Chloe Shomo embodies the Wisconsin Idea’s principle that education should influence people’s lives beyond the boundaries of the classroom. As the 2026-2027 Wolff Fellowship recipient, she will put her education into action in a year-long international travel program focused on food systems and their impact on the next generation. She plans to visit seven countries (Italy, France, Brazil, Guatemala, Honduras, Thailand and South Africa) on five continents to explore responses to food access.
Late L&S alumnus Paul Martin Wolff (’63) and his wife, Rhea S. Schwartz, established the Wolff Fellows program in 2020. The fellowship provides a $45,000 stipend to a graduating senior to develop an itinerary and embark upon a year of experiential learning.
Shomo will graduate this May with a double major in history and education policy studies. Taking classes on food waste and recovery, nutrition in the education system and inequality has prepared Shomo to embark on a year-long global learning expedition.
Out of the classroom, Shomo has worked tirelessly to elevate the voices of students facing food insecurity. Serving as the distribution director and cultural food project coordinator at The Open Seat Food Pantry, a campus program that provides healthy food and hygiene products to UW–Madison students, each week she helps distribute 3,000 pounds of food to more than 120 families in the Eagle Heights community. As Open Seat’s internal director, she developed a food resource map for UW–Madison students and community members that has garnered more than 100,000 views.
According to Shomo, managing the food pantry has taught her “how community work requires empathy and listening, even when situations are challenging.” She is also the student basic needs advocate for the Associated Students of Madison and helped organize the Sustainability Roundtable Dinner for more than 200 attendees as the advocacy intern. Shomo has been invited to discuss student food insecurity as a panelist, presenter and podcast guest for multiple organizations, including the inaugural UW System Basic Needs Conference this past fall.
“While my past experiences have focused on food distribution, this project will expand my knowledge of the food system from production to preparation to waste,” she says. “Across each location, I will work with local farmers, students and community activists to understand how food shapes social issues.”
Shomo’s Wolff Fellowship travels begin this summer. Her first stop: Italy. Shomo will spend one month in Calabria, Italy’s “toe,” where she will stay on a farm to learn how local agricultural economies function in one of the country’s most marginalized regions. From Italy, she will travel to France, where she will spend six weeks working with a private organization called Too Good to Go that explores the ways that private businesses can work to reduce food waste while improving accessibility. After an urban Parisian experience, Shomo will spend a month near Fortaleza, Brazil, where she will learn how Brazil’s National School Feeding program, which requires schools to source produce from local farmers, benefits youth nutrition and the local economy. Next, Shomo will spend two months in Lake Atitlán, Guatemala, where she will work with a nonprofit, Natün Guatemala, which supports traditional foodways and access within the Mayan community. Shomo will then travel south to neighboring Honduras for two weeks to collaborate with Johanny Melgar, a UW–Madison educational policy studies doctoral student, studying small coffee farms.
“This experience will help me understand the social and economic impacts of the coffee industry on individual farmers and communities,” she says.
Next, Shomo will travel across the Pacific to Mae Sot, Thailand, where she will explore how migration and instability affect youth access to education and nutrition. She will spend two months there, working alongside UW–Madison graduate Ei Thin Zar (PhD’24) in a school for Karen refugees, an ethnic group indigenous to southern Myanmar. Finally, Shomo will fly across the globe to South Africa, where she will spend two months in East London to work with Kidlinks, a nonprofit that fights poverty and food insecurity among Xhosa youth through agricultural education.
“I will work directly with youth to provide hands-on learning in farming practices while exploring how agricultural education can improve food access,” she says.
After a year abroad, Shomo plans to pursue a master’s degree in education and work as a secondary school teacher, then complete a PhD on food access and nutrition in K-12 schools.
“Through this fellowship, I hope to better understand food systems from the farm to the classroom and bring the lessons I learn back to Wisconsin,” she says. "Because of the support through this fellowship, I can focus entirely on these transformative experiences and eventually bring that education back to fight food insecurity in our own community. I am truly grateful to the Wolff family for this incredible opportunity."