Leila Malow

Leila Malow—2013 Fellow

Year: Class of 2014
Major: Political Science
Organization: Pillsbury United Communities (Brian Coyle Community Center)

I spent my summer working at the Brian Coyle Community Center. The Brian Coyle Center is a central hub for social services and community activity in Minneapolis’ Cedar Riverside neighborhood, a neighborhood known to have one of the highest populations of East African immigrants and refugees in the United States. At the Center, I worked on the development of a new youth social entrepreneurship venture. The social enterprise is a youth-operated, next-to-new thrift boutique called the Sisterhood of the Traveling Scarf. The Sisterhood of the Traveling Scarf aims to build the work-readiness, leadership, and entrepreneurial skills of young East African women (14-21) living in Cedar Riverside through the combination of employment at the boutique and in-depth trainings and workshops. A highlight of my experience working at the Brian Coyle Center was developing workshops and curriculum material for the program’s work-readiness trainings, as well as mentoring and supervising the project’s youth staff.

The Chuck Green Fellowship was a great opportunity to be engaged in the Twin Cities. The seminar and summer component challenged me to make a meaningful and thoughtful contribution through forging community partnerships. The fellowship played a significant role in my intellectual and personal growth at Macalester. The fellowship provided me with the support and resources to be effective in the work that I chose to do, and gave me and other fellows a remarkable amount of freedom to follow our interests and chart our own course of action. My experience as a Chuck Green Fellow at the Brian Coyle Center, especially my daily work with teens, was tremendously rewarding.