St. Paul, Minn. – Eura Chang ’15, from Rochester, Minn., has been selected as a 2014 Frank Karel Fellow. This was the second year Macalester was invited to participate.

The Frank Karel Fellowship Program in Public Interest Communications is a leadership program that places undergraduate students in leading nonprofit organizations that promote the public interest for a hands-on, experiential summer fellowship.

The fellowship provides a stipend to cover travel to and from Washington, D.C., housing, and living expenses for the summer while the awardee completes a full-time internship with a non-profit.

Chang is looking forward to gaining hands-on experience in the field of public interest communications and advocacy, and thankful for the opportunity to participate in a fellowship that works to increase the amount of racial and ethnic minorities in the fields of non-profit leadership and advocacy.

“Through the Karel Fellowship, I will be focusing on a specific social justice issue with an organization as well as going through professional development which concentrates on how to use my passion productively towards positive social change,” she said.

She is very interested in education reform and immigrant rights and hopes to be placed at a site in D.C. this summer where she can bring these two interests together.

“As a Political Science and Educational Studies double major, I am very interested in how policies are formed and which policies are successful – especially in regards to schools and classrooms,” she said. “Participating in the Karel Fellowship will provide me with a valuable insight into how people and non-profits can influence policy and thus influence how things are run in schools on a large scale. For example, I will apply my Karel experiences to my off-campus work-study program with the Minnesota Literacy Council where I work with immigrants and refugees who are English Language Learners (ELL).”

Chang would eventually like to work at a non-profit.  “I am interested in applying for the Fulbright English Teaching Assistant Program and completing that after graduation,” she said.  “In the future, I would like to work at a non-profit or school in adult ELL classrooms as well as continue my advocacy in policy work.” 

The Karel Fellowship honors the legacy of Frank Karel, who established, led and nurtured the field of strategic communications during his 30 years as chief communications officer for the Robert Wood Johnson and Rockefeller Foundations. Among Karel’s strong beliefs was that racial and ethnic minorities were underrepresented in the public interest communications field and that foundations and public interest organizations needed to be proactive in recruiting and nurturing broader participation and leadership in public interest communications and advocacy.

Macalester College, founded in 1874, is a national liberal arts college with a full-time enrollment of 2,011 students. Macalester is nationally recognized for its long-standing commitment to academic excellence, internationalism, multiculturalism, and civic engagement. Learn more at macalester.edu.

April 3 2014

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