Students Receive Education for Action Grants

Education for Action, a student-run multicultural collective at Radcliffe College, has selected the recipients of its Summer 1996 Social Action Grants. The following Harvard-Radcliffe undergraduates have received funding to do social action work this summer and afterward, in this community and around the world.

The students will confront such important issues as advocating for the homeless community within New York City and educating San Francisco's Spanish-speaking lesbian and bisexual women's community on HIV transmission.

Monica Alvarez '97, $900, to work with the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund in Washington D.C., in trying to promote more sensitivity to the issues that affect the Hispanic community across the country during this election year. She will research and actively participate in the efforts to encourage voter awareness and participation, lobbying and constructing policies, and learning about the legal work that goes into public interest law.

Mehana Blaich '97-98, $600, to work with Native Hawaiians on the North Shore of Kaua'i, running a cultural immersion summer camp for "at-risk" Hawaiian youth, through the Waipa project. The Waipa project provides Hawaiian families with a land-base which serves as a source of economic self-sufficiency and as a cultural resource.

Marco Garrido '99, $1,000, to participate in Project HIP-HOP (Highways Into the Past: History, Organizing, Power), an interracial and socioeconomically diverse group of young people which will journey to South Africa to study the mass social movement which toppled the apartheid system. Upon his return, he will teach at Academy Homes, a housing project in Roxbury, using a curriculum stressing the importance of community, with a special focus on the civil rights movement and the South African anti-apartheid movement.

Ana-Maurine Lara '97, $200, to work with the Lyon Martin Women's Health Center Lesbian HIV/AIDS Program to raise awareness, discussion, and action in the California Bay Area's lesbian and bisexual women's community. She will be translating and writing a newsletter and designing an outreach program that will focus on issues pertinent to lesbians and AIDS.

Nirosha Nimalasuriya '98, $500, to form a committee in Boston to plan and organize what will be the first national student conference for Sri Lankan Americans, providing a forum to discuss issues of identity and community. The conference hopes to address the persisting internal divisions within the Sri Lankan American community by fostering unity within the new generation of Sri Lankan Americans.

Megan Peimer '97, $720, to develop and implement community-based health education projects, most notably a five-week summer youth program, in conjunction with the New River Health Association of Fayette County, W.V. The program will include a peer education theater troupe and will provide innovative educational and leadership opportunities.

Crystal Redd '98, $1,000, to work as a legal advocate at the Urban Justice Center in New York City. She will be a legal advocate in the operation of legal outreach clinics at soup kitchens, food pantries, and homeless shelters throughout Manhattan. Her work will offer legal representation to individuals who are normally ignored by legal services.

Julissa Reynoso '97, $1,500, to work with the Ethiopian Human Rights Council, monitoring human rights violations and compiling reports. She will travel around the country, compiling information to develop a report on women's rights in Ethiopia.

Abdur-Rahman Syed '98-99, $700, to direct the summer school program of the Home Schools project in Karachi, Pakistan, which provides primary education to students who would not otherwise receive it. This project seeks to combat Pakistan's pervasive illiteracy rate.

Veronica Terriquez '97, $1,200, to work through MALDEF, the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Education Fund to research and distribute information on affirmative action, and CCRI, the California Civil Rights Initiative, which plans to end affirmative action in the state's organizations and agencies. She will also be working with a coalition that is campaigning to oppose CCRI.

Rachel Tiven '96-97, $500, to work with B'Tselem, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, researching and reporting on human rights violations in the Palestinian territories and creating educational curricula on democracy and social justice.

Stanley Wei '98-99, $1,500, to work through GEOMED, an international nonprofit organization, to assist a poor, displaced community in post-civil war El Salvador develop self-sustainable health care. His efforts will not only include direct clinical care, but encourage the community to develop the tools to help itself through health, hygiene, and literacy education.

Also a member of the Education for Action community but no longer needing the funding:

Youngju Ryu '97, to strive toward self-empowerment of the women and children of G.I. towns in Korea, by starting a language program in Eui-Jung-Bu, Korea that will include both English and Korean classes. Youngju will also work to mediate a cultural understanding between the U.S. servicemen stationed in Korea and the women who have traditionally served as tokens of economic exchange between the U.S. and the Korean governments.