By Briana Watts, Special to JTNews
Picture the word “Recycle” painted on all the garbage and recycling bins on a school campus, in five different languages.
Student-led efforts like this, which cross cultural, racial, gender and other identity barriers, are what the American Jewish Committee hopes to encourage through its annual Max Block and Deborah Rosen awards, which were given to 23 Seattle-area students at an evening reception on May 6.
“It’s a program that honors student humanitarians,” said Wendy Rosen, director of the AJC Seattle chapter. “These are students that are doing work in the world, building bridges between communities.”
As opposed to recognizing students for athletics or academics, this award looks for students who have taken extraordinary initiative to create change in their communities.
In the 51 years since the program was established, more than 1,200 Seattle students, whether Jewish or not, have been recognized for their humanitarian efforts. The AJC takes one nomination of a junior or senior from any Seattle high school. This year, 23 students were recognized as Max Block scholars; three received the Deborah Rosen award with a $2,000 scholarship.
Hanna King, a Rosen scholar raised in the Jewish community, developed a curriculum and runs workshops on gender and sexual harassment at Garfield High School. When the Westboro Baptist Church from Kansas came to protest King’s work and the Gay Straight Alliance at Garfield, she organized a 700-person rally in response.
“I think that it’s no longer acceptable, at least at Garfield High School… to be overtly homophobic,” said King. “But there are a lot of ways in which discrimination is more subtle and oppression can manifest in ways that wouldn’t be easily identified as discrimination.”
King also co-wrote a grant for $100,000 currently under consideration to provide funds for a new community initiative she works with called Queer Youth Space on Capitol Hill.
Other students showed similar passion for the community activities in which they’re involved. Lauren Roth, a junior at Mercer Island High School, is beginning an Invisible Children’s Foundation club at her school to send books, money and other essential school items to Uganda during the 2010-2011 school year.
Roth has also been heavily involved in the B’nai B’rith Youth Organization since beginning high school and helped re-energize a local chapter of the organization. Through her involvement in BBYO, Roth has helped with the Saw Fashion Show to benefit the Huntington’s Disease Society and also works with the Invisible Children’s Fund, among other service activities.
“It means everything to me,” said Roth. “I put so much work into it, but it’s so rewarding… The leadership skills that it’s taught me and the friends it has made for me and the opportunities it’s brought are invaluable… It’s such a great program to do all of these things and develop as a human being.”
“The remarkable thing about these students is that they’re not just doing this to check off a box in their community service form,” said Wendy Rosen.
Other Block scholars have put together art exhibits to uplift the voices of young people, work and travel with international organizations to bring different types of relief, and build relationships with other parts of the world, or work to make their own cultures a more vibrant piece of the Seattle community.
“I’m involved in community work because I’m passionate about communities and that sort of travels with me wherever I go,” King said. “I love Seattle, it’s been my home for a long time, and I feel like I owe a lot to the people who have provided support for me. But I think that I will be dedicated to my community and bettering my community wherever I go.”
King will attend college in Pennsylvania next fall, where she thinks she might double major in computer science and political science, possibly with a minor in peace and conflict studies. “[But that’s] all subject to change within the week,” she joked.
Briana Watts is a student in the University of Washington Department of Communication News Laboratory.