Serena Prince ’24 awarded Coro Fellowship in Public Affairs
Serena Prince ’24, a government and Africana Studies double major from New York City, New York, has been awarded a Coro Fellowship in Public Affairs. She will be returning to her hometown this fall to join 11 other fellows in the competitive, full-time, nine-month program designed to prepare future leaders for public service.
Coro Fellows are placed with a variety of organizations that have shaped the civic life of New York City, including businesses, nonprofits, political parties and labor unions. Participants meet prominent New York City leaders, network, build their skills and confront problems together. Fellows spend most of the week at a rotating placement among five organizations and two days each week at seminars.
Prince was first introduced to Coro in high school as part of the organization’s Participatory Budgeting Youth Fellowship program, run in partnership with the New York City Civic Engagement Commission. Her group promoted youth involvement in the city’s participatory budgeting (PB) process, in which City Council members dedicate at least $1 million for residents as young as 11 to decide how to spend.
“We advocated for PB across the city and created projects for how money could be spent in various districts,” Prince says. “Most importantly, we created ways to get more underrepresented populations involved. We actually did increase youth engagement in participatory budgeting that year, which was really cool!”
Prince says the experience inspired her to become involved in government at the local level, and a major issue on her mind is integration. “A lot of my independent research has been on how integration can be achieved in different ways. There are some very segregated places, and it’s something that I really want to be a part of fixing,” she says.
One of the biggest takeaways from her research, she says, is the cyclical nature of social movements: An inciting incident angers and mobilizes people to fight for change. If change doesn’t come fast enough and the people leading the movement stop, enthusiasm wanes. “People become complacent with a sliver of progress or too tired to continue on,” Prince explains. “Because of the explosiveness of mass movements, they start off extremely strong, but that is not realistically sustainable.” She attributes the cycle to human nature, and she wants to find a way to keep the momentum going until true change is achieved.
“No emotion is forever,” she points out. “When it comes to segregation and integration in New York City, it’s the same cycle where people get angry and say, ‘This is wrong.’ And then nothing changes, and people forget. And then there’s another study 10 years later: ‘Hey, New York City is segregated,’ and people react, ‘Oh, wow!’ We’ve been in the same situation for the past 70 years. Not much has changed. How can we create some sustainable frameworks to maintain that desire for change?”
At Conn, Prince is a Posse Scholar, a scholar in the Holleran Center for Community Action and Public Policy, a Holleran Center Fellow, a DEI Race and Ethnicity Programs Fellow and a Connections Ambassador. After graduation and before her Coro Fellowship begins, she will be a summer intern for the New York City Council. Last summer, Prince won a Bessell Fellowship that allowed her to spend six weeks teaching in and exploring Tanzania in partnership with the Sasamani Foundation, founded by Andy Halsey ’77.
Prince says of her Coro Fellowship, “I’m excited to step into a new environment and learn about what leadership can look like in this space. I think I’ve gotten to know Conn very well, but there’s a bigger world out there with different types of people I’m going to meet. I see this as a next step for me in terms of my own development as a person beyond academia. I’m ready to experience that and learn more about myself, what I want from the world and what I can contribute.”
For more than 30 years, the Coro Fellows Program has developed aspiring change-makers using New York as its classroom. Participants grow self-awareness and analytical skills, are exposed to cross-sector collaboration, are granted access to high impact leaders and are provided with unparalleled relationship-building opportunities to launch their professional careers. Coro Fellows leave the program with an understanding of how New York City works and with the knowledge, skills and networks to make not only New York better, but also society on the whole.
Connecticut College offers a wide range of fellowship opportunities for students and recent graduates. For more information, visit The Walter Commons or email fellowships@conncoll.edu.
