Perpetual Baffour
National Policy Emerson Fellow
Coalition for Community Schools
baffourp@iel.org
202-822-8405
Perpetual joined the Coalition for Community Schools in June 2014 as the National Policy Emerson Fellow from the Netter Center for Community Partnerships at the University of Pennsylvania. Her primary duties include tracking, analyzing, and creating supporting documents for federal legislation, regulation, and guidance as they relate to moving the community schools policies agenda.
Prior to joining the Coalition, Perpetual spent two years working for the Philadelphia Mayor’s Office, the first as an AmeriCorps VISTA intern for Mayor Nutter’s education initiative in order to increase high school retention and college matriculation rates in the city. She also served as a Summer Fellow for LIFT-Philadelphia, a national nonprofit dedicated to fighting poverty and securing economic stability for financially disadvantaged adults. Her work included securing local community members with employment, housing, public benefits, and/or admission into education and job training programs.
Perpetual has also been involved with the Netter Center as an after-school mentor and qualitative researcher. She has written research proposals to increase the capacity of Penn’s community partnerships in order to create college access for local students. In addition, Perpetual wrote her senior honors thesis on transforming pedagogical practices in inner-city schools through culturally relevant and meaningful curriculum.
Perpetual graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a B.A. honors degree in Philosophy, Politics, & Economics with a Distributive Justice concentration.