Policy Institute Expands Its Reach

The Policy Institute plans to open its doors summer 2025 to students across the DC region, GDS announced during a July celebration that marked the summer program’s 10th anniversary and showcased the work of its most recent fellows.

Since its start as a pilot project, the Policy Institute has served as an incubator for inspired activism, helping GDS students deepen their understanding of social justice issues and develop the skills they need to affect change in their communities and beyond. The one-month program–run by the Community Engagement and Experiential Learning (CEEL) office–hosts roughly 50 fellows divided among five “tracks.” Each track explores a specific topic, such as the environmental justice movement or factors perpetuating socioeconomic inequity. For the program’s duration, fellows (led by GDS faculty) work alongside advocates, interact with policymakers, and travel to “ground zero” cities to learn from the people and places most affected by their focus issue. 

Speaking at July’s on-campus event, CEEL Director Leigh Tait urged the GDS community to consider supporting the regional expansion effort. Previously, the Policy Institute’s initial funding was seeded by a multi-year anonymous donation that has since run its course. GDS helped subsidize the costs through 2023 before introducing a $500 fee per student last summer.

“A four-week immersive experiential program that includes out-of-town travel, hundreds of speakers, supplies and food, and local transportation costs money to pull off,” Leigh said. "Any donation that's made moving forward will help ensure the participation of any student from any school who is passionate about policy, advocacy, democracy, and making meaningful and informed change in the world.” 

Leigh expects each track will be capped at 12 fellows, up from 10, when the program grows to include students from local public, private, and charter schools next summer. 

Taking Informed Action

In the summer of 2024, fellows met more than 80 speakers–from policymakers in the nation’s capital to food bank volunteers in New Orleans to Google representatives in San Francisco, said Michelle McKeever, CEEL’s Associate Director.

“This program is the epitome of what experiential education should be, and really, education in general,” Michelle added. “Our speakers consistently reflect back that our fellows are what give them hope for the future.”

During the past decade, the number of tracks has grown from two to five or six, depending on the year. Some are mainstays that are reimagined to capture changing contexts and circumstances (such as Waging Life in the DMV, which focuses on a living wage and affordable housing). Others are new (such as AI in the Human World). But as the program wraps up, no matter what the track, each cohort of fellows designs an action project to tackle a challenge. And some of those projects take on a life of their own.

The annual GDS Summit on Sexual Assault and Consent, now entering its ninth year, originated from a track proposed by Tyce Christian ’18 during her junior year in high school. In a 2017 interview with the National Women’s Law Center, Tyce said she and her peers came up with the summit idea while brainstorming proposals for an action project as their track drew to an end.

“It was a really cool opportunity, as young people, to be able to pull adults together and pull our peers together,” Tyce said at the time. “I had some of my best friends at the [first] summit. Plus, students from all over the Delaware-Maryland-Virginia region came, from all-boys schools, from all-girls schools, from Christian schools, from all types of schools, and represented a big community with all sorts of different perspectives.”

To this day, what is now known as the Bodily Autonomy and Consent track continues to be a popular draw for the Policy Institute. The summit attracted more than 430 students, parents, and teachers from across the nation in fall 2023.

Heads, Hearts, and Hands

For Margaux van Allen ʼ20, the Policy Institute helped her grasp the real-life implications of the housing and socioeconomic issues she was studying as part of the Waging Life in the DMV track. It was the summer of 2019, and she witnessed the indignities of poverty when she and her peers helped Thrive DC distribute food to vulnerable individuals.

“There was this one family that stayed after everybody else cleared out,” Margaux said after completing the track. “[The mother] had about four kids, and she came up to us and asked for an extra bag of oranges. We couldn’t give more to her, even though it was obvious that it probably would have helped her a lot. And that was kind of frustrating and challenging.” 

Speaking at the Policy Institute’s 10th-anniversary celebration, Anoushka Chander ʼ21 recalled how she helped a Spanish-speaking immigrant study for the U.S. citizenship exam as part of the immigration policy track, also during the summer of 2019. She and her peers met with U.S. senators on Capitol Hill that summer to voice support for immigrant and refugee rights. And together they learned how to thoroughly research a topic so they could defend their positions.

Inspired by what she learned, Anoushka founded the GDS Student Action Committee upon returning to school her junior year. The committee continues to act as a one-stop shop designed to engage civic-minded GDS high school students who want to get involved in advocacy work. 

She went on to lead her peers in an initiative to get-out-the-vote and combat voter suppression leading up to the 2020 election.

Anoushka is now a senior at Harvard College. She recently completed an internship with the House Democratic Women’s Caucus, and she’s set her sights on earning a law degree and working to secure reproductive justice for mothers of color. 

As she presses forward, Anoushka said she is guided by the wisdom of one of her Policy Institute mentors: “[He] taught me that the most powerful way of engaging in advocacy is … [to use] the head for research and logic, the heart for the emotional connection, and the hands for action.”