Population Fellowship Program

The Sierra Club Global Population and Environment's nationwide six-month Fellowship Program equips outstanding student activist leaders with continual training, resources and mentorship to implement self-designed campaigns that elevate population, sexual and reproductive health and rights, and environmental protection among youth audiences. Check out our application and read the biographies of our 2009 Fellows below!

2009 Fellows
Sierra Club Population Fellows in the photo above: Front row far left: Adjoa Tetteh. Front row, third from left: staffer Cassie Gardener. Second row, second from left: Marcella Lucente. Fourth from left: Kimberley D.C. Schroeder. Back row, second from left: Jen Crick. Third from left: Ciara Conway. Sixth from left: Sirina Keesara. Second from right: Ty Dawson. Far right: Aviva Rosman. Fellows not pictured: Erin Moore, Maren Anderson.

Adjoa Tetteh, a 2006 graduate of the University of Chicago, has been a passionate advocate for sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) since 2004 when she joined a student organization, Sex Education Activists. In her capacity as board member and eventual co-director, as well as through collaborations beyond graduation with organizations like the Sierra Club and Illinois Caucus for Adolescent Health, she has campaigned for access to comprehensive, medically accurate sex education throughout local (Chicago and Illinois), national, and global communities. Approaching population, sexuality, and the environment from a justice perspective, her campaign efforts have utilized a combination of peer education, awareness building, and empowerment of youth to advocate for their own rights to access and education. Adjoa has also approached her advocacy from a scientific perspective in addition to working on the ground, co-authoring a journal article for service providers on the content and influences on Illinois sex education programs, published in the Feb. 2008 issue of Obstetrics and Gynecology. Currently, she is furthering her commitment to rights, justice, and equity through her dual roles with the Sierra Club's Global Population and Environment Program (GPEP) as a liaison to the GPEP Committee and a Mentor within the Fellowship program. In these roles, she strives to act as a resource to the Fellows and their campaigns, while also achieving her own goals of building a coalition of SRHR advocates in the Chicago and engaging young adults in their "odyssey" years by creating fun, relevant, opportunities for action outside of university settings.

Aviva Rosman is a junior at the University of Chicago majoring in public policy with a concentration in feminist studies. On campus, Aviva serves as a peer educator on sexual violence prevention and is working with other activists to change her school's sexual assault policy. As a Sierra Club Global Population and Environment fellow, she is coordinating a video petition on Chicago college campuses in support of the Illinois Reproductive Justice and Access Act and planning an event for Earth Day.

Ciara Conway is a junior at Rhodes College in Memphis, TN. At Rhodes, she is the president of VOX: Voices for Planned Parenthood. Currently, they are celebrating the acquirement of a condom machine on campus. They are also in the process of planning a Free EC Day , hosting one of their state legislators, and planning a fair to celebrate Earth Day. She has previously been very focused on campus education and activism, but is excited about incorporating environmental justice and political activism into her campaign.

Erin Moore is a graduate student at the University of Chicago in Illinois. She grew up in Boulder City, Nevada and brings five years of program and academic experience with girls' empowerment programs and community organizing to the organization she founded and now directs, the Southern Nevada Young Women's Collaborative. For four years at the University of Chicago, she led Women and Youth Supporting Each Other (WYSE), a nationwide, curriculum-based girls' mentoring organization. Currently a member of WYSE's National Board of Directors, she organized WYSE's National Leadership Training Conference for branch directors from around the country in the summer of 2007. Erin was also a campus organizer with Advocates for Youth's "Rights, Respect, Responsibility" campaign, where she mobilized students and community groups to pressure the Chicago Public Schools Board of Directors to adopt age-appropriate, medically accurate sexuality education for all Chicago Public Schools students. Erin is now excited to serve with other young activists from around the country as a Sierra Club Global Population and Environment Program Fellow.

Jen Crick is a sophomore at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania and a long-time population-environment activist with the Sierra Club. Before college, Jen was an environmental leader in her community and high school through the Environmental Club, State Envirothon, and Girl Scouts. During the summer of 2004, she traveled with People to People as a student ambassador to the United Kingdom and Ireland where she participated in several service projects related to environmental protection. In 2007 as a graduating high school student, she won an essay contest to attend the 2nd Annual One Voice Reproductive Health and Population Summit in Washington, D.C., co-sponsored by Advocates for Youth, SIECUS, Sierra Club and Population Connection. There she met amazing people from the Sierra Club and the Student Coalition, who inspired her to focus Swarthmore College's environmental club on working with the school's administration to develop a campus sustainability plan. As one of her school's first Green Advisors, she helps the eighty other people in my dorm to lead environmentally aware lives. She co-organizes her campus's Focus the Nation Effort, and helps lead Earthlust's Carbon Reduction campaign at Swarthmore. She is also active with Voices for Choice, College Democrats, Feminist Majority and Spiritual Youth for Reproductive Freedom. During February 2008, she was selected to participate in a Study Tour to the Philippines coordinated by the Sierra Club, Audubon, and the Izaak Walton League of America, to learn about PHE initiatives - projects that connect population, health and environmental issues to effectively meet community needs and protect the environment. Read her Philippines story here.

