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BY MENGHAN JIN

In print | Published January 21, 2010

The Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility awarded the Eugene M. Lang Opportunity Scholarship this December to six sophomores: Adam Bortner, Rebekah Judson, Tom Liu, Lizah Masis, Stephanie Rodriguez and Sarah Scheub. The scholarship will provide the Scholars the opportunity to engage in a paid summer internship to jumpstart social activism projects of their own design and to apply for a grant of up to $10,000 for implementation. Those who complete their project successfully and wish to further their studies in graduate school can receive up to $10,000 in additional funding. A group of mentors in the Swarthmore community will also be available to assist and guide the awardees.

Adam Bortner ’12

Working with the AIDS Care Group last summer as a Chester Community Fellow led Bortner to discover the therapeutic powers of digital storytelling. “I had learned about this way of telling stories where instead of just writing it down and having other people read it, you record your voice, you can put photos with it, you can put film with it, music and create a sort of a mini-video,” he said. For his project, Bortner aims to establish a digital story center in Chester to help residents living with HIV/AIDS tell and preserve their stories through a unique medium and combat the pervasive negative stereotypes of AIDS. To improve access to the technology in Chester, Bortner intends to partner with nonprofit organizations and purchase necessary equipment, including computers, audio recording equipment and digital cameras, to follow through with his vision of developing a digital story center in Chester accessible to all. The center will also offer Chester residents living with HIV/AIDS workshops teaching the process of creating digital stories.

Rebekah Judson ’12

Currently active in several community service projects, Judson has always wanted to establish a project stemming from her own ideas and inspirations. With this scholarship, she hopes to create a digital literacy program for middle school students in the South Bronx in New York. Before coming to Swarthmore, Judson spent a year working with numerous schools in the South Bronx and found the instruction stilted and application of technology lacking. “Previously there’s been a lot of effort to close the digital divide by providing a lot of technology and access to technology, so I’m trying to create a program that is about [the students] acquiring technological skills and also about closing an information gap,” she said. She will focus on providing more opportunities for students to actively utilize technology and develop some sort of technological literacy as well as on forming closer relationships with communities in the South Bronx.

Tom Liu ’12

Yearning to branch out of the classroom and really help bring about improvements in other people’s lives, Liu saw the Lang Scholarship as a great opportunity to go out into the world outside Swarthmore and promote perceptible change. He plans to work closely with two professors at Johns Hopkins University on the pressing issue of insufficient treatment for the Chinese rural poor who live with cataracts and could go blind without treatment. “It is estimated that by the year 2020, the number of people blind with cataracts will double in China if nothing is done,” he said. By providing better access to cataract surgery, which is a relatively simple and cost-effective procedure, and by increasing awareness of the importance of healthy eye care practices to citizens of a rural region in Northern China, Liu hopes that in the long term this project will also contribute to local economies by granting those suffering from cataracts the ability to work.

Lizah Masis ’12

From Eldoret, Kenya, Masis plans to provide financial assistance to women in her home country by starting a microfinance organization in Mount Elgon, offering loans to those who wish to start or expand a business. “Most of [the families in the community] have working women, but they are locked out of the financial system completely. Because of the geography of Mount Elgon, it’s in the middle of the mountain, so we don’t have any banks.”

Furthermore, a violent two-year conflict in the region that began in 2005 displaced and decimated a great number of men, leaving the women of the community alone to fend for themselves and their families. “Most of them have never done that before . . . and if they were given some sort of support, especially financially, they would at least make some sort of comeback,” Masis said. According to Masis, the loans will be issued on a group-based system, and trust among the women in the group will provide security for need-based loans ranging anywhere from $10 to $200.

Stephanie Rodriguez ’12

With a passion for writing, Rodriguez plans to partner with the Chester Education Foundation to develop a Youth Writing Center in Chester aimed at helping middle school girls. After falling in love with the community of Chester through volunteering with Dare 2 Soar and participating in the Chester Community Fellows Program over the summer, Rodriguez “realized how important it was not just to change the lives of 10 girls … but the possibility of helping way more women, way more young girls in Chester through what helped [her], which was writing.”

She intends to expose the girls to creative writing and writing in the digital era through blogging and other social networks, as well as to provide instruction on grammar and other basic writing rules that will benefit the girls if they choose to enter academia and the corporate world.

Sarah Scheub ’12

Scheub, who may pursue a career in agriculture or veterinary medicine, became interested in the waste management system in San Francisco, Peru, which was launched last year by a previous Scholar, Diego Garcia Montufar ’09. “I’ll be taking the compost from his project and using it to help individual families start their own gardens to really help bolster the independence of the community and teach also in the schools about nutrition and the biology of some farm animals,” she said. If possible, Scheub is hoping to assist a school in San Francisco that needs funding in order to transform a part of its property into terrain conducive to agriculture that would ultimately provide food for the students. This summer, she intends to meet with community leaders in San Francisco, hopefully with Montufar’s assistance, and establish what the desired outcome of the program would be.

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