2027 Chauncey Fellowship Projects Take Shape

“I love math,” says Isabelle Awai, a senior at the University of New Haven (UNH).

Awai is one of two local college students selected for the 2027 Chauncey Fellowship at The Community Foundation. She will receive the support to design and pursue a project focused on her passion for one year following her graduation from UNH in the spring.

“Math is my one passion, and that’s exactly what my project is circled around,” she says. “I want to share that love.”

As a Calc II learning assistant at UNH, Awai helps students tap into tricky concepts. She recently noticed one of her students raising his hand a little higher in class.

“Just to see that passion come out – that's something I want to implement in my project. I want to create a program to teach certain types of math, because I know it can be really daunting. You can ask yourself, ‘When am I ever going to use this again?’ But I want to create a program geared towards specific components of math that you can use every day and improve your life.”

Awai says that, more broadly, she hopes to change how math is viewed. “Math is so diverse and can be used in so many ways. I just want to spread that joy, and change the dynamic of how math is looked upon.”

Ericka Henriquez, a senior at Yale, is designing a personal history project for her fellowship. She hopes to create a final product to present at a local library, nursing home or assisted living center.

“My project started because I love to listen,” said Henriquez.

When her grandmother was hospitalized and moved into an assisted nursing facility, Henriquez would visit her. She quickly noticed that the nurses around her didn’t speak Spanish, so her grandmother, who only spoke Spanish, had nobody to talk to. As Henriquez visited with her more and more, she learned things she’d never known about her grandmother’s life.

“She would tell me all these stories, and like I said, I love to listen,” said Henriquez. The stories ranged from youthful escapades to her reasons for leaving El Salvador during the Civil War. “I was just like, ‘Wow, there's so many things that I didn't know about my grandma because I never asked her, because I didn't know I could.’”

Hernandez hopes to offer personal history projects, and possibly, including “junk journaling” or scrapbooking as a way of documenting these histories. “I would give any materials to the library to show how New Haven residents’ lives were. Yale and New Haven have such a history,” she said.

At a luncheon celebrating the two newly-announced fellows, Henry “Sam” Chauncey, reflected on the history of the award, created in his honor by Edward “Edder” Bennet III, who graduated from Yale in 1984. Chauncey, the former secretary of Yale, was Bennet’s mentor, and helped him make the campus more accessible after a swimming accident left Bennet paralyzed.

“In the summer between his freshman and sophomore year, Edder dove into Long Island Sound,” remembers Chauncey. “He came back to Yale, and he was the first wheelchair-bound student on campus.”

Chauncey was an ardent supporter of Bennet, helping ensure that he and others with physical limitations could successfully navigate the campus. Years later, after becoming the senior executive and then president of First National Bank of Santa Fe, Bennet reached out to Chauncey regarding a fellowship in his name.

“He came to me,” remembers Chauncey, “and he wanted me to help him desigin it.”

Chauncey requested that the fellowship be awarded in the fall of the senior year. “Then you have a chance to consult faculty or whoever you want about the projects you want to work on, so that when you graduate from here, you can hit the road running, so to speak,” he said. “The other thing I said is I did not want the fellowship to only go to Yale students. I wanted it to go to the whole community of New Haven.”

Awai will be the second of six Chauncey Fellows who have graduated from another university besides Yale. The first was Julien Sanchez, a Southern Connecticut State University graduate who is finalizing the film he directed, set in part on his alma mater’s campus.

“They really have all been wonderful fellows, just incredible,” said Chauncey.