MASTER OF ARTS IN
GLOBAL & INTERNATIONAL STUDIES
Candidate Profiles
Isabelle
Lagarde
Isabelle has a background in International Relations with a focus on sustainable development in Africa. After completing her BA at San Francisco State University, she traveled to East Africa where she worked as Program Coordinator for the Foundation for Sustainable Development. During her 17 months in Uganda and Kenya, Isabelle worked with a variety of grassroots NGOs and learned first hand the challenges and difficulties, as well as the enormous potential, of community based development initiatives.
When her contract in East Africa ended, she traveled to South America where she taught English, while studying Spanish and Dance at the University of Buenos Aires. She also enjoyed writing for a travel website and spent a few months traveling around the continent. She finally returned home to Northern California and spent a year in Berkeley working and volunteering with a local non-profit called Ethical Traveler. Having traveled throughout her life, calling such diverse places as France, South Africa and Argentina home, she is now looking forward to her studies at UCSB. She plans to continue to focus on sustainable development in Africa, particularly through grassroots community based organizations.
Isabelle interned at the Clinton Foundation’s Harlem office in New York City for summer 2009 where she worked on reports on countries such as Rwanda, Malawi and Colombia, and specific issues such as agricultural developments and the evolving international food crisis. She was also helped prepare the President for bilateral meetings with Heads of State, such as Russian President Medvedev, Rwanda's Kagame and Mexico's Calderon. Since the President had recently been appointed the U.N. Special Envoy to Haiti, we did a lot of work reaching out to the Haitian Diaspora and Haitian experts to gather information and create partnerships and contacts for the President, which I am sure are proving very important now.
In fall 2009, she traveled to Liberia to work with the International Rescue Committee. As an intern with the IRC she traveled to different parts of the country, working on a variety of education and youth protection issues. The focus of our work was community driven education and vocational training in 32 communities in rural Liberia . The IRC's Healing Classroom Initiative was a CGI commitment, and Isabelle spent most of her time in Liberia working on a Healing Classrooms training for the mostly volunteer teachers in the schools with which IRC worked.
