Celebrating 20 Years of Impact

In the summer of 2019, Japan’s hotels and conference centers welcomed not just world leaders attending the G20 Summit, but young women chosen to represent the same nations at the G(irls)20 Summit. Aimed at building a global network of young leaders – entrepreneurs, educators, organizers, and more – the girls’ conference takes place alongside every G20 Summit and concludes with policy recommendations submitted by the delegation to their G20 counterparts.

Vandinika Shukla, MPP 2020, was serving as a policy advisor for the 2019 G(irls)20 Summit through the Women and Public Policy Program Cultural Bridge Fellowship, and working with the girls’ delegation gave her insight into the difficulties these young leaders were experiencing in the modern age. She was alarmed to hear young women from every country share stories about dealing with online harassment and intimidation – so much so that even after her fellowship ended, she couldn’t let the issue go.

Ultimately, Shukla said, that summer reshaped the trajectory of her career.

“It brought me face-to-face with the challenges that young women, particularly young women of color, face when they’re leaders in the public space,” she said. “When I came back to HKS, I dedicated a lot of my research to studying harms against women online. After graduating, I worked on movement building, looking at the role technology can play in enabling community voices to be central to policymaking and to journalism… and I focused on protecting marginalized communities online and strengthening democratic participation. All this was directly related to what I did that summer.”

Shukla said she also sees connections to the G(irls)20 Summit fellowship in her work now, as the Deputy Director of Global Programs for the Obama Foundation.

“We bring young leaders to work together on value-based leadership, finding common ground, and building coalitions across difficult issues,” she said, “and having immersed myself in a very different cultural context that summer and learning from the different contexts that all the young women brought, that experience really shaped how we can do this exercise of finding common ground and do it better.”

Learning from different cultural contexts, thinking about gender equity in a new place, and doing so to find common ground better. When Nancy Klavans launched the Cultural Bridge Fellowship in 2005, these are exactly the goals she envisioned.

20 years later, Shukla is one of more than 200 fellowship alumni funded by Klavans’ Germeshausen Foundation – one of 200-plus “cultural bridges” built in 73 countries around the world.

“I didn’t want this to look like your average fellowship,” Klavans explained, recalling her 2005 conversation with Ambassador Swanee Hunt, who was the WAPPP director at the time. “I said if these student fellows are going to go to a country and learn, I don’t want them to go where they’re comfortable; I want them to be immersed in the country and really feel the experience.”

The Cultural Bridge Fellowship was created to fit these parameters – students applied to spend their summer working on a policy issue related to gender, in a country they’d never lived in before.

Many early program participants were inclined toward international policy work and given their first opportunity to actually do this work through the Cultural Bridge program. Fellows in the first few years included Desiree Allen, MPP 2007, who went to Liberia to support its first woman president Ellen Johnson Sirleaf in a tumultuous transition, and Jamille Bigio, MPP 2009, who interned at the UN’s Inter-Agency Information and Analysis in Jordan. Allen then built a career working on economic growth in conflict-affected countries with the International Finance Corporation, while Bigio went on to become the USAID Senior Coordinator for Gender Equality and Women's Empowerment.

At the same time, the Cultural Bridge Fellowship has never been exclusively for public policy students. Since its outset, the program has supported students from five of Harvard’s graduate schools in addition to HKS.

“This cross-Harvard engagement was one of the unique and trailblazing aspects of the program that Nancy and the Germeshausen Foundation made possible,” said Nicole Carter Quinn, WAPPP’s executive director.

For instance, Sonya Soni, MTS 2012, was studying at Harvard Divinity School when she spent the summer of 2011 in Western Nepal working with a non-governmental organization called Nyaya Health to launch a community-driven nutrition program. Her studies at HDS centered around medical anthropology and ethics, and during her internship she focused on designing a program that included the perspectives of local girls, by learning how they viewed their own nutritional needs and how they wanted these needs to be assessed.

“I didn't want to just extract community voice through a one-time survey, interpret their voice, and design a program,” Soni explained. “I really wanted to make sure that it was community owned.”

Reflecting on the impact of her work in Japan, Shukla similarly said amplifying girls’ voices was key.

“So much of public administration and policy design happens behind closed doors,” Shukla said. “The G(irls)20 Summit was about making sure that high-power decision-making spaces like the G20, the G7, and the UN have grassroots representation and that they speak to the people that they are designing policies for -- particularly looking at the future of young women and gender marginalized youth.”

With any people-focused project, Soni said, “It's important to not just think about centering community voice, but actually shifting power in the work that we're doing.”

“That’s the main legacy” of her fellowship, she said – both for the community she worked with and for her own professional growth.

She has spent the last 13 years continuing to work in various initiatives that center community voices, especially those of girls and women – from an Indian NGO started by her great-grandmother called Girls Rights to her current position as director of the Prison and Justice Writing Program at PEN America, where she works with incarcerated artists and writers to share their experiences with mass incarceration.

