Ethelia Holt ’24, ’25 M.P.H. and Alessandra Pappalardi ’27 Promote Women’s Health as Dwight Hall Community Response Fellows

As Dwight Hall Community Response Fellows, Ethelia Holt ’24, ’25 M.P.H. and Alessandra Papparlardi ’27 support community partners who are improving and advocating for the health of women in New Haven and Connecticut. 

Ethelia is promoting the mental and financial health of new and expectant mothers through programming offered at Dixwell Community House by the nonprofit Mind Blossom, while Alessandra works at the J. Meyer Lab at the Yale School of Medicine, helping provide services to women affected by the criminal justice system, substance use disorder, homelessness, or intimate partner violence with a specific focus on HIV prevention and treatment.

About Community Response Fellows

Dwight Hall Community Response Fellows began in 2020, when Yale students and staff were rapidly adapting to the interruption of in-person service due to the pandemic. Many students came to Dwight Hall looking for financial support and advice on how to continue service remotely or in their home communities. 

The launch of Community Response Fellows allowed Dwight Hall to meet students and community partners where they were, offering undergraduates greater flexibility to pursue service opportunities year-round and for community organizations to determine the support they sought on their own schedule. 

As with all Dwight Hall fellowship programs, Community Response Fellows supports undergraduates in intensive experiences through which fellows learn from New Haven community partners. The program is specifically designed for students who are already active within the social sector and the communities they serve by providing a financial incentive, a cohort of peers, and professional platforms for reflection, communication, and personal development. 

Community Response Fellows is distinct from other Dwight Hall fellowships due to its intentionally flexible application timeline—students can apply for the fellowship at any time during the academic year. Students typically propose a semester-long project and are required to evaluate their progress and resubmit a funding request at the start of each semester. 

“When students apply for a project in the fall semester, I have consistently seen them continue their project in the spring semester,” emphasized Director of Programming and Evaluation Mark Fopeano. Ethelia and Alessandra’s stories highlight how an initially short-term project can have a long-term impact.

Ethelia Holt ’24, ’25 M.P.H.: Maternal Mental Health and Financial Wellbeing

Ethelia discovered Mind Blossom, her partner organization, during the summer of 2024. At the time, she was serving as a President’s Public Service Fellow through Yale’s Office of New Haven Affairs, supporting the work of local organization Christian Community Action (CCA), which focuses on housing advocacy and its relationship to health.  

Ethelia and her CCA colleagues had a staff meeting at the Dixwell Community House (Q House), where they were given a tour and learned about the rich history of the Q House. Weeks later, Ethelia was reading the Q House newsletter when she came across an ad for a maternal health program hosted at the community center. 

Struck by the work of the program and how it combined her passions and academic interests, Ethelia reached out to learn more and was connected to Dr. Pernille Yilmam, Founder and CEO of Mind Blossom, a nonprofit offering a range of programming that “strives to prevent and combat mental illness through mental health education and fostering community support.”

At the Q House, Mind Blossom invites approximately 10 new and expectant Black and Brown mothers to participate in weekly sessions led by a trained local mother. The curriculum is adjusted to the needs and desires of the women in the cohort, and for 12 weeks they learn about mental health challenges that are common in the perinatal period, build skills and strategies to manage these challenges, improve their financial literacy, and receive financial support through stipends. 

“The curriculum is designed to address the unique challenges that underserved women face during pregnancy and the postpartum period,” emphasized Ethelia. After speaking with Dr. Yilmam about Mind Blossom, Ethelia asked for an opportunity to help serve in the program and  became a program coordinator.

The search for funding naturally led Ethelia to Dwight Hall, where she had previously served as a leader of FOCUS on New Haven, the Camp Yale program administered by the Hall. After reading about Community Response Fellows on the Dwight Hall website, Ethelia also determined that partnering with Dwight Hall would be strategic for Mind Blossom. 

“Involving Dwight Hall was a step we wanted to take to ensure the sustainability of the program in New Haven, especially since students are constantly coming and going,” noted Ethelia. Dwight Hall’s long-standing role in the New Haven community will help guide student interest to the program after Ethelia graduates. 

In her role as Community Response Fellow and Program Coordinator at Mind Blossom, Ethelia primarily engages and builds relationships with the women in the cohort. 

“My main objective every week is to engage with the moms and keep them showing up to the program, making sure that there are as few barriers as possible to getting them to the Q House,” she explained. “That can mean figuring out transportation needs, helping with childcare, and just keeping in touch with the moms to hear how things are going in their lives and how best to support them in showing up.”

