In its 58th year, the Dwight Hall Summer Fellowship program provided 21 Yale students and recent graduates with the resources required to fully develop relationships with partners in New Haven, their hometowns, and communities across the country. In 2025, the program catalyzed relationships between Yale students and agencies and NGOs around the country.
Through the Summer Fellowship and other leadership development programs, the Hall is expanding “Pathways to Public Service Careers” programming, including social impact career events and collaborations with Yale’s Office of Career Strategy, as well as an inaugural partnership with the United Nations Development Programme. With the involvement and mentorship of community partners, Summer Fellows advanced projects, research, and internships focused on social change.
Nine fellows were awarded full funding, while 12 students received supplemental support. Eighty-six percent of all Summer Fellows receive Yale financial aid. This summer, fellows addressed issues ranging from legal support to housing insecurity to mental health.
Riley Elliott ’26 advanced the work of the Charlotte Center for Legal Advocacy as an intern in the pro-bono unit. In her Dwight Hall fellowship application, Riley shared, “As a rising senior, I am certain that my future career will be in serving impoverished communities in southern states.” During her summer, Riley’s weekly reflection highlighted a back-to-school bash for 700 children in Charlotte: “CCLA had one of the largest turnouts for the event in years. [These children] were finally able to act like their age, not someone who is carrying the weight of their parents’ immigration status.”
The Dr. Peter R. Muehrer ’82 Fund underwrote the summer experience of Matthew Verich ’26. He served as a research and program intern with the Connecticut Mental Health Center. Matthew supported the work of a CMHC lab investigating Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD), advancing the lab’s research, which informed his senior thesis plan. “I’m excited to embark on my senior thesis plan through the guidance of my lab mentor Dr. Sarah Fineberg, who has allowed me to investigate a research question personalized to my interest. I aim to expand on the literature gap that describes the effects musicianship has on neural plasticity in participants diagnosed with BPD. Overall, my extensive experience performing mental health screens with study participants diagnosed with a variety of mental health disorders will equip me well to conduct EEG recordings with face-to-face participants.” As a senior, he will continue this work and serve as a coordinator of Dwight Hall’s Community Mental Health Fellowship program.
Emily Hettinger ’26 worked as a Yale Alumni Nonprofit Alliance-Dwight Hall Summer Fellow with the Orange County Public Defender. She wrote, “This week was mostly spent inside doing a lot of research and writing on gang history, gang injunctions, gang enhancements, and the impact of racism on all of these things. My research will be used in future briefs that my attorney is working on, so it feels good to contribute to something that will be used to fight for justice…This summer was a wonderful opportunity for me to learn a lot about how to work with publicly funded legal resources to combat racism at both a macro scale in terms of legal precedent, and a micro scale in terms of the lives of the individuals affected by racism. Every day, I am inspired more and more to work as a public defender, and this summer confirmed that for me more than ever.” This experience built upon Emily’s work in summer 2024, when she served as a student engagement summer fellow with the Yale Prison Education Initiative at Dwight Hall.
Zoya Haq ’27 interviewed New Haven musicians through the Yale Music Library, with the goal of creating a permanent collection preserving the cultural histories of New Haven. She reflected, “This was my final week of full-time summer work at the Gilmore Music Library. What a summer it has been! I’ve met with over 25 musicians – jazz, folk, punk, ska, Latin, hip hop, and more – who represent the fiber and fabric of what makes New Haven such a special, musical city. I’ve been connected to a wide range of people who make New Haven music what it is, including audio engineers, venue owners, and producers. I’ve had a number of incredibly enriching conversations, culminating in the three interviews I did this week. The work I’m doing, though, is far from over – I’ll be continuing my work with the New Haven Musicians Oral History Project this school year, meeting with even more musicians in order to make sure our collection is as robust and representative as it can be.” Zoya’s summer fellowship was sponsored by the Yale Club of New Haven.
Devorah Feder ’26 helped to run the Haley House soup kitchen while conducting research for the Massachusetts Housing & Shelter Alliance. She gathered local emergency resources and created the resource center above outside of Haley House.
The Dwight Hall Summer Fellowship program’s inaugural partnership with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) matched eight fellows to teams within the Crisis Bureau’s Governance, Rule of Law, and Peacebuilding Hub. The United Nations Development Programme is the knowledge frontier organization for sustainable development in the United Nations Development System and serves as the integrator for collective action to realize the Sustainable Development Goals. Fellows spent two months working from the United Nations headquarters or remotely on peacebuilding research, events, social media, and policy projects. Two fellows had the chance to organize and report on a panel held for a general United Nations audience.
In their reflections, students elaborated on the life-changing experience of being a Summer Fellow. Altogether, the 2025 Summer Fellows contributed more than 4,600 hours of public service and social justice work.
The 2025 Dwight Hall Summer Fellows program was made possible through the support of the Yale Alumni Nonprofit Alliance, Yale Club of New Haven, Charlotte Foundation, Dr. Peter R. Muehrer ’82 Fund, Hugh R. McCombs ’68, an anonymous Summer Fellows alum, Yale alumni and friends, and the Dwight Hall Summer Fellows Fund.
Students interested in continuing or pursuing fellowships after the summer may find information about academic year funding opportunities on Dwight Hall’s Fellowships and Paid Opportunities page.
The Summer Fellowship program is part of Dwight Hall efforts to expose more Yalies to pathways to social impact careers. As the Hall makes service fellowships core to the Yale experience, Dwight Hall students graduate feeling more equipped to pursue social change, experience early career success, and hold a lifelong commitment to service.
This program advances the Grow pillar of Dwight Hall’s Engage, Grow, and Advance program delivery model by developing students’ intellectual, moral, civic, and creative capacities to the fullest with experiential learning and fellowships.
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