By Janis Siegel, JTNews Correspondent
A national youth leader on his own mission to mobilize religious youth around the world is landing in Seattle. He’ll be in town to honor 23 local high school students who have won the American Jewish Committee’s Max H. Block Award for their extraordinary philanthropy at a ceremony on May 13. Three of them will also receive $2,500 each, from the newly endowed Deborah L. Rosen Scholarship Grant.
“The generous donation from Deborah Rosen to establish the AJC Education Endowment has enabled us to expand the Block Awards into a much larger effort called the Student Human Relations program,” said Kathleen Crowell, development director for the AJC’s Seattle chapter.
This year’s competition for the 2009 AJC Student Human Relations Program Awards was keen. Counselors in 50 Seattle-area high schools nominated their pick for the one top junior or senior in their student body. From that group, 23 students were chosen to receive the Block Award for their outstanding public service.
The evening’s keynote speaker, Dr. Eboo Patel, is a 33-year-old Muslim-American who was born in Mumbai, India. He has written about his own personal struggle to define his religious faith in his book, Acts of Faith.
Patel is the executive director and founder of Interfaith Youth Core, an international nonprofit comprised of youth collaborating on projects to serve others. He is also a Harvard-educated Rhodes scholar who was recently named to President Obama’s 25-member Interfaith Council.
“I am especially honored to be amongst the high school students who are receiving this award,” Patel told JTNews from his home in Chicago. “I will be speaking about the importance of young people as the architects of interfaith cooperation.”
Patel believes there are multiple demands on today’s youth and more than a few choices they can make about the direction of their lives. Leaders need to be mentors, he said, because millions of religious young people in the world are interacting with greater frequency. That interaction, said Patel, “tends either toward conflict or cooperation.
“I believe there is a generation of young people who want to be interfaith bridge-builders,” he said. “Religious extremists are really good at advancing their message of religion as a source of hatred. But I think the vast majority of believers in the world view their faith as bridges.”
This year, the AJC is honoring three Rosen Scholarship winners who didn’t wait for their high school graduations to try and make right some of the wrongs they saw in their world.
Elinor Paulus, a senior at Ingraham High School in North Seattle, founded a Human Rights Club at her school and used a $1,000 grant to teach elementary and middle school children about water rights issues. Now she’s organizing a conference on the subject for high school students in the Pacific Northwest region.
Dimitri Jai Woods is a senior at the private Seattle-based Lakeside School. In addition to his work on the school’s Black Student Union Leadership Committee, and winning varsity letters in track and field, Jai was a Seeds of Compassion youth ambassador, and created a Jena Six action group for youth in Louisiana, in commemoration of six high school students in Louisiana who were arrested for assault following several race-baiting incidents.
Daniel Nguyen, a student at Franklin High School in Seattle’s Mt. Baker neighborhood, joined his school’s Gay/Straight Alliance to support its members and to help promote tolerance. He’s a member of the National Honor Society and he will represent the University of Washington’s Upward Bound Program at the 2009 TRIO Student Leadership Conference in Olympia.
In keeping with AJC’s mission to promote human relations locally and globally, religion is not a factor in their awarding criteria. The organization is dedicated to identifying local high school humanitarians who can become leaders in the future.
“I think there’s a trend of young people becoming more aggressive in their religious belief,” Patel said, “and then there is a trend among young people who view their religious beliefs as bridges of understanding. I think that’s the trend we need to help accelerate.”