Public Service Venture Fund

Alice Cherry ’16 and Kelsey Skaggs ’16 have been named 2018 Echoing Green Fellows. In 2016, Cherry and Skaggs co-founded Climate Defense Project (CDP), a legal nonprofit that provides advice and support to the climate movement in the United States and internationally.

As Harvard Law School's Public Service Venture Fund enters its fourth year, HLS is looking back on all that its awardees have accomplished since the first awards were conferred in 2013.

Two recent Harvard Law School graduates, Shannon Erwin ’10 and Alana Greer ’11, have been selected as recipients of grants from the Public Service Venture Fund, a unique program that awards up to $1 million each year to help graduating Harvard Law students and recent graduates obtain their ideal jobs in public service.

Shortly after graduating from HLS, David Satterthwaite Wertime ’07 and Rachel Lu ’07 launched Tea Leaf Nation, an e-magazine focusing on Chinese social media. The site had become a go-to destination for Western journalists, academics and decision-makers seeking insights into what average Chinese people are thinking.

Sixteen public service visionaries and social entrepreneurs from Harvard Law School have been selected as the inaugural recipients of grants from the Public Service Venture Fund, a unique program which will award up to $1 million each year to help graduating Harvard Law students and recent graduates obtain their ideal jobs in public service—even if those jobs don’t yet exist. At the same time that it announced the recipients of the new Public Service Venture Fund, the Law School also announced the winners of three other fellowships for public service/public interest post-graduate work: the Skirnick Fellowships, the Kaufman fellowships, and the One Day's Work Fellowships.

Each year, students at Harvard Law School receive a number of impressive fellowships and scholarships to work in the public sector and on research projects in foreign countries.

Officially launched on Sept. 25, the Harvard Law School Public Service Venture Fund will award $1 million in grants each year to Harvard Law graduates pursuing careers in public service. The Fund supports two kinds of post-graduate fellowships: “seed grants” for startup public interest ventures, and, through “existing organization-based fellowships,” salary support to graduating HLS students to work at nonprofits or government agencies in the U.S. and abroad.

Beginning in 2013, Harvard Law School’s new Public Service Venture Fund will provide $1 million per year in grants to support new and recent graduates who will be working for public service employers, and also to support those who want to start their own organizations. With this commitment, the School is enhancing its focus on entrepreneurship in general and social entrepreneurship specifically—to encourage current students to pursue their own ideas and to prepare students who might want to apply for support from the fund and other sources of assistance for public service enterprises.

When she was 19, Rebecca Onie ’03 created a program that takes a holistic approach to treating low-income patients; one “genius grant” later, she’s determined to change the health care system.

Harvard Law School today announced the creation of the Public Service Venture Fund, which will start by awarding $1 million in grants every year to help graduating J.D. students pursue careers in public service.