Here are some news for December, 2020: The Racial Justice Fellows Program at City College is run by the Colin Powell School of Civic and Global Leadership, in partnership with the Black Studies Program

This Fall 2020 semester, two students from our LALS Program classes have been selected to participate. Congratulations to Lesly Calle and Max García!

Lesly Calle is a fourth-year undergraduate student in the Macaulay Honors Program at The City College of New York pursuing a BA in Economics with a minor in Public Policy. She was born and raised in New York City and is a first-generation college student. Lesly is interested in social justice, economic inequality, and environmental policy and is looking to understand how economics can serve as a bridge for equality. As a junior, she was selected to the inaugural cohort of Climate Policy Fellows at the Colin Powell School of Civic and Global Leadership, where she co-authored a policy brief on single-use plastic mitigation and its effects on climate change. Through the fellowship, she had the opportunity to intern with the World Resources Institute, a global research organization working to scale ideas on environmental action. As a research intern for the US Climate team, Lesly performed research on carbon pricing initiatives and learned of the disproportionate impacts carbon emissions have on low-income communities and communities of color. For the 2020-2021 academic year, Lesly was selected for the Edward I. Koch Fellowship in Public Service at CCNY, which helped her develop a partnership with the CUNY School for Labor and Urban Studies and the Community and Worker Ownership Project where she is helping to develop and enhance communications strategies. In the coming months, she will help to promote the understanding of cooperatives and economic democracy as part of the solution for our current economic injustices.

Max Garcia was born in Washington Heights to Dominican immigrants. His family arrived in New York in 1996 looking for a better life. The issues that have always interested him have been racial/social justice-oriented just based on the experiences he felt firsthand growing up in a Black immigrant family. He had witnessed discrimination against both of his parents due to color and a language barrier, and later experienced it himself, so he knew that he wanted to learn how to bring about racial/social justice. His hobbies include acting, creative writing, rapping, and playing music and video games for fun (not necessarily in that order). He came to CCNY because his guidance counselor told him that it was the best public college in the city. He chose to major in Political Science in order to gain an in-depth understanding of the American political system and how it directly impacts his community in turn. He wants to work for racial justice, and it was in the title of the fellowship, so it caught his attention immediately.