For the second year in a row, Mesa Refuge partnered with the Human Rights Center at UC Berkeley School of Law to support three fellows focused on human rights in a tw0-week writing retreat. The retreat is made possible by Dr. Thomas J. White, whose support gives students researching critical human rights concerns an opportunity to think and write about their findings. The Human Rights Center fellows are graduate or undergraduate students selected from University of California campuses for year-long fellowships to work with human rights organizations worldwide. This year, the fellows included Andrea Lampros, Alissa Greenberg and Levi Bridges, shown here with benefactor Tom White at a festive final dinner where the fellows shared excerpts of their individual human rights projects.

Levi Bridges worked with Public Radio International’s program The World, a coproduction of WGBH (Boston) and the BBC, focusing on immigration in southern Mexico. He is producing a series of radio stories about the abuses suffered by Central American migrants in Mexico due to a U.S.-financed initiative called the Southern Border Program that aims to stop migrants from making it to the United States. He is a 2017 graduate of the radio program at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism.

Alissa Greenberg is a freelance writer and audio producer based in Berkeley, California, whose stories examine strange science, immigrant issues, international affairs, culture, and community ties, with a generous dose of quirk. Her work has appeared online, in print, and on the airwaves of KQED, NPR, the Atlantic, TIME, the New Yorker, the Los Angeles Times, Pacific Standard, and the Washington Post.

Andrea Lampros is the communications director at the Human Rights Center and manager of the Human Rights Investigations Lab. An alumna of UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, she spent more than a decade working as a newspaper reporter, magazine editor, and freelance writer. She has written for the San Francisco Chronicle, Huffington Post, California Journal, Diablo magazine, and other regional publications.