Ayanna-Miller Smith, a criminology and justice policy doctoral student at Northeastern, will spend the summer working in key state agencies as a Rappaport Public Policy Fellow. Ayanna will join a cohort of twenty graduate students and was chosen from a field of almost 200 applicants. The fellowship is funded and administered by Harvard’s Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston, which strives to improve the governance of the region by strengthening connections between scholars, students, officials, and civic leaders.
Ayanna will have a joint placement between the Massachusetts Office of the Child Advocate and the Massachusetts Department of Youth Services. She will be assisting both agencies in examining racial and ethnic disparities in youth custodial arrests rates across the state of Massachusetts. Data indicates that Black and Hispanic/Latino youth experience disparities in almost every single county. Ayanna will also be assisting in other smaller projects within these two agencies.
Now in its twenty-first year, the Rappaport Public Policy Fellowship is a unique program that gives talented young graduate students 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.
Congratulations, Ayanna!
