Elena Sapelyuk (SFS’23), an alumna who works with refugees in Nairobi, Kenya, has been named a 2025 Knight-Hennessy Scholar, a prestigious graduate program at Stanford University that prepares students for international leadership.
This year’s Knight-Hennessy Scholars cohort brings together 84 students from 25 countries and across disciplines to pursue a fully funded graduate degree at Stanford. For three years, scholars take courses and receive mentorship, experiential learning opportunities and leadership development to prepare them for future leadership roles.
Sapelyuk joins four fellow Georgetown alumni who have been named Knight-Hennessy Scholars in recent years. She will be pursuing a master’s in international policy at Stanford.
“We are excited for Elena’s next steps as a Knight-Hennessy Scholar,” said Lauren Tuckley, director for the Center of Research & Fellowships. “She lives out her passion, and has the tenacity and determination to create real change. We look forward to seeing what she does next.”
Sapelyuk, who came to the U.S. as a refugee from Russia at 6 years old, has researched, studied, volunteered and worked on all angles of solutions for forced displacement. At Georgetown, she found her area of focus — and then took a leap of faith.
A One-Way Ticket
In March of 2023, Sapelyuk sat in a coffee shop on campus looking at flights. She was about to book a one-way flight to Nairobi, scheduled two weeks after graduation.
She had spent her whole senior year trying to get to this point. She had cold-called and networked to land a job in Kenya. The country hosts two of the largest refugee camps in the world. Most of the over 700,000 refugees there depend entirely on humanitarian aid, and the country is working to integrate more refugees into the local economy. Sapelyuk wanted to see the economic innovation in action that she had only read about in class.
She was terrified. But she booked the flight.
“I’m a first-generation student. It felt like a big risk, especially when people around you are taking consulting jobs and salaries, and [my] family was like, ‘You’re moving to Africa for an internship?’” she said.
Finding Her Calling
Sapelyuk’s passion for working for refugees started early. She grew up around fellow immigrants in Brooklyn and witnessed the barriers her parents and other neighbors faced to safe, steady employment and upward mobility.
While attending Hunter College in New York City, she taught English to refugees, immigrants and migrants with the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs. She transferred to Georgetown in 2020, wanting to examine refugee policy on a global scale.
After the U.S. withdrawal from Kabul, Sapelyuk spent the first three weeks of the fall semester supporting the arrival of over 2,000 evacuated Afghans at Marine Corps Base Quantico. She tutored grade-school students from migrant backgrounds through the DC Schools Project, interned with nonprofits like the International Rescue Committee and took courses in international development.
In her junior year, she was awarded $10,000 through the Davis Award for Peace and a scholarship through the Center for Social Justice to design a free camp in Montenegro for Ukrainian teenagers who had fled their home country during the war. She spent the summer teaching them peace-building skills and creative writing. Along the way, she found her calling.
“I had done resettlement, I had done policy. That gave me a taste for what I was meant to do,” she said. “As soon as I graduated, I wanted to be back in the field. I wanted to be as close as possible to the population I was working for.”
Seeing Her Studies Play Out
Two years after graduating, Sapelyuk is living in Nairobi. She’s visited refugee camps and led research projects funded by the State Department and World Bank to help create sustainable economic opportunities for refugees across East Africa.
Most recently, she’s consulting with the Kenyan government as they implement a refugee socioeconomic integration plan that she studied and wrote about at Georgetown.
“It’s been surreal to have a paper you write, where you wonder how this is going to impact Kenya, to then work directly with folks on that policy and consult on it,” she said.
After two years in Kenya, Sapelyuk had more questions than answers. She wanted to learn how to encourage humanitarians and leaders of private companies to work together to create sustainable livelihood opportunities as an alternative to aid. She knew she needed to get out of her comfort zone again.
Through the Knight-Hennessy Scholars program, Sapelyuk said she’s looking forward to working closely with students from diverse disciplines and immersing herself in the program’s leadership development curriculum.
She said Georgetown has prepared her for this moment, to find her calling. She’s still in touch with the professors who encouraged her to move to Kenya and pursue graduate school.
“I don’t feel like I’ve really left Georgetown in a way,” she said. “That feeling of being called to do something, it’s not just a shtick. It is real. That is the Georgetown ethos. I’m really thankful for it.”
