MPAs Across the Decades Build Community of Mutual Support and a ‘Sense of Drive and Commitment’

For 75 years, the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs’ Master in Public Affairs program has produced an uncommonly close-knit community of alumni who provide mutual support and mentorship.

One of the most recent examples is the connection between Stephen Jackson ’94 and Marissa Bray ’24. Jackson, the United Nations Resident Coordinator in Kenya, welcomed Bray to Nairobi as an intern in the summer of 2023, 30 years after he had interned in the same country with Catholic Relief Services.

Their association began in January 2023, when Bray participated in a Winter Policy Trip to Kenya and met Jackson, along with several other SPIA alumni.

“We had such a great time in Nairobi,” Bray recalls of her and her fellow students. “A lot of us came away from that trip actually wanting to come back for the summer and work there.”

Which is exactly what happened. Bray returned to Kenya following her first year to intern with Jackson, who put her to work on a project helping to assess the effectiveness of the country’s peacebuilding infrastructure. Allegations of fraud in the wake of Kenya’s 2007 presidential election sparked widespread violence resulting in 1,500 deaths and hundreds of thousands of people displaced. A new constitution adopted in 2010 included the creation of new institutions to prevent future violence.

In the immediate aftermath of the successful 2022 elections, the project Bray assisted with involved “looking at all the bodies and institutions, people who play any kind of role in peacebuilding at all within the country,” she said. “The whole point was to bring together anybody who had anything to do with peacebuilding and assess how things were going. Was it working? Was it not working? Were there things we could be doing better?”

The UN team spent the summer working with Kenyans of all stripes and then helping to produce a report detailing the findings, work that Bray continued as a virtual intern last fall after returning to Princeton for her second year. Submitted to Kenya’s president, the report was then presented to the UN Peacebuilding Commission in March, and Bray was on hand in New York to witness it.

“I actually got to hear about how the work we did inspired other countries to review their own peacebuilding architecture,” she said. “That was the most exciting part for me – seeing this all come to fruition and watching every stage of development of this process and report happen.”

“Marissa was brilliant,” Jackson said. “The end product that she was in on the beginning of is something that I will mark as a major achievement for the UN during my time at the helm.”

Bray called herself “amazed” by the size and scope of the MPA alumni network of which she is now a part. It was a realization that first struck her during initial trip to Nairobi a year and a half ago.

“We often joked about this during the Winter Policy Trip to Nairobi last January,” she said. “When we were putting together a list of people we wanted to talk to, when we got to Kenya we realized it was SPIA alum after SPIA alum after SPIA alum in terms of leadership positions there.”

Thirty years after his own experience as an MPA student, Jackson is cheered by young alumni like Bray, who share his “sense of purpose and mission” with respect to public service.

“It’s inspiring and encouraging to see people like Marissa coming with that same sense of drive and commitment and openness to the world that I hope and believe we all shared in my time at Princeton, but also with the new ideas, the new perspectives, a very different vision of the world than the one we were stuck with,” he said. “You need a dash of optimism in these dark times.”