“When I was a student, the Cultural Bridge Fellowship was a space to center women's and girls' voices in the work, and I didn't have that anywhere else at Harvard,” she said. “This program was so powerful for me, and I feel like everything I learned in the program completely informs the work I do [today].”

Marissa Davis, MPP 2014, similarly said her fellowship helped her realize the importance of centering local voices for maximum impact.

Her 2013 fellowship in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, focused on designing and piloting a peer support mentoring program for pre-teen girls who were struggling to stay in school. At the time, Davis was insistent that there be local involvement in building it. She co-created the program with a local community leader, who has gone on to run similar programs in the community over the last 10 years.

“What I hoped would happen is exactly what happened,” Davis said, describing a ripple effect where the girls she worked with “started creating mentorship programs for other girls younger than them.”

“And they’ve gone on to not only matriculate, but to graduate from universities,” Davis added. “The odds of that, for their peers, that is just unheard of. I'm so proud of them. They're out in the streets, just taking the world by storm.”

Now an equity and inclusion consultant who recently launched a leadership development program with one of her clients, Davis said she still finds similarities to her work in South Africa.

“Even though I had all these frameworks I could use, to work with those girls I had to show up as another human being who also recognized the humanity in them, and the nuance to their stories,” she explained. “That’s what I carry with me now.”

For other program participants, the Cultural Bridge fellowship pointed them in new directions.

Asma Jaber, MPP 2014, spent the summer of 2012 working with the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Palestine. Her project was focused on how military court impacts family structures, especially women who are left to provide for their household when husbands or sons are imprisoned.

Jaber, now a lawyer, said her time in Palestine was a large factor in her decision to devote her career to the law and human rights.

“One image I won’t forget is seeing a row of mothers in court trying to talk to their sons, who were being convicted for publishing and distributing political materials,” Jaber said. Some of them didn’t understand why their sons were being jailed and were desperately trying to gain clarity.

“It was a jumping-off point for my career,” she said. “Ironically, the law was failing, but it led me to want to study the law – to understand failings of the law in times of human rights abuses.”

The Cultural Bridge experience also allowed Jaber, whose parents are from Palestine, to “be in a place that shaped who I am and…dig deep into my own culture.”

Soni also said her fellowship enabled her to gain perspective on her heritage, culture, and identity – in her case, as a member of a South Asian diaspora.

“I thought because my family is from India, I understood South Asian politics and I’d understand working in Nepal, but it was completely the opposite,” Soni said. “I learned so deeply not to generalize or to think that I know what it means to work in South Asia just because I'm Indian [American].”

Her experience from 13 years ago had echoes just last summer in the experience of Valencia Lambert, MS 2024, a Harvard School of Public Health student whose 2023 Cultural Bridge Fellowship was in Mbarara, a rural part of Uganda. Her fellowship focused on getting more comprehensive HIV testing and care for pregnant women who are inclined to work with traditional healers instead of their local health centers. These healers, Lambert explained, are generally viewed unfavorably in urban Tanzania, where she grew up.

“I met a lot of people with different views of public health because of their cultural experience,” she said. “I talked to a lot of the traditional healers about how their culture shaped what they do and how they see the world. That was just great for me in growing my own view of the world.”

Working with traditional healers also evolved Lambert’s view on how to make meaningful change in local communities, showing her the importance of meeting people on their terms.

“Sometimes [in public health] we think, okay, let’s pour more resources into healthcare facilities. Let's just do that and everything will magically work,” Lambert said. “But if we are not incorporating people who are leaders within that community, people might fall through the cracks.”

Soni had a similar realization during her time in Nepal, noting power dynamics can impact a cross-cultural fellowship.

There are very clear power implications when I come with an American accent and a US passport to do this work in rural communities across South Asia,” she said. “Even though India is my ancestral homeland, I want to make sure that I'm never overpowering local community voices. So it made me think about how we show up with humility.”

Davis agreed.

“The through-line [from my fellowship to my work today] has been that empathy and humility go a very long way,” she said.

Klavans and her family talked with a group of alumni this year in celebration of the 20th Cultural Bridge cohort. It was gratifying to hear directly from former participants about the lessons they’ve carried with them from the program – in some cases, for more than a decade.

Klavans thanked them for being “the people on the ground,” both then and now.

“I’m grateful for your energy, your enthusiasm, and your willingness to do the work,” she said.

For some of the former fellows, looking back at their fellowships caused them to reflect on their work in the present moment – and in the future.

Shukla, who runs Obama Foundation programs for young leaders from around the country, acknowledged that it isn’t an easy time to run a program like hers. But her experience as a Cultural Bridge Fellow has become a tool for her as she navigates today’s political reality.

“It really is top of mind right now with the state of the world, but also the state of the US, in thinking about how we can communicate across differences,” she said. “Rather than see each other as issues or as identity boxes that we tick, thinking about how we can build bridges, how we can use storytelling and lived experiences to really find each other's humanity.”