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Middlebury College has announced the recipients of the 2025 grants, which give young adults an opportunity to develop innovative, community-based, scalable solutions for pressing issues around the world. Among this year’s recipients is Alexandra Mihailopol ’26, a �鶹��ý���� economics and data science double major, with a project titled “EmpowHER: Financial Education for a Safer Future.”

The backstory to the grant is especially poignant considering Mihailopol’s background. Growing up in Galați, Romania, Mihailopol was a self-identified “little entrepreneur.” She was curious about business, and her parents — especially her mother, who’s a dentist with her own practice — instilled in Mihailopol the value of earning your own money, being financially independent and giving back to your community.

However, given that her parents grew up under a Communist government, they had limited access to knowledge about investing, buying their own home or saving money, Mihailopol said. Moreover, schools in Romania, in her experience, didn’t teach about personal finance. She learned bits and pieces from what her parents had been able to learn and from books and the internet, but it was challenging. “ How am I supposed to become an adult, and how am I supposed to learn all these things if no one’s teaching us?” Mihailopol said.

A friend told her about the concept of a liberal arts education, which she immediately felt aligned with her own educational goals of being able to explore new subjects. She started researching U.S. colleges that offered financial aid to international students and had a strong sense of community. That’s when she stumbled upon a YouTube video introducing Mount Holyoke. Mihailopol immediately fell in love.

Flash forward to fall 2024. Mihailopol was taking a class with Lucas Wilson, Professor of Economics and Critical Race and Political Economy on the Ford Foundation. Discussing economic inequality and reflecting on the limited educational opportunities in Romania, Wilson suggested an idea: What if Mihailopol were to start something that could help other people in Romania have what she felt her education had lacked?

The idea intrigued her. Meanwhile, a friend of hers, Ana Maria Stan ’24, had previously completed fellowship work with Projects for Peace. Watching her friend’s journey gave Mihailopol the idea of also pursuing a project. While interning at the International Women’s Forum in Washington, D.C., during her semester at Mount Holyoke’s D.C. program, Mihailopol did an independent study about the correlation between domestic violence and financial education.

“All these little parts came into play, and I thought, ‘OK, how could I decrease these rates of domestic violence? And how does financial education come into play?’” Mihailopol said. “I thought that I would love to create a curriculum and I would love for a lot of people to have access to it — specifically people who don’t have access to resources, [such as] minorities and women.”

She started fleshing out a plan. She connected with the founders of the nongovernmental organization , which focuses on improving access to financial literacy for women in Eastern Europe, and discussed what a partnership for teaching such a curriculum could look like. She and the founders of FeminEast discovered the online platform LearnWorlds, where they could develop and host the curriculum alongside interactive and fun educational activities.

Thanks to the grant from Projects for Peace, their pilot project — which will feature an online curriculum on both a desktop and a mobile app — will take place for nine weeks this summer. The team, which includes dozens of volunteers and financial professionals, will recruit participants from four rural areas in Romania. Mihailopol’s vision is for two volunteers to then host a workshop in a centralized area. Participants — about 30 to 40 per workshop — can use either their own laptops or the ones the program will provide. The project will also offer participants printed workbooks and activities for them to take home.

Finding out she won the Projects for Peace grant was a surreal experience for Mihailopol and a joyous one for her entire family. She credits Mount Holyoke and encouragement from staff and faculty — including Wilson, Senior Lecturer in Economics and Entrepreneurship, Organizations, and Society and Nexus Track Chair for Global Business Nexus Rick Feldman, who is her advisor, and Associate Director of Fellowships Briana Chace at the Career Development Center — for helping her maintain her drive to help change Romania’s educational system.

“ I think Mount Holyoke is the perfect school to motivate you to fight for community,” Mihailopol said. “ It helps you be bold and brave and jump headfirst and try everything. And if you fail, it’s OK. You can get up and try again. This is how it kind of pushed me to apply and take risks and aim for the highest opportunities and the most interesting projects and give back.”