Society & Culture
Hem Rizal is an M.A. candidate in public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. He was born in Bhutan and migrated to Nepal with his family when he was just a year old. He grew up in the Gold Hap Refugee Camp in Nepal and later settled with his family in Seattle. Hem is a graduate of the University of Washington, where he studied Mathematics, Political Science, and Human Rights. He taught briefly in the Des Moines Public Schools with AmeriCorps and spent four years teaching math on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation with the Teach for America program. He has also been actively involved in the Black Lives Matter community in Des Moines.