Graduate urban planning student Ooha Uppalalapati (MCRP ’21) was one of nine selected as 2020-21 Morgan Stanley Community Development Graduate Fellows.
Through the fellowship, students will share their expertise and provide much-needed support to a local community development corporation (CDC) to increase organizational capacity on initiatives and programs at the forefront of the community development movement. Each year, the Morgan Stanley Community Development Graduate Fellowship pairs nine students from New York City’s most highly respected urban planning, community development, or public administration masters-level university programs, with high-performing community development corporations (CDCs). Fellows spend a substantial amount of time dedicated to confronting the unique challenges in neighborhoods where the CDCs are located.
Ooha will be working at Chhaya CDC, an organization founded to address the housing and economic needs for low-income South Asian and Indo-Caribbean New Yorkers, for her fellowship.
At the Bloustein School, she works with the Ralph W. Voorhees Center for Civic Engagement examining the status of federally assisted housing in Newark to better understand housing affordability in the city. Before attending Rutgers, Ooha worked with a non-profit in Mumbai, where she was part of research focusing on self-built neighborhoods and their relationship with the urban planning processes in Indian cities. She organized workshops to facilitate the exchange of vocabulary of planning practice between the residents and planning documents. Previously, she was an Urban Fellow at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements where her learning focused on the different socio-spatial practices that constitute Indian cities.