Three UCLA students have been honored with 2013 Charles E. Young Humanitarian Awards for their outstanding commitment to public service. The awards ceremony, a private event for family and friends, took place May 7 in the Charles E. Young Grand Salon at UCLA's Kerckhoff Hall.
The Young Humanitarian Award, established by UCLA in 1986 as an annual tribute to recognize and encourage projects that address communities' social needs, is one of the most prestigious honors given to UCLA undergraduates. Each student received $1,000, to be donated to a public service project of their choice.
"It is a very special event," said Janina Montero, vice chancellor for student affairs. "We don’t only recognize the students who are recipients of the awards. Through this event we also acknowledge the wonderful, wonderful work that happens on campus, the initiative of our great community of students and, more importantly, their generosity."
This year's awards ceremony honored three 21-year-old students and for the first time recognized a joint project.
Maria Guadalupe Mendoza, a sociology and Chicana/o studies major from Orange Cove, California, who will graduate in June, co-created the Central Valley Project to serve and mentor youth in California's Central Valley and extend UCLA’s commitment to community service beyond the greater Los Angeles area.
"The most valuable experiences of my undergraduate career at UCLA have been outside of the lecture hall," said Mendoza. "These learning experiences involve connecting with diverse groups of students at UCLA who share a commitment for improving our community. Coming from a small rural community to UCLA has opened the doors to incredible opportunities for me and invaluable learning experiences, but I have been very fortunate to have positive mentors and resources that I know are not readily available to youth in underrepresented communities."
The project, which was founded in February 2012 and involves 20 UCLA student volunteers, promotes higher education, positive self-image and community service engagement among high school students in the southern San Joaquin Valley region, where the program serves roughly 80 students. The program runs four times per quarter in Orange Cove and at Lindsay High School, which are more than 160 miles from UCLA.
This quarter the high school students brought together the United Farm Workers Union, city council and the local radio stations to host an educational forum on farm worker’s rights for their parents and members of the greater farm labor community.
Mendoza intends to use her award to expand CVP’s service in the community, create community scholarships for youth and provide educational supplies to children of those involved in the project.
The second award-winning project, the UCLA Global Citizens Fellowship, was started by Madhu Narasimhan, a political science major from Fremont, Calif. who will graduate in June, and Ajwang Rading, a junior from Corona Del Mar, Calif., who is also majoring in political science. After noticing that many of their peers were interested in international community service work, but often didn’t have the financial resources to pursue such endeavors, Narasimhan and Rading decided to find a way to help them achieve their service aspirations. Narasimhan had previously co-founded a non-profit soup kitchen in India and is deputy chapter director for the UC Haiti Initiative.
Together they founded the UCLA Global Citizens Fellowship program in 2012 to "empower exceptional undergraduates to transform the global community through public service." In just a year they raised more than $35,000 from private donors and the UCLA administration to create a sustainable program that offers annual awards of $5,000 each to two undergraduate students who are undertaking self-directed service projects in any country of their choice.
"Through a fortuitous combination of hard work, serendipity, knowing the right people and believing so passionately in what you do that everyone listens, Madhu and Ajwang managed to get together seed funding and a board of directors that looks like a Who’s Who at UCLA," said G. Jennifer Wilson, the assistant vice provost for honors at UCLA. "There is a strong commitment to securing more funds and making sure the project continues long after they have left UCLA."
The first recipients of the UCLA Global Citizens Fellowship are a student who is travelling to Moldova to teach and empower children who are at-risk for human sex-trafficking, and another who is headed to Uganda to set up an emergency medical system in remote villages that lack access to healthcare facilities.
Rading has been involved with a variety of community service efforts during his time at UCLA, including the Half in Ten Center for American Progress and the Clinton Peace Center in Northern Ireland. He is also a skilled public speaker who talks to students from low socio-economic backgrounds about the importance of overcoming adversity. He and Narasimhan plan to use their awards to further fund the fellowship program.
"Each of us as human beings has a limited period of time here on Earth," said Narasimhan. "And we each have unique capabilities that we should utilize to leave a tangible impact on this earth. I don’t think there’s a more important mission than that."
