Arianna Lawrence ’26 has been awarded the .
The leadership development and scholarship program, created by Barack and Michelle Obama and Brian Chesky, co-founder and CEO of Airbnb, identifies and supports students who have a passion for helping others through public service.
The 100 scholarship recipients, known as “Voyagers,” will receive up to $50,000 in financial aid for their junior and senior years of college to help alleviate college debt so they can afford to pursue a career in public service.
For the duration of the two-year program, students are invited to an ongoing speaker series, providing them with access to a network of leaders. After graduating, they will join the Obama Foundation’s global community.
Additionally, they receive a $10,000 stipend and housing to pursue a summer work-travel experience between their junior and senior years of college. The students will design their own “Summer Voyage” to gain exposure to new communities and experience in a chosen field.
As a public policy analysis major with a concentration in environmental analysis, Lawrence is considering traveling to, among other places, Costa Rica, Brazil, or Cuba, this summer to study environmental justice and sustainable urban planning.
In the last two years, Lawrence has already built an impressive resume. She has worked as a policy and advocacy intern for The Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, a Clean Cities intern for the San Francisco Environment Department, a U.S. programs intern for the Institute for Sustainable Communities, a Beyond Petrochemicals Campaign Fellow for Bloomberg Philanthropies, and a climate intern for the California Ocean Protection council. She is currently serving as an environmental education intern for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
When Lawrence considers what she wants to do after college, she says, “I definitely want to do something that’s serving communities and having an impact. I can’t think of working in a job where I’m not directly engaging with communities and working with people to better living conditions.”
That could look like sustainable urban planning or something more generally related to housing or environmental advocacy.
With so many possibilities, Lawrence hopes her summer experience will help her narrow down “what I really feel called to,” she says.
She also looks forward to gaining a more global perspective.
“Having that kind of more global experience will change the way that I think about U.S. government and my work within public service,” she says. “The Summer Voyage will enable me to think in a way that’s less centered on the U.S. and about the histories, policies and governments of other places and how those have informed their social culture and civic activism.”
The Voyager Scholarship comes on the heels of another award for Lawrence—the highly competitive Udall Undergraduate Scholarship, which she received in May 2024 for her commitment to public service in the environmental field.