1. Allie Stankewich ’23 Awarded SIT Alice Rowan Swanson Fellowship

Allie Stankewich '23 Awarded SIT Alice Rowan Swanson Fellowship While working for the Fulbright program as a teaching mentor in Uganda, Stankewich partnered with a local organization to build a fish farm social enterprise.

By Kelsey Goodwin
July 9, 2025

Allie Stankewich '23, a sociology and environmental studies double major with a minor in poverty and human capability studies, has found herself in some far-flung places since graduating from Washington and Lee University. This spring, her journey took her to a remote village in Uganda, where her W&L experience came full circle to help one community jump-start a long-held dream.

Stankewich recently received the Alice Rowan Swanson Fellowship through the School for International Training (SIT), an opportunity open to SIT alumni that supports recipients returning to their program country to pursue a project benefiting human rights in that region. With the $5,000 fellowship grant, Stankewich partnered with Thriving Youth Farmers Uganda, a local NGO in Masulita Village, Wakiso, to develop a fish farming project focused on addressing food security and creating opportunities for youth entrepreneurship.

Stankewich participated in SIT's Public Health in the Tropics Internship in Uganda in 2021 and says she was glad to be able to return to Uganda in the fall of 2023 as a Fulbright English teaching assistant. After her nine-month term, she stayed in Uganda as a mentor to Fulbright's teaching assistant program, supporting TAs across an assigned section of sub-Saharan Africa that included Uganda. Stankewich says she had always had SIT's fellowship program in the back of her mind, and realized that since she was already in Uganda, portions of her grant that would have otherwise been used for her travel expenses from the U.S. could be put toward the project.

Stankewich began working with Thriving Youth Farmers Uganda in September and was awarded the fellowship in April. She worked with the organization until her time in Uganda concluded in mid-June. The organization's goal was to construct fishponds, employing local workers to create the infrastructure and stocking them with fingerlings (juvenile fish). Its long-term agribusiness plan also included organizing community training sessions on fish farming techniques and providing nutrition education linking climate change and food security. The project's broader goal is to create a sustainable agricultural initiative that will generate income for local entrepreneurs and improve nutrition in the community.

"Agriculture is the largest sector of Uganda's economy," Stankewich says, "and it has abundant potential, but is also deeply affected by climate change and evolving needs in the community. Uganda also faces a high unemployment rate for youth, defined as ages 18 to 35. This organization had already secured a piece of land and has sought to use it as a training site for young people to develop agricultural skills, but it's also about building capacity in young leaders for community relations and empowerment, technical resilience design skills in agriculture and understanding the needs of their community in terms of food security and health."

With the new funding in place, the team brought in a contractor with aquaculture expertise to assess the site and develop a plan.

"He came to the site and gave us the initial estimates," Stankewich says, "how much space this should take up, what resources we would need, what the estimated cost would be."

From there, the project began to move quickly: Construction began, workers mobilized, and training sessions were scheduled to fit both her and the community's schedules. One particularly memorable moment came when it was time to transport fish fingerlings.

"I accompanied the team to go buy the fish fingerlings," Stankewich says. "For the excess fingerlings, they attached six plastic jugs filled with water, with about 200 baby fish in each, to the side of one motorbike. They transported them approximately 30 miles on very bumpy, crazy roads." Amazingly, Stankewich says, only three fish were lost in the journey.

Initially, Stankewich had been volunteering with the organization to assist with grant writing and fundraising efforts. When she was awarded the fellowship, she and her partners in the organization knew they had the opportunity to accelerate their plans.

"When I was awarded the Alice Swanson fellowship, it was very exciting, because now we could consider things that we hadn't been sure could be sustained simply because of a lack of capital," Stankewich says. "Once we got the funds, we hit the ground running. Five thousand dollars in Uganda goes a long way, and it felt like we transformed the whole momentum of the organization."

Stankewich says the team of youth worked tirelessly to hand-dig the property where the farm's first fingerlings would eventually live.

"They also wanted to try to align it with the time I had left in Uganda," Stankewich says, "so knowing I would be leaving toward the end of June, we sort of wanted to keep the process moving, and I got to see a lot of it happen and get to be a part of it, which was exciting."

Stankewich worked closely with Thriving Youth Farmers Uganda to ensure that the project could continue after her departure. She helped host two well-attended trainings in a local school before she left and is looking forward to hearing progress updates as the project continues to build momentum.

"Seeing the transformation that we were able to achieve while I was there was so rewarding," says Stankewich. "It made it that much harder to leave."

During her time at W&L, Stankewich was highly engaged with both the campus and the greater Lexington-Rockbridge communities. She was actively involved in the Shepherd Program for the Interdisciplinary Study of Poverty and Human Capability, Campus Kitchen and the Nabors Service League. After her internship with SIT in 2021, Stankewich received a David L. Boren Scholarship from the National Security Education Program to study abroad in Arusha, Tanzania, during the fall of 2022, completing an immersive study of the Swahili language domestically at the University of Florida the summer prior to her departure. Stankewich's experience in Tanzania inspired her to apply successfully for a Davis Projects for Peace grant, which she used to spend four weeks in the summer of 2023 working with the Widows Encouragement & HIV/AIDS Foundation, an Arusha-based NGO, before embarking on her Fulbright.

Stankewich, who hopes to pursue a master's in global environmental health, says that her approach to her project this spring had foundations in the kind of community engagement she participated in during her time at W&L on and off campus - an approach that prioritizes empowering a community to create sustainable change.

"In some ways, I would describe my approach as leading by letting others lead," Stankewich says, "and that was my goal the whole time - for this to be for the community, by the community."

Find out more about how Thriving Youth Farmers Uganda is empowering local youth in Uganda and learn more about Stankewich's project through the School for International Training's Alice Rowan Swanson Fellowship.

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