awareness, activism and volunteerism. In the summer of 2006, Corbin interned for New Demographic, an anti racism training company where he researched topics for their podcast, Addicted to Race. His work that summer culminated with the production of his own episode which explored issues of Eurocentrism in education and since then he has continued to do outreach work for New Demographic. Since the beginning of his sophomore year, Corbin has worked as Dr. Kim D. Butler’s undergraduate research assistant on her project mapping common experiences of African Diaspora communities in the Americas, with the majority of his research exploring trends in post-abolition anti-black violence. Corbin plans to pursue a career in education and to work with youth in Brooklyn after completing graduate school.
Alley Lyles is a junior sociology major (with an emphasis in Urban Studies) at Rice University in Houston, Texas. This summer she is working on her senior honors thesis on redevelopment in Houston's Second Ward under the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship and Rice University's Center for Civic Engagement fellowship. During the school year, she is an undergraduate researcher and assistant for Dr. Michael O. Emerson's Center on Race, Religion and Urban Life (CORRUL). This past Spring semester, she designed and created the center's first newsletter and continues to help planning for two urban conferences in the fall. After graduating in May 2008, she plans on pursing her Ph.D. in Sociology. For fun, Alley enjoys traveling, collecting maps, mentoring children and doing word finds. 
Ieshaah is currently a junior at Spelman College with a double major in Sociology and Comparative Women’s Studies. She aspires to become a prosecutor with a concentration in crimes against women and children. Originally from Buffalo, New York, Ieshaah involves herself in a number of civic activities in the Atlanta area. This past year she interned with the Georgia Commission on Family Violence where she was able to develop her awareness of violence against women and its affect on the world community. In addition to her work with the commission, Ieshaah served as a peer tutor for the writing center, a mental health peer educator, and a volunteer english teacher to 8th grade students. In the fall, Ieshaah will be studying abroad in Accra, Ghana, where she hopes to continue her community activism.
Ángela Pérez was born and raised in Colombia but has called New York City home for the past eight years. She is currently a rising senior at The City College of New York, double majoring in History (Latin America) and Asian Studies. As a first generation immigrant, Ángela has overcome obstacles preventing her from pursing higher education. She graduated from the nation’s first Early College Program and has demonstrated an unusual motivation to reach her educational goals. She is recipient of the Mellon-Mays Undergraduate Fellowship, the Colin Powell Leadership Fellowship, and the H. Austin & Florence R.S. Kaye Scholarship. She has been awarded the Joan Kelly Prize for her outstanding work in the field of History, as well as the Raoul Wallenberg Humanitarian Award. Ángela has done extensive work on public policy and immigration issues. As an intern for the Center for Community Change (CCC), Ángela saw the importance of grassroots mobilization of previously disengaged and overlooked immigrant communities to enhance democratic participation and representation. Her overall experience at CCC confirmed her desire to pursue advanced research and a career specializing in race, class, and minority groups in the US and Latin America. Ángela is currently working on a research project about the impact of public policies in the dynamics of minority relations, particularly the tensions between African Americans and Latinos in post-Katrina New Orleans. She recently traveled to New Orleans to do field work and will be spending this summer writing an extended paper on this issue at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Ángela’s other interests include reading poetry, traveling, and learning new languages (she’s fluent in Spanish and is learning Japanese). 
