Hi everyone! My name is Paul-Louis Biondi (they/he) and I am a sophomore in First College. Originally from Atlanta, Georgia, I plan to major in Comparative Literature with certificates in Gender and Sexuality Studies and History and the Practice of Diplomacy. Beyond Service Focus, I am a Fields Fellow through the Carl A. Fields Center and a LGBTQIA+ Peer Educator on campus as well as a chair for the upcoming Princeton Model UN Conference.
This summer, I had the chance to be a RISE Fellow through the Pace Center for Civic Engagement. As a fellow, I worked with Let’s Get Ready, a partner organization based in New York City that uses a near-peer mentorship network to give students from historically underrepresented backgrounds the support they need to access and persist through college (you can check out their website here). I worked as a part of the Program Design Department to develop coach training and a student curriculum that spoke to the diversity and inclusion needs of students at Let’s Get Ready.
During my fellowship, I worked on a few different projects. My first project was to redevelop the training that LGR coaches undergo every year so that it would include cultural responsibility and equity-literacy training. With the rest of the program design team, we researched and created resources that would help coaches engage with their students in conversations about social, emotional, and identity challenges that they were facing in college. The goal was to not only give coaches the vocabulary to talk about diversity and inclusion, but to also equip them to help students navigate their college environments and the obstacles they encounter. The other project I worked on was to create a Student Leadership Council for the Let’s Get Ready. This council was envisioned as a feedback mechanism for the organization so that students could better express their needs to LGR and LGR could internalize and respond to the feedback students gave them. As a part of the project, I designed the council structure and drafted an agenda, bylaws, and resources for the council to use in the year to come.
Getting to be a part of this non-profit has been so insightful and rewarding and I am grateful for the opportunity to help such a wonderful organization with their work!
