The Community Service Office has announced three student winners of the Social Change Grants. Presented annually to students seeking to better their community, the three grants have a total value of $18,000.
Junior Julienne Kane, a political science major in Arts & Sciences, was awarded the $3,000 Stern Social Change grant.
The Stern Social Change Grant was established in 2000 to provide interested students with the means to pursue creative and meaningful activities geared toward finding solutions to society’s needs.
Kane plans to use the grant to implement her program, “Break the Chains,” this summer.
“Break the Chains targets youth incarcerated in juvenile detention, promoting literacy, peer communication and creative expression,” Kane said. “I will also visit the academic and college counseling offices at several Washington, D.C., public schools to study areas in need of improvement and compile a report on my findings.”
Junior Raymond Mailhot, a biology and Spanish major, both in Arts & Sciences, won the $5,000 Kaldi’s Social Change Grant. Established in 2005 to provide students with the opportunity to develop sustainable community projects in the St. Louis region, the grant is given to one undergraduate student each year.
The grant helps the recipient to pursue full-time summer work in developing and implementing an innovative St. Louis community project and to sustain the project through part-time work for one academic year following the summer work.
Mailhot plans to use the grant to identify resources for diabetes prevention and to administer a yearlong intervention for the prevention and control of diabetes for Latino patients at La Clinica in St. Louis.
Junior Aryan Weisenfeld, a biology major, is one of 100 American college students to win the $10,000 Kathryn Wasserman Davis 100 Projects for Peace Social Change Grant.
Philanthropist Davis, on the occasion of her 100th birthday, established the program with a donation of $1 million so that each of the projects will receive $10,000. The object of the program is to encourage and support motivated youth to create and implement their ideas for building peace throughout the world in the 21st century.
“With this grant, we plan to enable the implementation of a support network to help Egyptian youth deal with the hepatitis C epidemic that has ravaged the country,” Weisenfeld said. “My project partner, Anant Vinjamoori (a student at Stanford University) and I will recruit and train a core of educated young adults to spread the message of hepatitis C awareness to their communities and social circles.
“We will then use the mobilization of these youth to leverage the establishment of several youth-focused hepatitis C support groups that will provide a forum for dialogue and discussion for those who have the disease or have relatives/friends with the disease.”
To learn more about the grants, visit communityservice.wustl.edu/grants.