Kimberley D.C. Schroder is a senior at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY. She switched coasts after growing up in Lafayette, CA. While concentrating in Sustainable Development at Cornell University, she has incorporated classes as diverse as "Transportation and Society", Neurobiology", and "African Civilizations and Cultures" into her schedule. She studied community-based sustainable development in Senegal, West Africa. She also interned for the Transport Research Institute, based at Napier University, Edinburgh, Scotland, UK. She has attended many conferences and trainings related to sustainability and activism, such as Sustainable Ivies, Change It! (Greenpeace), Women for Sustainable Development (National Wildlife Federation), and the 3rd Annual One Voice: Reproductive Health and Population Summit (co-sponsored by Sierra Club, SIECUS, Advocates for Youth and the Feminist Majority Foundation). At Cornell, she is active in Sustainability Hub, Kyoto Now!, and Roots & Shoots, among other groups, as well as multiple one-time events/campaigns from Energy Independent Caroline to getting Cornell to commit to being Carbon-Neutral. Freshman and sophomore year she lived in Ecology House and participated in many house clubs like EcoPlayers and EcoRecycling. For Kimberley, sustainability means more than just managing resources efficiently - it's about people, and setting up societies to truly meet basic needs in the larger holistic picture.

Marcella Lucente is a senior majoring in political science at the University of California, Riverside. She's spending her Winter 2009 quarter interning in the Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi's office, where she was also named a Robert T. Matsui Congressional Fellow for an exemplary dedication to public service. Prior to this, she organized for grassroots campaigns, mostly dealing with energy policy, and worked at a non-profit legal aid clinic. These services educate and empower clients by giving them the tools necessary to improve their lives. For example, we provided them with the legal documents and procedural information to resolve domestic disputes, seek financial stability, and access the healthcare, dental, and developmental services needed for their minor dependents. Currently, she is organizing a campaign at UCR during Earth Week that will educate and encourage her fellow students to make the global-to-local connections between women's empowerment and the environment. She will be promoting policies and programs that increase access to to voluntary family planning and comprehensive sexuality education, both here and abroad. Through this event, she hopes to persuade her peers to act locally by creating a more efficient recycling program on my campus. As John Muir said, "When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe."

Maren Anderson is a graduate student at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, where she studies the connections among climate change and population from a policy perspective. She has a background in population and environment issues, having studied abroad in Madagascar and seen first-hand the successes of population, health and environment projects that holistically address local community health and environmental needs. Her work in these issues has taught her that collaboration and cross-movement understanding are key if we want to move forward. In 2008 she was a member of the Lutheran Volunteer Corps, a year-long national volunteer service program for people seeking to unite faith, social justice, intentional community, and practice simple and sustainable living. As part of her year of service, she worked as a fellow with the Women's Funding Network (WFN) in San Francisco. She greatly enjoyed and benefited from her time with WFN, learning about the women's funding movement and the concept of women-led solutions. She believes that "we must bridge the gap between the realities in the more developed world and the less developed world. The connections (among population, health and environment issues) are oftentimes more evident for individuals outside our nation, but how do we help people here understand these realities? While doing this, we must keep in mind that it is not a "their" problem but rather a problem that we are all a part of and are all affected by." Maren is originally from Northern Minnesota, and received her B.A. from Gustavus Adolphus College in 2007.

Sirina Keesara graduated from UC Berkeley with a B.A. in Anthropology in 2008 and will be attending medical school next year. She traveled to Ghana in the Fall of 2007 and Summer of 2008 to conduct a research project about barriers to fertility regulation for Ghanaian women. Through her study of the Ghanaian healthcare system, she became interested in international global health policy and the organizations that govern it. She hopes to influence policy by organizing grassroots effort behind the issue of population justice!

Ty Dawson is a long-time population-environment activist with the Sierra Club, having served as a volunteer with the Global Population and Environment Program Campus Campaign from 2006-2009. Ty has organized and spoken at more than a dozen "Sex and Environment" presentations at his college, Ohio University, alongside Shelby Knox during our 2006 "Illinois Tour," and alongside Adriana Varillas of Cancún during our 2007 "Ohio Tour." As a college student, Ty coordinated the Campus Climate Challenge at Ohio State University, and worked with students at colleges and universities across Ohio to curb greenhouse gas emissions. Seeing the damaging effects of mountain top removal first-hand inspired Ty to take action, and work to change Ohio's energy policies. He has encouraged many students to join the Sierra Student Coalition and become part of the renewable energy revolution. In September 2007, Ty received the Joseph A. Barbosa Award, given to a Sierra Club activist under the age of 30. During November 2007, Ty was also selected to participate in a Study Tour to the Ethiopia coordinated by the Sierra Club and Audubon, to learn about PHE initiatives - projects that connect population, health and environmental issues to effectively meet community needs and protect the environment. Read his Ethiopia story here.