Graduate School
MIT

Undergraduate School
Cornell University

Mentor
Helene Solomon, Solomon McCown and Rappaport Institute Advisory Board Member

Agency
City of Boston, Mayor’s Office of New Bostonians

Supervisor
An Le, Community and Policy Affairs Advocacy Coordinator

Description of Fellowship
Ksenia spent her summer as a Rappaport Fellow at the Department of Neighborhood Development in the Office of Business Development (OBD). Her objective was to help the City of Boston to develop a better understanding of the immigrant entrepreneurship experience in Boston—including business owners’ needs, challenges and successes. Her key objective was to provide a set of recommendations for how the City could better serve and support the foreign-born business owner community on the basis of her findings. Because she was not jumping in to help with an existing project but rather starting, executing on and wrapping up a standalone initiative in the course of her summer with OBD, she chose to treat the experience as somewhat of a test- run at consulting for a city agency. Running her own business doing consulting engagements for non-profits or public sector agencies is a career path that she has been actively exploring, so her work with OBD seemed like a perfect opportunity to try her hand at executing on a project in this manner.