ABOUT THE MILLENNIUM FELLOWSHIP - CLASS OF 2021
United Nations Academic Impact and MCN are proud to partner on the Millennium Fellowship. In 2021, over 25,000 young leaders on 2,000+ campuses across 153 nations applied to join the Class of 2021. 136 campuses worldwide (just 6%) were selected to host the 2,000+ Millennium Fellows. The Class of 2021 is bold, innovative, and inclusive.
UNITED NATIONS ACADEMIC IMPACT AND MCN PROUDLY PRESENT CLAUDIA CABRAL, A MILLENNIUM FELLOW FOR THE CLASS OF 2021.
Harvard University | Massachusetts, United States | Advancing SDG 4 & UNAI 2
" If used wisely, I believe that education can be a tool for liberation. As a female first-generation college student and first-generation high school graduate, this mentality has been ingrained in me by family members throughout all my years of schooling. What my family hopes for me is that my education helps me obtain self-sufficiency in a way that very few women in my family have had the opportunity to in the past. I take this message to heart, striving for more than what my family can expect from me. I still believe that education *can* be a tool for liberation, but it can also be a tool for exclusion or reproducing harmful mindsets that keep society from progressing forward. I am passionate about higher education and understanding the greater societal structures and inequalities that provide a need for reform and innovation in this sector. I am certain that the Millennium Fellowship can help guide my leadership potential and place me in community with other changemakers in order to promote the causes we all care so dearly about. "
Millennium Fellowship Project: The World Needs Warriors Initiative
The World Needs Warriors is an intercollegiate healing arts collective that is
grounded in mindfulness and uses a model of “Awareness, Healing, then Action”
(Aha!) to address the underlying issues that “suffer culture” poses for too many
students. While “suffer culture” would stop at Step 1: “Awareness” and
glamorize unhealthy patterns or equity issues as an inevitable part of the
college experience, the World Needs Warriors program encompasses all three
steps by teaching various mindfulness practices for the sake of students to act
on their findings, providing support along the entire process. Not only does this
program view self-care to improve one’s own educational experience, but it also
promotes wellness at the institutional level to create a structure of support for
more changemakers to enter the world in a more holistic way.
About the Millennium Fellow
Claudia Cabral is a senior at Harvard majoring in Sociology and minoring in Educational Studies. She was born in Canada, raised in the United States, and her family comes from the Portuguese archipelago of São Miguel, Azores. Although she hails from multiple domains, she considers herself a "global citizen" as, she says, our duty to uplift humanity supersedes any kinds of barriers (mental, physical, etc.). She has come to love education as a reflection of and tool for transforming the harmful systems that exist today and intends to use her Millennium Fellowship to address just that.
