CIERP Alumni Perspectives: A Conversation with Danielle A. Tomlinson
By Lyndon Sam
From a young age, Danielle A. Tomlinson (MALD ’20) knew two things. First, that she wanted to work at the United Nations. Second, that she wanted to apply her talents in the service of her home country Jamaica. Today, she has accomplished all that and more in her role as a policy associate at the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) Multi Country office based in Kingston, Jamaica. This Black History Month, she joins CIERP Alumni Perspectives to reflect on her path and how Fletcher helped her in charting it.
Danielle came to The Fletcher School in 2018 to study development economics and environment & resource policy. Coming from a small island state, she believed that working in the international relations arena would empower her to address a range of issues back home. Before Fletcher, Danielle worked as a project assistant at the planning agency of the Jamaican government, where she focused on external cooperation management. This role gave her the opportunity to collaborate with international organizations like the United Nations and the World Bank, as well as bilateral partners like the governments of China, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Hoping to bring even more value to the table, Danielle decided to apply for graduate studies to develop a more technical skillset.
Though she had already heard about Fletcher’s prestige, she was pleasantly surprised to find so many prominent Fletcher alumni in her field. These included Tahseen Sayed (MALD ’78), the then-Country Director of the World Bank for Caribbean countries, and Courtenay Rattray (GMAP ’08), Jamaica’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations in New York. Reputation aside, she also discovered that Fletcher was the only school on her list that cared about her holistic wellbeing. This convinced her to apply, and the rest is history.
While at Fletcher, Danielle begun researching topics such as renewable energy and solid waste management out of concern for her home country. Not sure where to start, she figured she would take a few classes to give her a lay of the land. Professor David Wirth’s course on International Environmental Law introduced her to interesting debates about transboundary issues (such externalities from pollution) and the nuances of maritime law – both highly relevant to small island states. Danielle touts Dean Kelly Sims Gallagher’s Innovation for Sustainable Prosperity as being the most influential course she took – even today, she refers to some of the course texts when working on innovation and SDG acceleration projects. Her coursework on Environmental Economics (with Professor Shinsuke Tanaka) and Development Economics – Micro Perspectives (with Professor Jenny Aker) helps her to think about how the environment affects economics and communities. From these courses, Danielle gleaned principles that inform how she designs projects and encourages stakeholders to adopt new ideas and technologies. Under Dean Gallagher’s supervision, Danielle crowned her Fletcher career with a capstone project titled “Trash Talk: Assessing the feasibility of municipal waste to energy systems in Caribbean Small Island Developing States.” This project allowed her to explore the effects of improper solid waste management in Jamaica from environmental and economic lenses. It also allowed her to generate novel ideas for tackling an age-old problem, which she considered an intellectual treat.
Beyond equipping her with the right skills, Fletcher was also influential in shaping the way Danielle thought about her career journey. Her initial agenda for grad school was to become a technical expert, in a field like econometrics or Monitoring & Evaluation. However, after interning with the UNDP and discussing her career with faculty, her ideas began to evolve. Danielle’s professors convinced her that she could do a lot more with a Fletcher education than just crunching numbers behind a computer. Her true takeaway from Fletcher, she realized, also lay in the soft skills and open-mindedness that have helped her navigate flexibly within the fields of innovation and sustainability. She credits Fletcher as a great place to rethink possibilities.
Her ‘Fletchery’ skillset has been an asset in her multifaceted role at UNDP. Here, she focuses on developing policies and designing projects to be deployed in Jamaica, the Cayman Islands, Bermuda, Turks and Caicos, and the Bahamas. However, Danielle’s duties aren’t as simple as pulling project ideas out of a hat. She also has to account for the socioeconomic contexts in the target countries and evaluate whether the country office or host government is choosing the most appropriate means to reach their goals. To get additional nuance, her office holds consultations, workshops and working groups to engage stakeholders such as governments, the private sector, local communities, and NGOs. Her current projects include COVID and Disaster Recovery, Energy and Environment, Innovation and Digital Transformation in Jamaica and the Bahamas. Furthermore, Danielle recently helped to put together her office’s country program document, which is the overall programmatic thesis that the office will govern out of for the next four-year cycle. This allowed her to re-emphasize new concepts in Jamaica’s development ecosystem pertaining to innovation, digital transformation, environment, disaster risk reduction, circular economy, and more. She has also worked on a joint proposal to receive funding via the UN Joint SDG Fund. This project lets her engage with the private sector and entrepreneurs, with the goal of creating a self-sustaining mechanism for financing and SDG integration. She’s also looking forward to working on the UNDP Climate Promise, where governments will be able to receive funding to develop projects to help them achieve the Nationally Determined Contributions that came out of COP.
It’s easy to look at all these achievements and think that it’s all been smooth sailing for Danielle. But as a US-educated Black woman from Jamaica, she has had to navigate cultural hurdles in both countries. When she came to the States at seventeen from a near-homogeneously Black country, she felt some trepidation about how she would fare at her predominantly white college. She tried her best to assimilate into the culture around her, only to return to Jamaica to face a new set of stereotypes. Back home, some people assumed she only got access to opportunities because of her foreign degree, casting doubts on her true merit. She felt pressure to work extra hard to prove that she neither received her opportunities on a silver platter nor took them for granted. Thankfully, by the time she got to Fletcher, she was surer in herself and her cultural identity. This allowed her to navigate graduate life with authenticity. Rather than underplaying her identity as a black woman from Jamaica, she leaned into it to enrich her experiences in class, with friends, in her extracurriculars (especially the Decolonizing International Relations Conference, which she remembers very fondly). She has enjoyed working at the UNDP because it brings together a multicultural group of people with international perspectives to work towards a common purpose.
Though she loved watching Black students thriving at Fletcher, Danielle is keenly aware of how so many Black people sometimes question their own identity, place, and value. She too has learned to grapple with questions of whether she deserves to be in the spaces she has occupied, especially when she is asked to speak in meetings with senior management. Through it all, she has found strength in reaffirming her identity and the values her parents raised her with. In those moments of doubts, she reassures herself with her favorite mantra: “I am better than no one, and no one is better than me.”∎
Lyndon Sam is a MALD student at The Fletcher School, Tufts University.
This is the first post in CIERP and CPL’s Black Legacy Month blog series. Read last year’s series here.