Alums Work to Improve San Francisco City Services
Northwestern University School of Education and Social Policy alumni Kathryn “Kate” Bowman and Neva Legallet are working for Bay Area city government as part of the San Francisco Fellows program.
Bowman, of Walnut Creek, Calif., is a research fellow who has been involved with utility issues and raising awareness about the city’s American Indian Cultural District. Legallet, originally from Marin County, Calif., is part of the overdose prevention and response team with the San Francisco Department of Health.
Bowman (BS23) and Legallet (BS23) are Northwestern’s first San Francisco fellows since 2021, when Jamila Wilson of the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences won the award. They join a cohort of up to 20 other recent college graduates and young professionals working full time as city employees while learning about public administration.
Kate Bowman
A committed advocate for health and equity, Bowman studied social policy and global health with a minor in environmental policy and culture. For her senior honors thesis, she analyzed more than 150 high-protein products and interviewed fourteen college-age students to understand how misleading claims led to an overestimation of the recommended daily allowance for protein.
While at Northwestern she worked at MetroSquash, an organization focused on building confidence and strength in young people through the sport and academic programs. The experience, she said, allowed her to witness firsthand the transformative power of education and community engagement.
Bowman also interned at UNITE HERE in Washington, D.C., researching and proposing policies to end discrimination and the Marjorie Kovler Center, where she assisted victims of political torture in accessing health services and public benefits. She spent a summer abroad in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia studying mental healthcare systems in postwar, post genocide societies.
As a Leopold Fellow, Bowman analyzed various laws and International Labour Organization conferences to understand how Indigenous knowledge of health has historically been legally suppressed.
Neva Legallet
A social policy and political science major, Legallet minored in Latin American and Caribbean studies and participated in community building and political organizing. In 2022, she won the Wildcat Impact Award for Empathy for her work with Students Organizing for Labor Rights (SOLR), an advocacy group that builds solidarity with campus workers.
With SOLR, she led the student coalition supporting campus workers as they prepared to strike for higher wages and health insurance, coordinating rallies and campaigns in the months before the victory.
Legallet’s labor-focused activism continued through her professional experiences, as she worked for UNITE HERE Local 1 her second and third years, conducting research and coordinating volunteers for the Chicago service workers’ union. During her junior year, she worked for Cook County’s Commission on Human Rights, carrying out community outreach for the Just Housing Amendment, which barred housing discrimination based on conviction histories.
Contact Jason Kelly Roberts at jason-roberts@northwestern.edu to learn more about the San Francisco Fellows program.