Other tasks include coordinating with community organizations and professionals in New Haven to invite them to present to the cohort and organizing a fundraising event for Mind Blossom to celebrate Black and brown mothers in New Haven. 

For Ethelia, her fellowship experience has been transformative, combining her academic background in public health and her desire to work in community settings. “It has been a great experience of learning from the mothers themselves and hearing their challenges, how much they are learning, and how that is helping them in their daily lives,” she reflected. 

“It has also made me realize that New Haven has been my home for five years! It has been cool to learn more about the experiences of people in similar geographic areas where I have spent the past four years. . . our experiences definitely overlap but are also so distinct.”

As a History of Science, Medicine, and Public Health major now pursuing a Master of Public Health degree, Ethelia’s fellowship experience is directly informing her professional goals. “My future aspiration is to be a child psychologist, and I am learning a lot about how children’s lives are intricately intertwined with the lives of their parents. . . and how social spheres of life interact with people’s health,” she explained. “This experience has solidified my desire to work in community settings.”

Alessandra Pappalardi ’27: HIV Treatment and Prevention for Justice-Impacted Women

Before becoming a Community Response Fellow, Alessandra spent the summer of 2024 working as Dwight Hall’s Summer Editorial Writer, interviewing leaders of Dwight Hall member groups and programs. 

“I had the chance to talk to so many people spending their summer in such meaningful ways, and though I had already been part of a few Dwight Hall organizations, I wanted to do more,” reflected Alessandra. “It was important to me to form a steadier relationship with New Haven, and the Community Response Fellowship offers students that possibility.”

She began researching working groups and learned of the J. Meyer Lab at the Yale School of Medicine. The lab offers services to women affected by the criminal justice system, substance use disorder, homelessness, or intimate partner violence, specifically focusing on HIV prevention and treatment among these groups of women. According to the lab’s webpage, their “work includes using patient-centered decision aids on HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) to help women make informed choices about HIV prevention, scaling up PrEP among key populations of women, and integrating housing and health services for people who are justice-involved.”

For Alessandra, the work of the laboratory perfectly fused her interests. “Finding a research group at the intersection of urban justice and women’s healthcare—two topics that are very important to me—that also actively serves the local community was an opportunity I could not pass up.”

Alessandra reached out to Dr. Jaimie Meyer, who then conferred with lab manager Carolina Price to help Alessandra embark on projects that aligned with her research goals. These assignments have included creating a community fact sheet on Project Carmenta, a “clinical study aimed at implementing a decision aid for PrEP in sexual reproductive health clinics for women who are receiving contraceptive care and family planning services.”

Currently, Alessandra is developing qualitative research questions for Project Athena, an intervention study that involves women in the criminal justice system, a population that has a higher risk of contracting HIV. The interview questions Alessandra develops will be used in the study, which will compare whether learning about PrEP through decision aids or through being connected to a clinician who can prescribe PrEP is more effective at encouraging women to take the medicine. Finally, she is also training with the New Haven Syringe Services Program, which distributes harm-reduction products to New Haven residents. 

While praising her fellowship experience thus far, Alessandra highlighted the empowering community she has found at the lab. “The lab is run entirely by women, creating a comfortable and supportive atmosphere focused on improving women’s healthcare options,” she explained. “I love attending our weekly meetings; the energy is incredibly supportive and conducive to my first time learning about women’s health in a clinical setting.”

Further, being a Community Response Fellow has deepened Alessandra’s connection to New Haven. From creating the community fact sheet for Project Carmenta, which was a “really respectable way of inviting New Haveners into the lab’s work” to supporting the Syringe Services Program which gave her “permission to get to know people who identify as drug users beyond the judgments often associated with them,” Alessandra emphasized how this community-engaged work has made her a “more informed researcher and citizen.”

As Alessandra progresses in her undergraduate and professional career, she will take forth the lessons learned as a Community Response Fellow gaining firsthand experience in community-based public health research. 

“New Haven, as any city, is rich with individuals whose lives have been shaped by circumstances beyond their control,” she reflected. “I will gladly partake in any science that makes individuals feel seen and heard—not as subjects, but as people—through professional, research-backed care.”

. . .

Dwight Hall Community Response Fellows embodies the Grow pillar of Dwight Hall’s Engage, Grow, and Advance program delivery model, growing students’ intellectual, moral, creative, and civic capacities to the fullest through experiential learning opportunities. 

You may learn more about Community Response Fellows here, Mind Blossom here (or by emailing info@mindblossom.org), and the J. Meyer Lab here.