Working Together, Giving Back, Changing Lives

Dear YANA Community,



Editor’s note: Hameeda Uloomi was a 2024 YANA-Dwight Hall Summer Fellow at Elena’s Light, a refugee integration organization in New Haven. We asked her to share what the fellowship meant to her. Here’s what she wrote.

The YANA fellowship made my long-held dream of helping others while also sustaining myself a reality. I have watched countless peers dream of pursuing careers in social impact, only to abandon those paths because they lacked financial support. We lose truly passionate people to other fields, along with their lived experiences and deeply needed leadership.

For me, the YANA fellowship allowed me to do something I had been doing my entire life: teach ESL. I grew up teaching ESL to my mother, who never had the privilege of attending school. My evenings were spent helping her learn English. When I was thirteen, I enrolled her in ESL courses, and slowly, one by one, most volunteers quit. I never blamed them. Teaching ESL is exhausting, emotionally demanding work, especially when it is unpaid.

I carried that same commitment when I taught ESL to Afghan girls who are barred from education in Afghanistan. But for the first time, when I applied to the YANA fellowship as an ESL tutor for Elena’s Light, I was compensated for this labor. That moment was deeply affirming. It was a powerful demonstration that no act of social impact is too small to be valued or funded.

Because my work was finally recognized and supported, my passion for social impact deepened rather than burned out. Through my YANA fellowship experience, I went on to found a student group dedicated to mentoring girls in Afghanistan and securing educational opportunities abroad. I built partnerships with U.S. boarding schools that ultimately supported the education of four Afghan girls. We helped evacuate them from Afghanistan to the United States. Today, they are thriving, straight-A students with dreams so expansive they are difficult to put into words.

The fellowship introduced me to a community that consistently goes above and beyond to ensure that those committed to social impact have the capacity, resources and confidence to pursue it. Without YANA, I would not have met the extraordinary people who opened doors for me and ignited a passion in me that I now see in others.

I want to thank you for your continued support and can’t wait to be a part of this community for years to come.

Hameeda Uloomi

2024 YANA-Dwight Hall Summer Fellow 



 Working Together, Giving Back, Changing Lives

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