Chesray Dolpha

Chesray comes from Cape Town, South Africa. Her passion for community development has been her bridge to New York. Chesray has focused on the intersection of youth development and the arts, specifically performing arts. In South Africa, Chesray was involved with a community drama project, Brown Paper Studio, which was an extracurricular drama program for schools in the Cape Flats. Chesray credits her experience at Brown Paper Studio as inspiring her to complete an honors degree in social development with a focus on community organizing, eventually leading to her involvement as a researcher at the Surplus People Project, a land and rural development NGO in South Africa. Chesray was selected to become an African Women Public Service Fellow at Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service at New York University, where she completed an M.P.A.