Two Wagner Students Hone Public Service Skills as Oprah Winfrey Scholars

By Robert Polner

Her home is a dusty community in Capetown, South Africa. Its name, Uitsig, means “look at the view” in Afrikaans. But as first-year Wagner Graduate School of Public Service student Chesray L. Dolpha explains, there is no grand vista, only cramped, airless residences topped by tin roofs.
    But Dolpha, 25, has become a new source of pride and celebration in her rural hometown. She is the latest African woman to receive an Oprah Winfrey Foundations scholarship at Wagner.
    “I was actually working with women farmers when I got the email that I was accepted,” says Dolpha. “I was so excited I screamed my lungs off. All these farmers were looking at me like I was crazy. First I called my mother, then my sister. It was just unbelievable.”
    The scholarship program began in 2002, when The Oprah Winfrey Foundations awarded an endowment to Wagner. Caren Yanis, the executive director of the foundations, explains that Winfrey believes that education is freedom, and women can be among the world’s most effective leaders. The goal of the scholarships is to train African women to work for rights and policies that benefit African women and African societies as a whole.
    At the time of the scholarship’s creation, Wagner was putting together a program for African students. The school’s reputation in the field of public service, says Yanis, “is exemplary. The synergy was there.” The Oprah Winfrey Foundations scholarship at Wagner is one of four scholarship programs that the foundations sponsor around the world, and the only one at the graduate level. Wagner’s Oprah scholars are selected annually. Dolpha joins Oprah scholar Sarah Nagadya, who is in her second and final year at the school.
    Nagadya, 32, is from Uganda. While pursuing a master of arts degree in gender studies at Makerere University, where she also received her undergraduate degree, she worked on a community-based project to improve food security in HIV/AIDS-affected households in rural Eastern Uganda. She realized she needed more advanced management skills to make “a countrywide difference for women.” She is working toward an M.P.A. in public and nonprofit management and policy at Wagner.
    Dolpha, too, has long been involved in public service. She received her first taste of American life in 2006-07, when she attended Bard College as an exchange student from the University of the Western Cape. Afterward, she returned to South Africa to complete her undergraduate studies and look for a job. In addition to working with farmers for a non-governmental organization (NGO), she also has assisted rural youth with their personal development through the arts as an employee of another NGO.
    Sadly, her mother has been diagnosed with lung cancer, but, adds Dolpha, was adamant that her troubles not get in the way of her daughter’s dreams. When Dolpha completes the requirements for an M.P.A. in public and nonprofit management and policy, with a specialization in management of international public service organizations, she will return home with the goal of founding an NGO devoted to youth development and education.  
    “I want to expose rural children to music, to theater and to other avenues for personal growth, because I, too, was a child playing in the dusty streets, and see myself in that vein,” Dolpha says.
    All along, the scholars are helped to adjust and to navigate toward their goals by Katty Jones, director of program services at Wagner. And while the Oprah scholarship does not necessarily mean Dolpha or Nagadya will get to meet the international television star, they know that she, like their loved ones, friends, and neighbors back home, is rooting for them.    
    “Oprah has a lot of pride in these students, and along with the foundations, has a stake in seeing them succeed,” says Yanis.

Chesray L. Dolpha

Sarah Nagadya