Quinn Kareem Rallins is a leading student activist for the disenfranchised on domestic and international frontlines. Since high school, he has been organizing food and toy drives for the impoverished communities on the Southside of Chicago. Quinn’s passion for service has only grown since he entered Morehouse College in Atlanta, where he has helped hundreds of Hispanic immigrants prepare for the GRE examination. He is also a coordinator and spokesman for Project Get Ready and Do Something (G.R.A.D.S.), which provides college readiness seminars throughout the Atlanta Public Schools. Quinn has worked in some of the most disadvantaged communities in the U.S., ranging from re-building community centers in South Central Los Angeles to repairing homes in the Ninth Ward of New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina. His research on “Empowering the Poor” has placed Quinn on panels alongside world leaders such as former U.S. President William Jefferson Clinton. Honored as a Boston University African Presidential Archives and Research Center Fellow, he has met with several former African heads of state to analyze U.S. African Relations in the 21st century. An international servant, Quinn spent the greater portion of his junior year volunteering in the barrios of the Dominican Republic. Collaborating with several student organizations in the U.S., Quinn raised several thousand dollars in donations for the community orphanage where he volunteered. His devotion to international servitude awarded Quinn the honor as a Student Ambassador to Sierra Leone. Quinn has traveled extensively throughout the country for seminars and workshops on poverty alleviation, post-conflict reconstruction, and the AIDS pandemic. Recently returning from a semester studying economics at Cambridge University in England and conducting research for a European thinktank, Mr. Rallins is excited about completing his senior year at Morehouse and simply serving humanity.
A native of Washington DC, Joshua Stroman is a rising senior majoring in political science at Benedict College in Columbia, South Carolina. His academic interests are rooted in his unique experiences as an adolescent and are centered on educational access and quality, economic development and clean government for under-developed African nations and youth participation in utilizing current culture as a force for social re-construction. These interests have manifested in Joshua’s work with the South Carolina Governor’s Office of Executive Policy and Programs as a research intern focusing on strategies to improve the educational environment in South Carolina for minority students, with an emphasis on eradicating achievement inequalities. Joshua is an avid reader and is currently building a personal library which he hopes will one day be housed in a policy development center that he is establishing to offer youth opportunities to understand and engage the advocacy process. Joshua engages in advocacy work for issues such as the Darfur crisis, discovering alternatives for clean energy, and applicable solutions for eradicating poverty, through partnering with Americans for Informed Democracy. Joshua is a recipient of the UNCF Funds for a Brighter Future Scholarship, has recently been named a 2007-2008 Dwight D. Eisenhower Fellow and is a 2007 United States Achievement Academy Inductee. Joshua’s ultimate desire is to work as a social re-constructionist in areas where extreme inequalities and injustices persist. He also hopes to become an academic renowned for scholarship and advancing the full ambitions of social policy theory. These ambitions he hopes, will lead him to either the United Nations or the United States Senate, where he can utilize opportunities such as the Galbraith Scholars Program and his unique adolescent experiences to influence important decision-making processes in a positive and equitable way. After graduating from Benedict College, Joshua plans to pursue a JD/MPP and a PhD in Government and Social Policy at Harvard University with post- doctorate plans of attending the American University at Cairo, Egypt. 
Ana Siria Urzua is a rising senior at the University of California in Irvine pursuing a bachelor’s degree in Anthropology. On campus she has been involved in such organizations as Movimiento Estudiantil Chican@ de Aztlan (MEChA) and Reaffirming Ethnic Awareness and Community Harmony (REACH), has been actively involved in the UCI Cross Cultural Center, and forms part of the 2006 Cohort of the Summer Academic Enrichment Program. Born in Colima, Mexico and having immigrated to the United States at the age of six, Ana retained a strong cultural identification to her roots and heritage. She strongly identifies herself with the community of Santa Ana, one of the cities that her family first came to upon immigrating to the US, and where she currently serves as community organizer through extensive work at El Centro Cultural de Mexico. For years, Ana has utilized music as a unifying tool for activism and positive social change through her work in a traditional folk music program at the cultural center, namely Son del Centro. Rapid changes in city that were negatively impacting community members sparked Ana’s interest in urban studies. This spring, Ana held an internship with the Affordable Housing Preservation Department of the Latino Economic Development Corporation in Washington DC, where she worked on tenant organizing, coalition building, and advocacy around tenants’ rights. Utilizing her internship and research experiences in DC, Ana will develop research this summer on gentrification and displacement in the city of Santa Ana, to be continued throughout the school year as her honors thesis. Ana is interested in pursuing graduate studies in urban planning and policy, and very much looks forward to meeting and learning from her fellow Galbraith Scholars.