The Bloustein School’s Kedar Nagarajan (MCRP ’23) was one of nine graduate students (including Nashia Basit) selected as a 2023-24 Morgan Stanley Community Development Graduate Fellow.
Now in its 12th year, the Fellowship is a program that supports the training and development of emerging community development leaders while also building the capacity of community development organizations. It is hosted by the Associate for Neighborhood & Housing Development (ANHD). Each year, ANHD pairs nine students from highly respected graduate school programs with ANHD member community development corporations (CDCs) to work on a community-based project.
This year’s Fellows will spend the next 10 months working on projects focused on a range of issues, including affordable housing development and preservation, community land trusts, cooperative conversions, and commercial tenant and small business support and organizing. They bring a fervent and sincere willingness to uplift the field of community development through their commitment to member organizations and allies.
Kedar has five years of professional experience across three of India’s largest cities Bangalore, Bombay and New Delhi where he has worked first as a journalist, and then as a mixed-methods academic research assistant focusing on displacement due to financialization and large scale infrastructural developments.
He also worked as an ethnographic research assistant to Dr. James DeFilippis for his upcoming book tentatively titled Social Justice and The Immigrant City. The book is a detailed sociological account about Queens, NY. Kedar’s work included ethnographic research and quantitative and spatial analysis for two chapters in the book—one pertaining to immigrant labor niches and the other on immigration law.