Rochelle Johnston '96

After finishing a Women's Studies degree at Smith College and working for the Canadian branch of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines for a year, I accepted a job at Save the Children in Toronto . For the next four years I worked with young people in foster care, group homes, jail, and on the street across Canada, to develop and run a program to help them and their peers learn about and stick up for their rights.

After resisting for years the fact that life really would get a lot easier (and potentially more interesting) for me if I'd just get a Master's degree, the Harvard Graduate School of Education took me into their fold. Despite reveling in the luxury of grad school, I resisted applying for a Doctoral degree and headed off to East Africa instead: with well over 50% of their population under 18 and communities that are still resisting Western ideas of "childhood" and "youth," this is where I felt I could learn the most about young people's power. I worked with UNICEF in their Child Protection Section long enough to figure out that consultants get to do all the interesting work. So now I'm working as a freelance researcher with no fixed address. In this capacity I've researched: children's safety and protection in Tanzania and southern Sudan; the process of developing a national youth policy in Liberia; and human trafficking in eastern Africa. As I get more experience, I hope I'll be able to start taking vacations again. I also want to set time aside to start my own participatory action research project with conflict-affected young people in Sudan and Uganda.