Author: Sam Goldman

Shreya Chaudhuri — an alumna of UC Berkeley’s Global Poverty and Practice (GPP) minor — was raised in the Bay Area, but she spent her summers thousands of miles away in eastern India, on her family’s tea farms in Assam.

She comes from a long line of tea farmers who cultivated the land long before global supply chains and corporate monopolies reshaped the region’s tea industry. Though she didn’t grow up on the farms full time, that history shaped how she understood land and labor.

Her mother carried that connection closer to home, spending time with Chaudhuri outdoors along the Bay Area’s beaches and among the redwood forests. Chaudhuri often tagged along while her mother gardened.

“I would mostly be talking,” Chaudhuri said, laughing. “But I was still with her outside.”

From those early experiences, Chaudhuri absorbed a philosophy that would shape her worldview and pull her towards environmental justice.

“Live in reciprocity with the land, respect the earth, and respect nature,” Chaudhuri said. “Never take more than you give.”

In middle school, Chaudhuri’s science teacher encouraged students to design their science fair projects around real-world problems, which stuck with her as she discovered her own interest in environmental science.

She found her footing during her senior year of high school, where her project on lead pollution in sub-Saharan Africa explored how algae could be used as a nature-based solution to remove heavy metals from water.

The project earned international recognition and was published with UNESCO, but more importantly, she said, it reframed her relationship to science — seeing it as a means of addressing inequality and environmental harm.

Her love for the environment would ultimately define her time at UC Berkeley, where she graduated in Spring 2025, received the Stronach Prize, and returned soon after to serve as a visiting scholar. Over the course of her education, Chaudhuri combined technical training in the sciences with political analysis, double majoring in environmental science and geography with an additional minor in data science.

The GPP minor program, however, is what Chaudhuri said truly “laid the foundation” for work with local communities in India.

The Global Poverty and Practice minor program, offered through the Blum Center of Developing Economies, challenges students to examine the structural roots of poverty and inequality while applying academic learning to community-engaged work.

Upon arriving at UC Berkeley, Chaudhuri planned to pursue a technical career in environmental microbiology. But after spending a summer working full time in a lab at the Carnegie Institution for Science her freshman year, she realized something was missing.

“There were already so many climate solutions,” she said. “But there wasn’t a bridge between the people who needed them the most and the people who were building them.”

Chaudhuri said that after taking several courses in the GPP minor, she was convinced the program could offer her something that no others at Berkeley could: coverage of perspectives from the Global South on climate change.

That focus shaped how Chaudhuri approached her GPP practice experience. Encouraged by GPP faculty to work with communities they were already part of, Chaudhuri centered the project on her own community in Assam. A defining element of the program, the practice experience is designed to help students bridge theoretical frameworks with real-world poverty action.

She got the inspiration from a trip to India over two years ago, when she returned to her uncle’s tea farm and saw firsthand how farmers were reviving Indigenous agricultural practices — such as polyculture, mulching, and composting — in response to climate change and corporatization.

“It was incredible to see the on-the-ground work that’s happening in frontline communities,” Chaudhuri said. “I wanted to be able to go back into my community and help co-create something meaningful together.”

After learning more about her own family’s historic struggle with colonial rule over their farmland, Chaudhuri decided to document these Indigenous ecological methods while also examining colonial tea plantations in Assam and how colonialism has shaped the community’s ecology and geography.

That research expanded into her senior theses and, later, became the basis for the follow-up initiative — Equi-Tea: মাটিৰ মুক্তি, মানুহৰ মুক্তি (“liberation of the land is liberation of her people”) — that earned her the prestigious Judith Lee Stronach Baccalaureate Prize.

Through the prize, Chaudhuri is working with farmers today in Assam to build a direct-to-consumer tea brand rooted in those same Indigenous ecological principles. The model prioritizes organic cultivation and farmer-led decision-making, while cutting out corporate intermediaries that often absorb the bulk of profits. Even well-meaning brands limit farmer autonomy, she said, and don’t use the surplus profits to reinvest in the agrarian communities, who are struggling to transition to agroforestry. Chaudhuri’s brand aims to emphasize local economies, ecologies, and autonomies, while building bridges between the producers and consumers — something that the colonial supply chain sought to eradicate.

To tell their story, Chaudhuri is producing a short 30-minute film, drawing on interviews with farmers and footage from the fields. The goal, she said, is to show American audiences how tea farmers are struggling with climate change, colonial legacies, and global markets.

“They’re focused on daily survival and making sure that their tea farms last and exist; they don’t have the capacity to build out the storytelling and marketing models that a lot of brands in America do,” Chaudhuri said. “I want people to know what tea farms are going through because it is a microcosm of the climate crisis.”

She also brought this work back to UC Berkeley last summer through an interactive tea exhibition at the South and Southeast Asian Library in partnership with the Institute of South Asia Studies. While she worked as a Climate Action Fellow at the Student Environmental Resource Center, she created a campus café pop-up, where visitors could sample tea grown ethically using Indigenous methods.

Alongside her work on tea, Chaudhuri emphasized the importance of climate education, something she’s been actively pursuing since she was 16 when she founded Project Planet, a nonprofit dedicated to decolonial environmental education. On campus, this took shape as the Decolonizing Environmentalism DeCal she founded, as well as the Decolonial Environmental Network and American Cultures Environmental Justice Initiative.

