The 2014 Chayes International Public Service Fellows are beginning to arrive and settle in to their summer placements.

Rebecca Donaldson arrived in Washington, DC, and started her work at Namati, which includes researching national legal aid frameworks to develop a toolkit for communities advocating for quality legal aid at scale. Rebecca is also working with Abigail Moy, ’09, a former Chayes Fellow who is now Namati’s program director of global operations.

Over in the Phillippines, Saptarishi Bandopadhyay, who is working for the Institute of Environmental Science for Social Change, reports: “…on the day after I got here I was packed off to the southern island of Mindanao and the rural villages of Bendum and Selahi, where I spent most of the week doing field visits with farmers who are enduring landslides, climatic changes, crop failure, debt, and loss of land and livelihood. The weekend was spent at a conference on land and water governance drawing physical and social scientists, community organizers, and theologians from across Europe and SE Asia, and where I assisted with documentation and, at the end, presented a synthesis of all the talks given under one stream of conversations (on sustainability). This is now the end of my second week, and have moved on to reviewing the progress of  post-disaster housing projects; leave for field-visits tomorrow…”

Stay tuned for more reports from the 2014 Chayes Fellows.