Caltech Graduate Awarded a Mickey Leland Hunger Fellowship

PASADENA—Sara Beaber, a recent California Institute of Technology graduate, has been awarded one of 20 fellowships from the Mickey Leland Hunger Fellows Program of the Congressional Hunger Center. Sara, a chemistry and history major, graduated from Caltech on June 12.

As a Leland Fellow, Sara will be placed in direct field service in a U.S. antihunger program for six months and then will be brought back to Washington, D. C., for six months of policy interning in one of several national nonprofit agencies.

"I am excited and honored by the opportunities I've been presented for next year with the Mickey Leland Hunger Fellows Program of the Congressional Hunger Center," says Beaber. "I look forward to networking with other Fellows and professionals in the antihunger and antipoverty field as well as getting involved in policy formation and evaluation on the national scale. This will help me get a better idea of the ways I can best pursue my goal of working toward the end of hunger in the United States."

Sara has been volunteering in hunger-related programs since high school, raising money in walkathons, serving at the local soup kitchen, and cooking and delivering meals to homeless families. Beginning with a precollege summer internship with Mercer Street Friends, a Quaker social service provider in New Jersey that had her rotate through several of their programs, she has become increasingly active in the distribution of resources and in the larger, more systemic, changes in policy and planning to end hunger.

In a 1996 summer research study, Sara worked with the staff policy analyst and advocate of Mercer Street Friends to design, analyze, and publicize a statistical study of welfare and employment policy in New Jersey and each of its 21 counties. In the summer of 1997, she worked with a nonprofit advocacy group in New York to study the capacity of emergency food programs in Albany, Buffalo, and Brooklyn.

Sara, the daughter of Lawrence and Patricia Beaber, is from Lawrenceville, New Jersey, and attended Lawrence High School. Her senior history thesis has a working title of "Barriers to Schoolchildren's Participation in Federal Nutrition Programs," and looks at why schools choose to offer or not offer the National School Lunch and School Breakfast Programs.

The Congressional Hunger Center was founded in 1993 by Congressmen Tony Hall and Frank Wolf and late member of Congress Bill Emerson in response to the disbanding of the House Select Committee on Hunger. Mickey Leland was a Democratic Congressman from Texas who cofounded the House Select Committee on Hunger and was very active in promoting antihunger efforts worldwide. He died in 1989 in a plane crash while on a humanitarian mission to Ethiopia.