MAYUMI SATO

Hometown: Yokohama, Japan

PiA post: Life Skills Development Foundation, Chiang Mai, Thailand (2017); Regional Community Forestry Training Center (RECOFTC), Bangkok, Thailand (2018) University: BA at McGill University; MA, PhD at Cambridge University

Current city: Cambridge, United Kingdom

Since she was a child, Mayumi Sato has always been on the move. Born in Yokahoma, Japan, the 27-year-old moved around Japan and crisscrossed the U.S. and Canada. With every new destination, Mayumi says she appreciated the opportunity to see “the realities of each city.” It is no wonder that Mayumi took a keen focus on Geography, which she studied at McGill University in Montreal, along with coursework in Arabic language and a minor in East Asian Studies. After finishing her undergraduate degree in 2017, Mayumi was awarded a PiA fellowship at the Life Skills Development Foundation, a Chiang Mai-based NGO where she worked with Shan refugees who fled Myanmar and helped them obtain job training and education in English and Thai.

Mayumi stayed in Thailand for two years. In her second-year post, Mayumi relocated to Bangkok to work with the environmental nonprofit Regional Community Forestry Training Center, known as RECOFTC, which assists local communities in sustainable forestry projects. Mayumi’s research in forestry policies took her all across Southeast Asia, from visiting rural communities in Thailand to interviewing timber workers in Laos and liaising with colleagues in offices in Vietnam, Malaysia and Myanmar.

She recalls a highlight of her fellowship was when she traveled to Laos to track a recent deforestation policy and its impact on local economies. She visited Vientiane, the country’s capital, and spoke with business owners who were struggling to stay afloat because they were reliant on illegal logging. She also interviewed female loggers who spoke of pay discrepancies in the industry. This experience was eye-opening for Mayumi. “You read a lot about policy, you read a lot of research,” she says, “but you don’t actually see how it actually operationalizes on the ground.”

After finishing her post, Mayumi knew she wanted to head back to academia to bolster her research skills. She completed an MA in Sociology at Cambridge, focusing her dissertation on racism in prisons and interviewing incarcerated Black and Indigenous activists. A current PhD candidate at Cambridge and a Gates Cambridge Scholar, Mayumi is looking to narrow her research on incarceration to examine the impacts of environmental factors and settler colonialism on the health of people in prisons.

Last May, as the pandemic ravaged the world, Mayumi was finishing up her Masters and became frustrated by the structural inequalities she saw in her program – how low-income students couldn’t access reliable internet connections or resources to complete their studies while wealthier students were able to coast by. She founded The Solidarity Library (TSL), which began as a hub for students to access academic resources and expanded into COVID relief kits and funding for people in the Global South and under-resourced communities in the U.S. and Canada. After receiving some grants, Mayumi and her team built The Solidarity Library’s first fellowship, the Edu-Justice Graduate Fellowship, which offers mentorship for students of color in higher education. She shared TSL on the PiA alumni page and soon she brought on a former Fellow who replaced her post in Bangkok to the organization’s board; two other Fellows became mentors and mentees for TSL’s flagship fellowship.

During the pandemic, Mayumi dove into her work on The Solidarity Library as a way to “distract herself from isolation,” she says – while juggling a role at the Samuel Centre for Social Connectedness, a research assistant position, and a writing job at the UN Environment Programme. When she has down time, Mayumi says she recently bought herself a violin, rekindling a childhood passion.

Looking ahead, Mayumi hopes to establish The Solidarity Library as a formal organization with an office and members around the world. She wants to find sustainable funding and have a dedicated team - not just other full-time students. “This chance of mentoring specifically students of color, I see the potential where I can actually teach them and have a greater impact.”