Through the advocacy and thoughtful benevolence of Mary Sue ’81 and Mike Shannon ’80, graduate students at the UW School of Human Ecology are receiving vital financial support. The Shannon Graduate Fellowship in Early Childhood Development was created to help recruit and retain exceptional doctoral candidates and supplement the work of faculty with a focus on the ecology of child well-being. Prudence Yokonia PhDx’25 — a recent recipient of this award — brings her own experiences of living in poverty and losing both of her parents by the time she was 18 to the essential work of understanding how refugee and immigrant experiences shape parenting. As part of her training, Yokonia offers her own brand of empathy and emotional intelligence to Professor Janean Dilworth-Bart’s Child and Family Ecologies (CAFÉ) Lab by exploring Black fathers’ perceptions of how early trauma shapes their interactions with their children and their children’s schools.
“I came to the UW with a burning passion to create change and keep up my nonprofit work in Zimbabwe,” says Yokonia. “I thought after earning my master’s degree I would go on to pursue a PhD in social work, but then a friend told me about the human development and family studies program.”
Image by Prudence Yokonia