One student helped investigate criminal cases for the New Hampshire Public Defender office.
Another visited greater New Haven residents struggling with chronic psychosis, part of a mental health program that assists with their well-being.
A third conducted research in the Mississippi Delta to support the efforts of the Mississippi Workers' Center for Human Rights.
As recipients of Dwight Hall Summer Fellowships, these and roughly two dozen other Yale undergraduates (and recent graduates) devoted their summer break to internships grounded in community service across six states and Washington, D.C.
The program, founded in 1968, provided full funding (an average of $5,275) for 11 fellows this summer, and supplemental financial support for the rest.
Dwight Hall at Yale, the Center for Public Service and Social Justice, engages thousands of students every year through volunteer opportunities, student-run member groups, and fellowship and learning opportunities in New Haven and the world beyond.
For the summer fellowship, students must apply with an internship or project with a host organization already in mind. The internship may be in New Haven or a community of their choosing (often in their home state).
In reviewing the applications, Dwight staff considers, among other things, the student's commitment to social justice, their background in the area they wish to work in, and the feasibility of what they're proposing, said Mark Fopeano, director of programming and evaluation.
"We don't have unlimited funding for all the good projects that are proposed," he said. "In a given year, 20 to 30 percent of applicants will get approval."
Throughout the summer, fellows are asked to submit weekly reflections on their experience and then complete a final reflection at its conclusion.
"That's where we hear the best comments," Fopeano said. "Students will say, 'I had direct client contact with the demographic that I have always been motivated to serve but have never had the opportunity. Now I'm more motivated to do that than ever before.'"
Peter Crumlish, Dwight's executive director and general secretary, said that the hope is that these students will take the "higher sense of purpose" gained from their internship experiences into whatever profession they pursue, whether related to public service or not.
Here is a sampling of the service work Dwight fellows were engaged in this summer.
Rohan Lokanadham
Major: Psychology with neuroscience concentration, certificate in human rights studies
Host organization: Connecticut Mental Health Center
The Connecticut Mental Health Center, in New Haven, provides mental health services for people in the Greater New Haven area. A collaboration between the state Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services and the Yale Department of Psychiatry, it also serves as a training site for Yale psychiatry and psychology trainees.
Rohan Lokanadham, a senior from Holmdel, New Jersey, spent the summer working with one of the center's outpatient clinical teams, the Assertive Community Treatment Team (ACT), which primarily works with people living with chronic psychosis. Many of those clients have comorbid substance use disorders as well.
"This team specifically focuses on wraparound services for seriously ill patients with the primary goal of keeping them out of the hospital," Lokanadham said. "What can we do in their own spaces, in their own lives to support them, whether that's figuring out how to get them housing or how to make sure they take their medication or that they make it to their appointments."
For example, he recently took one client grocery shopping. Because the client struggles with maintaining healthy blood sugar levels, when they reached the soda aisle he asked if she might be willing to buy sugar-free soda instead. She didn't object and has stuck with it since.
"That was a huge life change because she drinks so much soda," he said.
Lokanadham also worked on a new trial intervention: distributing bus passes to clients without air conditioning who need transportation to get to cooling centers during extreme heat. And he helped to further integrate the ACT team and their clients with the mental health center's in-house primary care clinic.
"The biggest things that I've learned and observed through my relationships with clients and learning about their lives is the disparities in health care and a lot of those social determinants that I knew about but now very clearly see playing out," he said.
Creed Gardiner
Degree: American Studies, with certificates in education studies and French
Host organization: Community Justice Advocates of Utah
Community Justice Advocates of Utah (CJAU) trains front-line workers in community-based organizations in how to provide limited legal services to their clients at no cost. Their focus is on domestic violence, housing instability, and medical debt.
For example, victim advocates in domestic violence, once certified as a Community Justice Advocate, could provide their clients with legal guidance on the different types of protective orders.
The training program was authorized by the Utah Supreme Court in 2021 as part of a "regulatory sandbox" for testing nontraditional legal services as a way of expanding affordable access to justice.
As part of his internship, Creed Gardiner '26 (who grew up in the suburbs of Salt Lake City) conducted a research project in which he interviewed Community Justice Advocates, their clients, and organizational supervisors on the training's impact.
"My goal is to document what the existing successes are of the program and then also how the program can become more successful in the future," Gardiner said.
His research will be included in a report that CJUA and their program partner, Innovation for Justice, will publish this fall, in hopes of furthering the community-based justice worker model.
