Melody Sapione dreams of true equity, plans to make change with a Yale degree
July 4, 2024 at 12:39 a.m.
It takes someone with firsthand experience of the harsh realities of inequity to change the world—a fundamental tenant Melody Sapione genuinely believes.
Her eyes light up with a subtle sparkle and notable passion when she speaks of her ambition to be that change.
“There are so many issues in policy-making that aren’t talked about enough. And we need people from the communities we’re trying to fix to be a part of fixing the problems,” she said. “Like immigrant issues, housing insecurity and food scarcity…they say they’re trying to fix it, but I feel like there’s so much more that we can be doing besides giving out food stamps. There are much more hands-on things we can do to help these communities, and structural changes that need to be put in place.”
Communities like Port Chester, she said, are where the burden of a broken system fall. And as a resident of the Village, she feels she has the perspective needed in the conversation of salvation.
Sapione graduated with her Class of 2024 peers on Thursday, June 27. Following in the footsteps of countless before her, she embraced the Port Chester Schools tradition of walking across the football field to receive her diploma, though she did so with an esteem that very few, if any, alum can claim.
In the fall, she will be headed to Yale University, an institution seemingly almost unattainable to many Port Chester Schools faces, which the young scholar emphasized isn’t the students’ fault.
Port Chester pupils, inarguably, don’t have the same access to opportunity that the textbook Ivy Leaguer is privy to.
“One day, I’d like to come back to help Port Chester by implementing a college readiness program here, because I know it’s really difficult. I experienced how difficult it was,” she said. “I know people say social media is bad, but I learned everything I know about the process from TikTok and YouTube. My parents didn’t go to college. My older sister did, but she didn’t really know what she was doing, and she didn’t feel much support either.”
“I know how difficult it is because I did get these opportunities, and when I’d go on them, I’d feel so behind. The other kids were doing so much, these big activities, and their parents and schools are so involved,” she continued. “Then you come here, and the kids don’t know…there’s so many opportunities they don’t know about, and I want them to know about them.”
Sapione encapsulates the two worlds of Port Chester. Her father, of Italian heritage, has longstanding generational roots in the Village, and he married her mother shortly after she immigrated from Peru.
Growing up around the corner from Edison Elementary School, the facility that kicked off her educational journey, Sapione may not have received private-school level, elite guidance, but she was ingrained with two fundamentals: work hard and be ethical.
Yale wasn’t always on her mind. It took the encouragement of an impactful teacher to make her see it was a possibility.
When she was a junior, her history teacher Timothy Hartnett recommended she enter the George S & Stella Knight Essay Contest, an annual competition hosted by the Society of the Sons of the American Revolution. Sapione is a natural writer, which she’s come to realize is the great equalizer—it levels the playing field by giving her an edge making up for a lack of experience.
“I wrote this essay on the Articles of Confederation, and I won. First, I won in the county, and then I actually won in the state,” she recalled. “I was like, ‘this really isn’t so hard.’ I just tried my best, and I wrote it by myself, no one revised it for me. And when I won, I was like, maybe I can do these things I see other people do.”
A devout member of the Chinese Alliance Church of Westchester on Glen Avenue, where most of the congregation are visitors from out of town, Sapione is familiar with the experience of peers from different areas—of more affluent parts of the region.
“A lot of them are from Darien, Westport, Greenwich, and a lot of them go to private schools. I definitely always had this thought of like, I didn’t know as much as them. I felt like I was lesser than them,” she sighed. But winning the essay contest started to change her mentality. It gave her the spark to seek and create her own opportunities.
Sapione ended her Port Chester High School career with a laundry list of achievements and points of notability for her resume. In school, she swam on the varsity swim team, joined numerous honor societies, sang in the Port Chester Sound and helped others through the Peer Tutoring Club. And outside of school, she dedicated her work to the community.
Aside from working as the manager of Early Learning at the Kumon in Greenwich and earning numerous internships with local organizations, she took the trauma she witnessed in 2020 and founded a food pantry that June out of her church that still runs today.
“Living in Port Chester, we’re right between Greenwich and Rye, these super affluent communities with us in the middle. And you see so many people struggling, but because of where we are a lot of people don’t notice,” she said. “My mom taught me to be someone who helps. So, I started this food pantry during COVID, because it seemed like no one was helping. And I was worried, how are people going to survive day to day?”
Collecting food donations that would otherwise be thrown away from Whole Foods and Acme, she started an organization that went from helping five people with groceries biweekly to 60. She’s recruited around 30 youth from the congregation to volunteer.
Academically, this year she earned the title of a 2024 Coca-Cola Scholar, being named one of 150 nationwide to win a $20,000 grant and weekend getaway to network with other likeminded “visionary leaders.” But the achievement she found most notable was one that introduced her to what would become her future—becoming one of a few dozen to be deemed a 2023 Yale Women in Economics Seeds of Fortune scholar.
The program gave her access to online lectures from notables from institutions such as the Federal Reserve before inviting her to campus over the summer to work on and present a group capstone project.
“We did our project on market failures and how it affects disadvantaged communities, and we actually won at that Yale conference,” she said. “Going there, that was when I first really felt like I got the support system. Because everyone there was like, ‘you got this,’ and they were all other girls like me. They didn’t come from these wealthy schools, I felt like I had people around me who knew how to do this who weren’t going to private school.”
How did she manage to balance all her commitments? Sapione attributes a lot to her faith.
“The church has been an important part of me because it gives me fuel to do whatever I want,” she described. “Like, I do have a busy schedule, my days are really long. And I think if I didn’t have faith and being Christian involved, I’d just be worn out and tired and wouldn’t want to do anything.”
The influence of her parents has also been key to her motivation.
She watched them work diligently to support their family, her father as a custodian at Port Chester High School and her mother, for a while, as a daycare staffer. Plus, their family circumstances made her grow up relatively quickly.
“My mom is blind. She was born with a genetic condition called retinitis pigmentosa, and my dad’s always working. So, I’ve always been pretty independent,” she said. “I think that kind of fueled the ‘I need to do good for myself’ feeling, because there’s no one I can rely on to catch me if I don’t know what I’m doing, so I just have to figure it out. I always felt this sense of, I have to figure things out on my own, and be there to take care of my mom.”
Sapione is ambitious. In the fall, she’s eager to major in Ethics, Politics and Economics at Yale and has the intention of pursuing a pre-law track. She wants to become a lawyer, ideally working in human rights or with advocacy organizations, though she does have anxiety over the first step.
“It’s a little scary,” she said. “When I went to the Coca-Cola scholarship, I felt like no one was like me. I felt behind because everyone had these similar experiences doing big things, and I’m like ‘how did I win this?’ And I felt that way again when I went to Yale’s accepted students’ day in May. A lot of them already knew each other, and I felt a little bit like an outcast.”
“But I’m sure I’ll find my people,” she assured.
Settling in to find her place is important, because she has dreams to pursue—dreams that, she hopes, will bring change to communities like Port Chester.
“Westchester is one of the richest [counties] in New York, so the struggles of Port Chester get overlooked,” she said. “I want to be that spokesperson for Port Chester, and towns like Port Chester, who are struggling. We’re not like our neighbors; we can’t have the same hands-off approach because we have problems they don’t have.”
To be the change is a mission Sapione embodies. And with a diploma in hand, she’s one step closer to the goal.
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