UMass Dartmouth Student Colleen Dawicki from New Bedford is a Rappaport Fellowship Recipient

NORTH DARTMOUTH, MA (06/15/2011)(readMedia)-- Colleen Dawicki, a master's degree student at UMass Dartmouth, is among the 14 local graduate students who will spend the summer working in key state and local agencies as Rappaport Public Policy Fellows.

Dawicki will work with New Bedford's office of Housing and Community Development to create a plan for strategically directing resources toward a high-need, high-opportunity geographic area of the city. In addition to conducting a needs assessment to define a target neighborhood, she will identify new and existing programs aimed at providing high-impact wraparound services and sustainably improving quality of life for residents of all ages.

Now in its eleventh year, the Rappaport Public Policy Fellowship is a unique program that gives talented young graduate students from throughout greater Boston the opportunity to help public officials address key problems and, in doing so, to learn more about how public policy is created and implemented. The fellowship is funded and administered by Harvard's Rappaport Institute of Greater Boston, which strives to improve the governance of the region by strengthening connections between scholars, students, officials, and civic leaders. The four doctoral students selected as fellows are also being funded by the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.

In addition to working full-time for their host agencies, the fellows will get together weekly to learn more about key issues in the region and discuss progress on their projects with each other. At many of these sessions, they will be joined by 12 law students who are working in similar internships via a fellows program run by the Rappaport Center for Law and Public Service at the Suffolk University Law School.

Both the Rappaport Institute and Suffolk's Rappaport Center for Law and Public Service were founded and funded by Phyllis and Jerome Lyle Rappaport Charitable Foundation which promotes emerging leaders in Greater Boston.