"This work is actually impacting Utahns, especially in rural areas, empowering them to protect themselves against abuse, avoid eviction, and to reduce their medical debt," Gardiner said. "And the training is manageable alongside the existing front-line work that these advocates are providing, and they are able to get the certificate without paying for it."
Fthia Yousif
Major: Ethnicity, race and migration, certificates in human rights studies and education studies
Host organization: New Hampshire Public Defender
The New Hampshire Public Defender is a non-profit corporation with offices throughout the state that provide legal representation to indigent defendants facing criminal charges.
Fthia Yousif, a senior at Yale, worked as an investigator intern in the public defender office in her hometown of Manchester. She is considering whether to apply to law school after she graduates, and perhaps one day become a criminal defense lawyer, and viewed the fellowship as valuable experience as she weighs her options.
"I've tried to be very in the moment, taking in everything and then reflecting on what just happened," she said. "I've watched a lot of court proceedings, and I think, can I actually see myself doing this kind of work? That's my biggest check-in - do I want to do this?"
The office's case load was heavy, with three to five new cases coming in weekly, and the types of charges varied: drug offenses, armed robbery, sexual assault, domestic violence, impaired driving, probation violations, mental health court, and family court. Yousif was able to immerse herself in many aspects of defense work.
She shadowed investigators as they retrieved surveillance footage and interviewed witnesses, she said, "the small stuff that builds the case." She accompanied them to jail to talk to clients. And she learned how to draft certain legal documents.
"I know the exact steps I need to take to draft a subpoena," she said. "They've trusted me to do that on my own over time. I do think they care a lot about us learning."
John Robert Walker
Major: History
Host organization: Mississippi Workers' Center for Human Rights
The Mississippi Workers' Center for Human Rights, founded by civil rights lawyer Jaribu Hill in the Mississippi Delta, organizes and advocates on a host of human rights issues, including access to healthcare, workplace conditions, housing, and environmental justice.
Walker, a junior from Starkville, Mississippi, participated in the center's Fannie Lou Hamer Emerging Leaders Program, a training ground for workers' rights organizing strategies. He was moved to get involved after being introduced to the organizing scene in New Haven.
"It was really striking to witness the political power that workers and unions have created there, especially at the city level," he said. "It's such a stark contrast with the political environment in Mississippi, where there are right-to-work laws and a lot of systemic barriers to organizing labor and protecting workers."
His work involved conducting research in support of the center's legal cases and advocacy campaigns. Participants heard from organizers who have experience advocating on behalf of workers. One speaker talked about exposing poor working conditions at a catfish farm, where many workers hadn't joined the union because they were migrants on temporary visas.
"She described how the bad publicity forced management's hand, pushing them to actually engage with workers about how they could improve working conditions," Walker said.
Walker hopes to pursue public service work in the future as a civil rights lawyer. He is still sorting out whether he wants to do that work in the Delta, where both sides of his family are from. But Hill has been an influential mentor, and one of her frequent assertions has stuck with him: "I will always stand on the side of those who have nothing."
(Walker's funding came through a partnership between Dwight Hall at Yale and the Yale Alumni Nonprofit Alliance.)
Alina Vaidya Mahadevan
Major: Economics and Global Affairs
Host Organization: United Nations Development Programme
The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), headquartered in New York City, is the United Nations' lead agency on international development, working in 170 countries and territories.
This was Alina Vaidya Mahadevan's second summer working within the UNDP's Governance, Rule of Law, and Peacebuilding hub. She focused on governance, specifically on enhancing civic engagement - integrating citizens' responses, feelings, and ideas into legislation and policy reform - to help build robust democracies.
She worked within the scope of the civic engagement team's Promoting Participation Pathways for Human Development program to support affiliated offices in five countries: Senegal, Kenya, Somalia, Mongolia, and Sri Lanka.
"A lot of the work we're doing to support these countries is essentially for them to be able to crowdsource peoples' responses to things like access-to-information laws," which they've worked on in Senegal, said Mahadevan, a senior from Mumbai, India. "How can we engage civil society more in the governance and legislation process, essentially creating institutionalized pathways through which public participation becomes a cornerstone of government?"
Dwight Hall's Crumlish established a partnership with the UNDP last year, with help from Naysan Adlparvar, a capstone faculty member at Yale's Jackson School of Global Affairs who has worked extensively with the UNDP. This summer, the program's second year, eight students took part.
Mahadevan said she would eventually like to commit to a career in public policy. Being able to witness what the work looks like in practice, what the barriers are, what the impact can be, "that's been really beneficial."
