On March 26, 2025, the Yale Alumni Nonprofit Alliance (YANA) hosted an event titled “From Summer Fellows to Social Leaders: YANA-Dwight Hall Fellowship to Strengthen the Nonprofit Sector.” The panel featured 2024 YANA-Dwight Hall Summer Fellow Hameeda Uloomi ’25; Jonathan Fanton ’65, ’78 Ph.D.; Asia Brown ’16, ’19 M.P.H., ’19 M.A.R.; and moderator Rob Leighton ’89 M.B.A. in a discussion on empowering the next generation of social impact leaders.
The Wednesday evening gathering in the Dwight Hall Library was attended by current Yale students, New Haven community partners, YANA board members, Yale alumni, and Dwight Hall staff. Program supporters and friends from across the country joined the hybrid event by videoconference. The group collectively celebrated the YANA-Dwight Hall Summer Fellows partnership and the upcoming 2025 Summer Fellows cohort.
YANA-Dwight Hall Summer Fellows supports a portion of the Dwight Hall Summer Fellows program, which was founded in 1968 to establish an environment for students to create social change through full-time, paid engagement in coordination with New Haven community partners and organizations. Today, in its 58th year, Dwight Hall Summer Fellows continues to support students as they utilize the program’s resources and infrastructure to form lasting relationships with communities in New Haven and nationwide.
In 2017, YANA and Dwight Hall launched YANA-Dwight Hall Summer Fellows. The partnership addresses critical funding needs within the Yale undergraduate body, supporting students who have already used their Summer Experience Award (a one-time summer funding award available to all Yale students through the Office of Career Strategy) and graduating seniors who are no longer eligible for the majority of summer funding opportunities. Thus, the fellowship removes financial obstacles for under-resourced Yale students, enabling them to pursue impactful summer internships focused on addressing social injustices.
To date, the YANA-Dwight Hall partnership “has funded 32 Fellows, supporting students working with organizations tackling challenges such as refugee services, legal aid, education equity, housing access, public health, cultural heritage, and community development.”
During the March 26th panel, Hameeda discussed her experience serving refugee women through the local organization Elena’s Light as a 2024 YANA-Dwight Hall Summer Fellow. Her work focused on teaching English to women in the Afghan immigrant and refugee community in New Haven.
The alumni panelists shed light on their personal career trajectories and the lessons they learned along the way. Asia, Principal at Wellspring Consulting, shared the academic path that led her to social sector consulting, from pivoting to studying public health as an undergraduate to her time at the Yale School of Public Health and Yale Divinity School. Jonathan, former President of the MacArthur Foundation and former Director of the Ulysses S. Grant Foundation, a Dwight Hall partner organization, remarked on the importance of living a balanced life, not getting consumed by your work, and giving back through service.
All the panelists emphasized the dynamic and rewarding nature of careers in the social sector and encouraged students to find mentors early in their professional journeys.
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YANA-Dwight Hall Summer Fellows embodies the Grow pillar of Dwight Hall’s Engage, Grow, and Advance program delivery model, strengthening students’ moral, intellectual, and civic capacities through experiential learning, fellowships, trainings, and mentorship.
You may learn more about Dwight Hall Summer Fellows here and YANA-Dwight Hall Summer Fellows here. Students interested in receiving supplemental funding for a summer 2025 social impact project may apply here by May 8th.
