CHLOE SCHNEIDER

The Change I Want to Bring to the World

2021 was the worst year for abortion rights since Roe v. Wade was ruled upon in 1973. Recently, it has become apparent Roe v. Wade may be overturned altogether. Anti-abortion, anti-reproductive health, anti-woman legislation has left so many women in our country stranded without safe options. I have witnessed many of the people I love struggle to find reliable reproductive healthcare and have experienced firsthand the devastation and hopelessness women can feel when confronting a system that is not designed to help us. 

I would like to help change the way women are treated in our healthcare system. I want to work to ensure women in this country have access to good, compassionate reproductive healthcare and are treated as humans throughout the process. I am interested in tackling this issue either from the policy side or from the counseling and care side. Regardless of my role in the system, my goal is to change the way women’s reproductive health is treated in the US and for my future daughters and granddaughters to feel their health is taken seriously.

How I’ve Been Involved in Changemaking So Far

I have loved being the president of the Campus Ministry Student Forum at Georgetown because it has given me the opportunity to facilitate meaningful interreligious dialogue and cooperation between the various student-run faith groups on campus. It has been both challenging and rewarding taking on this position and seeing the newfound interreligious collaboration and understanding that comes from having difficult conversations surrounding people’s most central beliefs.

What Drew Me to This Fellowship

Becoming a college student in the midst of multiple crises–political, climatic, and health-related–has clarified for me how important it is to have a positive impact in the work I do. I can no longer imagine myself being satisfied in a job in which I cannot directly see how my work contributes to the greater good and helps people, places, or creatures in need. At America’s elite universities, students are often taught that social impact work cannot be synonymous with career success and financial stability. This narrow-minded career pedagogy does students (and our future world) an immense disservice.

At school, I have received very little of the training the Mentora Youth Changemaker Fellowship provides. The opportunity to work and to learn in a cohort of like-minded students who are equally as dedicated to creating positive change as I am, in addition to working on an Inner Mastery|Outer Impact change project would be an invaluable experience, one that I wish I could have found within my academic cohort at Georgetown. Upon completion, I hope to feel I have the skills and experience to enter my career as an effective and capable changemaker.