In 2018, I spent six weeks in Massachusetts as a US Professional Fellow on Civic Engagement, a State Department exchange program that places mid-career fellows from around the world inside American nonprofits and government offices for an intensive, hands-on placement.
I was hosted by the Franklin County Community Development Corporation in Greenfield, supporting an organization working on business development, access to capital, and community economic growth. Most weeks were filled with board meetings, strategy sessions, and conversations with people running the unglamorous machinery of local economic development: food processing centers, regional planning commissions, youth programs built on the principle that young people should lead and adults should support, not the other way around.
What stayed with me most was not any single meeting, but a pattern across all of them. The people doing the most meaningful local work were rarely the most visible ones. A regional planning officer coordinating shared resources across counties does not make headlines, but the work holds an entire local economy together.
The program closed with a three-day Professional Fellows Congress in Washington, DC, bringing together around 350 fellows from dozens of countries. It was the first time I fully understood how similar the core challenges of civic engagement are across very different political systems, even when the language and institutions around them look nothing alike.
One weekend during the fellowship, I was hosted by a three-generation American Jewish family. We cooked, played games, and talked through some of the harder regional and global questions neither of us had easy answers to. Representing your country informally, at someone’s dinner table, turns out to carry more weight than any formal delegation.
If there is one thing worth passing on to anyone applying for a fellowship like this, it is this: selection committees are not looking for a dramatic story. They are looking for evidence of a story you were already living before you applied. I have watched people invent a narrative for an application instead of presenting the one they had actually been building for years, and it rarely works. The honest version, even when it sounds ordinary, is almost always the stronger one.
I am past the age limit for most of these programs now, which is the kind of thing you only notice once a door has quietly closed behind you. What I took from those six weeks did not close with it: a clearer sense of how civic work actually gets done, away from the cameras, by people who show up to the same unglamorous meeting every month because someone has to.
