Description

In 2020, HLF awarded a special grant to the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) to pilot a U.S. Foreign Policy Fellowship program with Trinity Washington University (TWU), a women’s college. TWU President, Patricia McGuire, and CSIS President and CEO, John Hamre, collaborated to develop the program which provided opportunities to engage Trinity’s diverse students with Washington, D.C.’s well-established foreign policy community. Fellowship program goals included encouraging more diverse talent to enter the foreign policy field, and growing a cadre of students comfortable contributing to policy debates in ways that productively challenge traditional perspectives and improve overall policy outcomes. The fellowship provided participants with mentorship, skills development opportunities, and policymaking exposure over the course of one intensive semester.
By all accounts, the program was a success: it inspired students from backgrounds underrepresented in U.S. foreign policy to pursue opportunities they had perhaps not previously imagined in that arena, provided critical professional skills development, and opened a professional pathway that went beyond Trinity’s standard curriculum. It also started the process of exposing scholars at CSIS to individuals with different lived experiences, backgrounds, voices, and policy views in ways that challenged these scholars to be more mindful of diverse perspectives and contributions in their work.
Considering this success, HLF staff invited CSIS to submit a proposal for a second year of funding so that CSIS could apply important learnings and takeaways from year one to refine the program. CSIS would incorporate feedback obtained from students, mentors, scholars, and TWU faculty to comprehensively strengthen the year-two program. CSIS would also leverage its own internal diversity, equity, and inclusion processes and policies to further refine the fellowship program, and would champion program graduates, opening doors and connecting them with organizations committed to greater diversity and inclusion.
CSIS ultimately aims to create a sustainable fellowship program model that can be applied to additional schools and students around the country to encourage more diverse talent to enter the foreign policy field. The CSIS Trinity Fellowship is a meaningful step toward expanding existing networks, equipping a new generation of diverse thinkers to be heard, and fostering the new connections necessary to impact representational change in the foreign policy arena in Washington and beyond.
Recommendation: That the Directors of the Henry Luce Foundation approve a one-year grant of $64,000 to the Center for Strategic and International Studies for the CSIS Trinity Fellowship – Enriching the Future of Foreign Policy.