UCR Graduate Student Receives Inaugural Pond Lehocky Giordano Scholarship

Paula Omokhomion is a student at the University of California Riverside working toward a master’s degree in public policy.

“My main interests are planning and evaluation of social welfare programs in low- and middle-income countries,” Omokhomion told The Riverside Record recently. “I’m also interested in how to implement these programs in these low-resource settings.”

Omokhomion, who was born in the U.S. and raised in Nigeria, has lived in Moreno Valley since 2021, but said this is the first time that she’s really gotten to settle into her life in Riverside County after completing her bachelor’s degree in public health nutrition at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

This fall, Omokhomion will embark on a fellowship working with the Government Accountability Project, a nonprofit whistleblower protection and advocacy organization based in Washington, D.C.

“I was very interested in the opportunity to go behind the scenes and to learn about the behind-the-scenes work of a nonprofit organization,” she said. “And the opportunity was wonderful, but it wasn’t really highly paid.”

Which drew Omokhomion to look for potential scholarship opportunities that would allow her to focus on the work of the fellowship, which is when she came across the Pond Lehocky Giordano Scholarship: 25 Days of Scholarship program.

“I was very drawn to the prompt, in which they asked us about how it was going to help us,” she said. “It was very straightforward, and then that’s where I was able to say, ‘This is really going to go a long way in supporting me financially, so I can focus on that opportunity while also meeting needs.’”

For Tom Giordano, a founding partner at workers’ compensation law firm Pond Lehocky Giordano, Inc., helping to fill a gap in funding was the goal of the new program, which provided 25 students from across the U.S. with $1,000 each.

“This is definitely not going to cover your college tuition,” he said. “But it’ll help, and I think that’s kind of what we want to do, is help.”

Also different about this scholarship opportunity was that it was open to students enrolled at 2-year or 4-year colleges, universities, trade schools or other education programs, something Giordano said was incredibly important to the firm’s founders.

“We grew up very middle class, lower middle class, believing the American dream, believing that you can kind of do anything if you have an opportunity to do it,” he said. “So it just made perfect sense for us to give scholarships.”

And while this was the first year of the program, Giordano said he hoped it would continue on for years to come to help students across the country achieve their educational goals and give back to their communities, which is one of the things that stood out to him about Omokhomion’s application.

“Here’s somebody who literally wants to dedicate themselves to public service and then, to take it even further, to help people who are  just grossly underrepresented and in need, how can you not pick that person, right,” he said. “How can you not want to support that person in their journey?”

As for Omokhomion, her ultimate goal is to take everything she’s learned throughout her education and her personal experience of growing up in Nigeria to work in an academic setting where she can not only teach but also advocate for better policies and practices for nonprofit and social services work, especially in the Global South.

“I really want to be teaching people who go out of my classes to have more impact, a more empathetic mindset toward people from different backgrounds and people from low-income backgrounds, who are willing to learn how we need to be open minded,” she said. “That’s really my goal.”

The Pond Lehocky Giordano Scholarship deadline for this year has passed. More information about the scholarship program can be found here.