Kendall Trelegan is a Master’s candidate in Global Human Development at Georgetown University's Walsh School of Foreign Service, pursuing a certificate in Gender, Peace, & Security with a climate and environment concentration. She completed internships with MADRE, an international feminist human rights funder, and Grow Asia in the Philippines, where she contributed to monitoring and evaluating a women's agricultural empowerment program. Currently, she is Conservation International’s Knowledge Management Intern for the Community-Led Solutions Partnership, Executive, and IUCN teams.

Kendall has five years of professional experience and over 1,000 hours of volunteer work with nonprofits, including the Consortium on Gender, Security, and Human Rights, Women's Earth and Climate Action Network (WECAN) International, Our Generation of Inclusive Peace, and the Environmental Peacebuilding Association. As the Canada and U.S. Regional Manager for ESD Global, she piloted training programs focused on gender-based violence interventions. At the Center for Justice & Accountability, she served as a Program Officer, working to bring international human rights abusers to justice.

Kendall graduated summa cum laude from Northeastern University with a Bachelor's in political science and minors in international relations and global social enterprise. During her undergraduate studies, she completed two co-ops in corporate diversity, equity, and inclusion and with a women’s political organization. Her degree culminated in a student consultancy in India, where she assessed the impact of climate change on the Koli fishing community, spurring her passion for locally led development.

Why GHD?

Kendall chose GHD because her passion has always been to alleviate risks that arise at the intersection of overlapping sources of vulnerability — whether it's gender, climate change, conflict, or otherwise. She believes the GHD program gives her the flexibility and the depth to approach varying, complex world problems in a way that suits her specific interests.

Summer Internship

I completed my summer internship in the Philippines with Grow Asia, a multi-stakeholder platform established by the World Economic Forum and ASEAN to foster more inclusive, resilient, and sustainable food systems. I contributed to the final evaluation of the AGREE (ASEAN Green Recovery through Equity and Empowerment) project. This initiative focused on demonstrating how COVID-19 recovery efforts can be both gender- and climate-responsive by testing interventions with corporate partners and shaping policies that position women as climate action agents. I analyzed focus group discussions, interviews, survey data, and reports to derive key insights, building on my quantitative M&E skills from GHDP 506 and transitioning into qualitative methods. A highlight was co-organizing an Agri-insurance Roundtable for the Canadian Embassy and the Philippines Partnership for Sustainable Agriculture, where I saw firsthand how private, public, and NGO sectors collaborate to tackle climate resilience in the Philippines, one of the countries most vulnerable to climate disasters.