Across all her experience, however, Chaudhuri stresses the importance of paying attention to how climate change is experienced on the frontlines, as well as to the Indigenous science, often overlooked in mainstream climate research, that communities already use to adapt to changing conditions.

“The majority of the people in this world are at the margins of the climate conversation, and we have to center their stories,” Chaudhuri said. “We have to center their narratives.”

When Michelle Gallaga moved to the U.S. from the Philippines with her two young kids in 2010, she didn’t know anyone in her new home.

“We had to start a life and really try to navigate being an immigrant and all the hardships that come with it,” she says.

“When you move to a different country at 40,” she adds, “people already have their own friends and their cliques, and so I never really got to form my own group of friends.”

Not having completed college, she found, limited her opportunities, and she encouraged her kids to pursue the degree she hadn’t attained. Once they had left home to do so, however, it didn’t sit quite right with her that she had pushed them to do something that she herself hadn’t been able to.

And so, as a birthday present to herself, Gallaga enrolled at Berkeley City College, and not without some apprehension.

But it wasn’t the first time that the graduating Global Poverty & Practice student had enrolled in college.

Gallaga had attended the University of the Philippines Conservatory of Music in Diliman as a voice major, while belonging to the Philippine Madrigal Singers, an a capella choir that took her around the world for festivals, world tours, and competitions.

She spent seven months away from the Philippines during the group’s 1989 tour and found it difficult to re-enroll in classes after returning, choosing to stay on with the choir for another three years.

She eventually did go back to school again, this time for music theory, but dropped out after joining a cover band.

In 2000, Gallaga got married, retired from singing, and gave college another shot, studying education to become an elementary school teacher. For two years she taught English in rural schools with poor infrastructure and limited educational resources.

“I loved the experience of being there and being around the enthusiasm of the children,” she said. “It was so fulfilling and so humbling. There was something about giving yourself to it that you get so much out of.”

But a divorce brought an end to the calling she had begun to develop, and she had to drop out again. Eventually, she moved to the U.S.

Now, years later in Berkeley, Gallaga was quickly discovering that she loved being back in the classroom.

With so much more life experience to apply to her lessons, the curriculum clicked in a way it hadn’t before. In 2023, she transferred to UC Berkeley to study sociology.

But making the most of her time at the country’s top public university was difficult while working two jobs: one providing translation and interpreting services for San Francisco government agencies, and another assisting a social entrepreneur pushing for equity in the psychedelics space. She could only attend class two days a week — not enough to build relationships or finally find community.

That is, until she met Valerie Moss, the Blum Center’s Assistant Director of Student Affairs, at a Global Poverty & Practice minor tabling session on campus. Examining and addressing poverty immediately struck a chord with Gallaga and harkened back to her experience teaching students in underserved schools.

Her first class, GPP 115: Global Poverty: Challenges and Hopes, “blew my mind,” she said.

Its lessons about understanding 20th-century development and 21st-century poverty alleviation left her feeling like “I was living a lie all my life,” she laughed.

This is it, she thought during that first semester in the minor. I want to learn more.

Her biggest lesson, she said, has come this current semester. She had arrived at GPP believing that the only way to make a difference in poverty alleviation was to do work that produced obvious, immediate results.

But “you may not see those results right away,” Prof. Khalid Kadir counseled in her Global Poverty & Practice Capstone Course. The impacts may not appear for generations, he said, but the important thing is that you took action.

The minor’s appeal, however, went beyond its curriculum.

“GPP is like family to me,” Gallaga said. “It was my only way to meet more students and build relationships.”

Her standing in the program led Prof. Clare Talwalker to recommend her as an advisor to her peers in the minor, to which she enthusiastically agreed.

“Joining the minor was the smartest thing to do,” Gallaga said, “because GPP gave me the community that I needed to really feel like I belonged at UC Berkeley.”

For her practice experience, a core component of the program where students apply what they learn, Gallaga volunteered with Spiral Gardens, a small, nonprofit community garden providing fresh, nutritious produce in a historically redlined Berkeley neighborhood and food desert — a place she herself had lived in for 10 years.

Each Sunday, she would give tours of the garden to new volunteers, helped them get their own small garden projects off the ground, and mentored them. She grew food for her geographic community and gained the social community she had spent years looking for in the Bay Area and had begun to find in GPP.

Volunteering with Spiral Gardens also put into practice the lesson Prof. Kadir had imparted. Her biggest takeaway from GPP, Gallaga said, was “that I was there. I was a part of something. I did what I could, and I’ll keep doing what I can. And that’s enough. That’s what matters.”

After graduating this month, she plans to stay in the poverty-alleviation and nonprofit space. “Being able to keep working with organizations that help other people will always make me feel like I belong,” she said.

Her son graduated from UC Irvine in June, and her daughter will graduate from UC Santa Cruz next June.

“When I told my son, ‘I got into UC Berkeley!’ he was so jealous because he got rejected from Berkeley,” she recalled with a laugh. “But when I told him I got in, he said, ‘Mom’s the GOAT!’” — the greatest of all time.

And come December 20, when Gallaga crosses the stage to receive her diploma, they’ll be there to celebrate her degree.