Human Rights Fellows named "best and brightest”

Three former Human Rights fellows have been listed as Business Insider’s “15 Incredibly Impressive Students.” Garima Sharma, Nicholle Richards, and Lara Mitra were highlighted for their passionate and innovative work as undergraduate Stanford leaders.

All three were awarded the Human Rights Fellowship by the Stanford Program on Human Rights and the McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society. This fellowship is awarded each year to a small group of highly competitive applicants.

Sharma worked with Apne Aap: Women Worldwide, an anti-trafficking NGO based in Forbesganj, India. She spent two quarters designing an interactive human rights education curriculum focused on sex trafficking, which she used in Forbesganj to engage with at-risk girls who are the daughters of sex workers in the red light district, as well as 12-14 year-old girls belonging to the Nutt (lower-caste) community. Simultaneously, she worked with older men, women and community leaders, with the goal of making preliminary headway into a community-wide anti-trafficking strategy.

Richards traveled to Guatemala to work with Kids Alive, a nonprofit that works to rescue orphans and at-risk children. In Guatemala, she helped at a care home for girls who have been abandoned or abused – often in the form of forced labor and/or physical and sexual abuse. She evaluated a program that works to continue supporting the girls who have returned home, and established a micro-loan project to help encourage business development and women’s empowerment in the region.

Mitra worked with Self-Employed Women's Association (SEWA), a union of 1.4 million informal economy workers, which provide community-driven socioeconomic services, including healthcare, local banking, social security, and housing to marginalized groups in Ahmedabad, India to. She focused on SEWA’s initiatives responding to people's inherent right to a healthy life, and worked with the health team to analyze and document the changing role of front-line health workers who deliver care to expecting mothers.