Meet the IRC-Zolberg Fellows for Summer 2021
The IRC and the Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility at The New School are excited to announce the summer 2021 cohort of fellows. Supported by the Arnhold Foundation, master’s and doctoral students at The New School have the opportunity to contribute or lead design and research projects at the IRC.
Since 2017, fellows have worked at the IRC on a range of teams including policy, innovation, research, health, governance, and emergency response. Fellows have a wide range of experience, and come from the Parsons School of Design, School of Nonprofit and Public Management, and other New School departments. Learn more about the fellowship.
Jeanine Marie, MS in Public & Urban Policy, The Milano School of Policy, Management, and Environment
Jeanine has worked as a Communications & Advocacy Coordinator at the D.C. Tenants’ Rights Center, a Program Assistant at the New School, in editorial roles at multiple nonprofit publishers, and as a student reporter and editor for her undergrad newspaper. Jeanine is also an alumna of Planned Parenthood’s Developing Leaders Program. Her primary research interests broadly include inequality and social policy, in particular domestic/gun violence, public housing, gender inequalities in the labor force, childcare and reproductive justice, community-led projects, voters’ rights, and race-based discrimination. Her recent research has focused on the effect that media portrayals of poverty have on federal funding of anti-poverty programs.
As Research and Communications Fellow, Covid-19 Vaccine Equity, Jeanine will support the IRC’s effort to ensure equitable access to Covid-19 vaccines in states affected by conflict and fragility, and specifically for refugees, internally displaced people, and others whose lives have been uprooted by crisis. Jeanine will track and analyze national policy decisions on Covid-19 vaccine access in countries where the IRC works, and will use this information to create advocacy and communications products designed to advance more equitable access to Covid-19 vaccines. Jeanine will work closely with the IRC’s advocacy staff sitting across the Health, Governance, and Policy & Advocacy Teams to create a scorecard measuring equity for Covid-19 vaccine access.
Lesley Onstott, MFA in Transdisciplinary Design, Parsons School of Design
Before returning to school, Lesley worked with Not Impossible Labs, a small organization that eschewed bureaucracy in favor of gritty, low-budget approaches to collaboratively crafting innovations in response to limitations of access around the world. There she fulfilled a variety of roles from project designer to project director to media producer. She has additionally worked as a photojournalist and in both feature and documentary film, maintaining a passion for creative communication, utilizing narrative to create connection, and crafting visual storytelling. Lesley’s current research interests include: “sustainable” and collective transition, exposure to “new” narratives and histories as a catalyst for increased relation to the unknown, and the potential of varied epistemological sources and creativity to create space for emergent and novel ways of approaching current power and structural challenges.
As Innovation Ethics Fellow, Lesley will develop an online assessment tool and accompanying guidance to help facilitate efficient and timely assessment of ethical risks in human centered design and other innovation methods. As part of this work, Lesley will: review ethical principles and existing systems and documents for ethical reviews; conduct interviews with IRC staff who work in innovation studies; create an online assessment tool to help teams 1) self-assess level of ethical risks, 2) identify next steps, and 3) identify relevant tools based on their self-assessment responses; and help to finalize tools & guidance to ensure that they are user-friendly and accessible.
Mónica Salmón Gómez, Ph.D. in Sociology, New School for Social Research
Mónica has more than 14 years of experience in the humanitarian and development sector advocating for human rights and social justice at the global level. She co-founded a non-profit organization, FM4 Paso Libre, that defends human rights of migrants and refugees in her home country, Mexico. As the coordinator of knowledge management and networks at Asylum Access America Latina, she also consolidated and coordinated the Regional Working Group of the Brazil Plan of Action (GAR-PAB), a network of more than 50 nonprofit organizations that work on international protection issues. During this time she also promoted and accompanied the construction process of the Network of Colombian Victims for Peace in Latin America and the Caribbean (Revicpaz-Lac). Mónica is interested in irregularized migration and refugee studies and their intersection with feminist and critical race theories. Her current research focuses on the dynamics of the Central American-Mexican-US migratory corridor as a border regime.
As the Humanitarian System Equity Fellow, Mónica will work closely with the Governance Technical Unit to help advance our research priorities related to Client Centered Programming in Partnership. This will contribute to strengthening the understanding of what a strong joint feedback mechanism looks like, and the nuances of this when working in partnership with different types of actors (civil society organization, government actor, private sector actor), as well as learning how partners can share capacity with one another on client feedback mechanisms. This work will support the IRC’s Strategy 100 commitment to giving its clients and partners greater influence over program design and delivery.
Forrest Sparks, MFA in Transdisciplinary Design, Parsons School of Design
Forrest’s practice sits at the intersection of public health, sustainability, and design. At the University of Texas, Rio Grande Valley (UTRGV), he was the Design Lead for food insecurity research initiative that co-developed solidarity economic food systems. He has also facilitated workshops with undocumented communities to institutionalize community engagement at UTRGV, conducted research with community health workers with the Equal Voice Network, and organized and curated TEDxMcAllen. Forrest’s current research interests revolve around how design can catalyze democratic and economic systems for inclusive and regenerative futures. This includes prototyping Citizens Assemblies as a vehicle for participatory policy-making in NYC, designing a service blueprint for a federal jobs guarantee that focuses on co-creating jobs in the fields of sustainability and public health, and developing a well-being economics curriculum for high school economics educators and students.
As Strategy Fellow, Forest will take a leading role in facilitating the development of the IRC’s Community Health Worker (CHW) strategy to focus our global work and articulate a path to better supporting the communities in which we work and to address their health needs. Working closely with members of the Health Technical Unit and the Airbel Impact Lab, Forrest will project manage the strategy development process, support the establishment of a cross-cutting internal working group, conduct literature and documentation reviews, conduct and synthesize stakeholder interviews, and document the insights and recommendations emerging from this qualitative research in a comprehensive strategy document.
