Summer Grants Recap

Each year, Groton offers fourth and fifth formers the opportunity to pursue meaningful summer projects through two competitive grant programs: the Lawrence Global Scholars Fund and the Dwight Internship Fund. Established in the mid-2000’s, the Lawrence fund supports community engagement projects with a global perspective, while the Dwight fund focuses on urban renewal and revitalization in students’ home communities. Both encourage students to collaborate with local organizations and specialists to create a tangible impact. This past summer, several Groton students took on projects ranging across various fields and applications, bringing their ideas and passions off campus and into the real world.

This past summer, Grant recipients undertook a wide range of projects spanning healthcare, education, technology, and social advocacy. Among them, Allyson Lu ’27 worked at a local community center, where she gave piano lessons to lower school students. Daniel Mao ’26 partnered with his local church to teach Latin etymology, helping students build confidence in their English skills. Eric Zhu ’27  focused on Alzheimer’s research, working with medical centers to test individuals already diagnosed with the disease and using his digital tool to broaden detection efforts.

Other students brought their work to the international stage. Jean-Louis Andreani ’26 traveled home to Hong Kong, where he managed to both provide financial literacy classes and distribute mattresses to childcare providers. Leah Bay ’27 conducted research in Bulgaria on Roma housing, surveying land status and self-identified ownership while interviewing NGOs and municipal officials. Her research highlighted the structural barriers to property ownership and housing insecurity faced by this marginalized community. 

Whether through education, research or direct service, each student identified a gap in their community and sought to address it in a meaningful way. This shared motivation, this desire to create access, understanding, and opportunity, connects projects that might otherwise seem unrelated. 

We see this with Fifth former Ethan Yan ’27, who deployed ALLocate, a low-cost leukemia detection system, across clinics in the Bay Area. The device consists of a microscope attachment that automates the scanning of blood cell samples, paired with an AI tool that flags regions showing signs of acute leukemia. Ethan’s reason to develop ALLocate was deeply personal: after witnessing his great aunt endure a difficult diagnostic process, he sought to create a quicker, cheaper alternative.

Alongside Ethan’s personal, ambitious, and profoundly impactful project, another 2025 Dwight Internship Fund recipient, Lena Aloise ’27, tackled a similarly personal project with a far-reaching impact on the local community and beyond while focusing on a different sphere of life: literature.

Lena focused on extending literature composition opportunities to refugee and immigrant youth through a personal narrative writing workshop and publication opportunity, working in conjunction with IINE Lowell volunteer coordinators, their graphic design team, and many of Groton’s own student peer tutors in the English department. Lena described the participants of the workshop as “bringing one hundred percent to everything they do.” She mentioned how their past experiences as refugees fleeing persecution or immigrants looking for a safer home shaped their mentalities when responding to feedback throughout the workshop, detailing their new daily schedules as “all day at a summer job, then [sitting] through the sessions for about two hours, but…two hours of actively writing in a language you don’t know…They really had a mindset of hard work, but also just optimism for everything.”

Lena views the publication process as a sort of liberation, arguing that “[the participants] weren’t really being done justice by the type of English language learning they were getting to do in ESL programs, which are often underfunded and really overburdened…Giving them that space to have their stories actually published and distributed in local and surrounding communities was just a really validating experience.”

The Lawrence Global Scholars Fund and Dwight Internship Fund have both substantially impacted individuals from local communities and beyond since their origination, whether it be a focus on global collaboration, community service, and leadership building or local revitalization, restoration, and extension of opportunities to underprivileged individuals. Groton’s summer grant opportunities reach far beyond the Circle, supporting projects that drive meaningful and measurable impact in underserved communities.