Maya Malik, MSSW, is a Participatory Action Fellow. They are one of two fellows supporting evaluation research with UUSC partners doing social justice work worldwide.

Mx Malik previously served as a Training Coordinator for the Women’s Health Center at Boston University Medical School, where they contributed to developing community-focused training programs. They are also a researcher with the McGill Global Child Research Group in the Participatory Methods Axis and worked for years as a researcher at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet in Society, in their Youth and Media core at Harvard University Law School, where they contributed to the design and execution of arts-based, participatory action research projects with youth around technology and their future.

Throughout their academic career, Maya has taught low-income youth of color in different communities around the world to combat the negative effects of poverty, trauma, and structural oppression on students from marginalized communities.

Maya is currently a doctoral student at the McGill School of Social Work in a program that utilizes arts-based research to co-create programs with queer Black youth from areas impacted by community violence. They earned their Masters of Science in Social Work from the Columbia School of Social Work, focusing on international social welfare and rights for immigrants and refugees. They were also a 2022-2023 Sadler Scholar at the Hastings Center and continuously work as a consultant on training development, qualitative data collection,  participatory analysis, and facilitation for all ages.