Monay says that her involvement in creative spaces such as drama workshops meant that she could explore and understand some of those struggles in more depth.
“I was exposed to the power of arts education to bring about agency and belonging for young people because that was my experience,” she says.
From those workshops in her early teens, Monay became involved in community arts projects in her local area that were focused on mobilising young people to be “changemakers”.
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Monay already has an impressive CV. She has supported more than 300 students across 10 London state schools, facilitated learning for over 100 young people across several countries, and mentored more than 60 young people from disadvantaged backgrounds.
In 2025, she graduated with a degree in law and anthropology from the London School of Economics and Political Science. She then began to look further afield for her next educational challenge.
“I had a friend who was graduating from Harvard and we had a conversation,” she says.
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“She was like, why don’t you look at Harvard…and then I looked at a couple programmes there and Education Leadership, Organizations, and Entrepreneurship [LOE] is the programme that most aligned with my mission and work that I’d been doing up until now.”
Monay found out she had been accepted onto the LOE programme back in March of this year.
“I think I screamed and cried a little,” she admits.
“It was just me and my mum at home, so we were just jumping through that, and it was a really fun moment. I called my dad, and he was at the boxing gym, and he was just so beyond happy. He was shouting to everyone in the gym, saying ‘my daughter just got into Harvard!’”
She sees her acceptance into such a prestigious university as more than an educational opportunity.
“It meant that I’m getting this opportunity to grow as a human being and grow as someone who’s able to have the disposition and capacity to drive change in the world, which is what I’m most passionate about,” she says.
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“It’s very easy for that to become stigmatised and for people to label you. But I think my parents did a great job at instilling in me that those things do not dictate where I will end up in life and I can do anything I set my mind to.”
She says that “the ability to see myself beyond my circumstance” has been really important.
“I was on free school meals growing up and we didn’t have much whatsoever,” she says.
Just 2.8% of students at Russell Group universities were eligible for free school meals when they were in Year 11, research from the Institute for Fiscal Studies has shown, with people from disadvantaged backgrounds often facing significant barriers to further education.
Meanwhile, Sutton Trust research shows that 60% of students who went to private school and went to university went to a Russell Group institution.
Extortionate fees and the cost of student living can mean people from poorer backgrounds struggle to attend university, and poverty may also have impacted their education throughout their childhood.
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Experts argue that systemic change is needed to give more pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds opportunities in further education.
Even now, Monay still has challenges to overcome. The financial barriers that she grew up with have not disappeared. The estimated cost of attending Harvard, including tuition and living expenses, is approximately £80,000. She has managed to secure partial funding from the university itself and has set up a GoFundMe page to cover the rest of the costs.
She also credits her faith with helping her get to this point. Her family is not particularly religious, but she herself found comfort in Christianity during periods of suffering from poor mental health.
“I’ve faced mental health struggles in the past and I think things that should have paralysed me in my destiny, but God has really, really helped me through,” she says.
“So, I think having a degree of faith, having familial support, having a perspective and a value system that extends beyond what people put on me, has been really, really important in my journey to Harvard and beyond.”
Monay arrived in the US in August and is now several weeks into her classes. She is already looking ahead to the next chapter once she graduates; she hopes to work across different sectors but primarily at the intersection of education and governance.
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“I want to use education, leadership, and service to help create opportunities for communities who may not always have access to the support, encouragement, or opportunities they deserve. If my journey encourages even one young person to believe that their background does not determine their future, then I will be incredibly thankful.”
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