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This cash prize is awarded to the rising Columbia College senior majoring in Human Rights who submits the best proposal for a summer or term-time human rights internship, and is intended to be used to help defray the expenses of the internship.
This prize is awarded annually to the Columbia College student majoring in human rights who has the highest grade point average and a superior record of academic achievement in Human Rights.
This cash prize is awarded to the rising Columbia College senior majoring in human rights who submits the best proposal for a summer or term-time human rights internship, and is intended to be used to help defray the expenses of the internship. Applications are accepted on a rolling basis throughout the year, with priority admission dates of December 1 for Spring term submissions, and April 1 for Summer submissions. Alternatively, for general research or internship funding, students should review ISHR's undergraduate financial resources page. Please apply here: APPLICATION: Myra Kraft Human Rights Prize
Claire Marie Ellis will graduate from Columbia College in May 2023 with a major in Human Rights, a specialization in Women’s and Gender Studies, and a concentration in English and Comparative Literature. Her academic research centers on asylum claims from gender-based violence survivors, which she has investigated through the work of NGOs in the United States, France, and Switzerland. As a bilingual descendant of Cuban refugees, Claire has volunteered at various New York–based nonprofits such as Sanctuary for Families, The Brave House of the Urban Justice Center, and National Advocates for Pregnant Women. Most recently, Claire clerked for a judge in the Civil Court of New York City and has since developed a passion for labor rights and consumer-debt fairness policy. With hopes to dismantle gender-based forms of socio-economic oppression as they particularly impact migrant and immigrant workers, Claire plans to engage in more human rights activism abroad in the near future and then pursue a JD back in the states.
Ella Every-Wortman graduated from Columbia University in 2016 where they majored in Human Rights with a focus on Critical Race and Ethnicity Studies and and minored in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. While at Columbia, Ella pursued their interest in restorative justice with a two-year long independent research project entitled "'Not to Forget but to Live': Reimagining Justice and Sexual Violence at the University," a project which takes up transformative justice as an alternative to current punitive systems of justice. Centering intersectional feminist anti-violence theory and an anti-carceral lens, this work brings together justice literature with original focus group and interview research to ask given the complex ideological, material, and systemic investments that inform the dynamics of sexual violence on college campuses, what would transformative justice at Columbia University look like and how can we use it to deconstruct the boundaries of privilege and marginalization that are mutually constituted through interpersonal and systemic violence. Ella was a core organizer for Columbia Prison Divest, a successful student-led campaign to divest Columbia University's endowment from the private prison industry, and also served as a Peer Advocate for Sexual Violence Response (SVR).
