Category: #SeniorsCorner

By Cynthia Boyadjian

This is part of a series of interviews with our 5 scholarship recipients for our 2018 Build A Better Future scholarship sponsored by Honors Graduation. We hope you will find their stories as inspiring as we do! This is to lead up to our 2019 program announcement on September 28.

Austin Fitzgerald recently graduated from The Charlotte Latin School in Charlotte, North Carolina. Having always been passionate about playing the violin, she received one of the $10,000 HGU Build a Better Future scholarships for her work in developing the Mindstrings program in her local community. Her father works as a teacher in the local public school where she saw first-hand the disadvantages that these students face every day. After seeing the vast difference between public and private schools in Charlotte and the lack of funding in public schools, she felt compelled to action. Through Mindstrings, she devotes a large portion of her time interacting with and helping low-income students to implement music into their education.

The Mindstrings program is currently in place at Sedgefield Middle School in Charlotte North Carolina where she works closely with the school orchestra. She has been able to give free violin lessons to students at the school in both private and group settings, where she also provides the instruments. With permission from the principal at Sedgefield, she is able to use the school facility to the hold the group lessons and has been able to continue this throughout the summer. For the private lessons, she travels to the students and teaches them in their homes. When I asked Austin how she feels that this has impacted her community, she said that this hasn’t just impacted the students, but also their families. She is welcomed into their homes and they are very grateful for what she is doing for them.

Austin is a self-proclaimed introvert and this program has helped her to put herself out there to be more outgoing. She has also refined her presentation and networking skills through the process of creating, designing, implementing and maintaining Mindstrings. Through her desire to increase funding for Mindstrings to take root in her community, she has gained confidence in herself to present her ideas and gain those relationships. In doing so, Austin was successful in gaining 3 violin donations from the Charlotte Latin Service Council as well as the Latin Arts Association

One of her biggest hopes for Mindstrings is to be able to expand the program to more schools. She is currently negotiating with a second school in the area to get the program going for the upcoming school year! Austin is also working on implementing Mindstrings as an officially sanctioned volunteer opportunity for upper middle and high school students in the Charlotte area. With that, she would love to have a formal program within Mindstrings to teach students proper etiquette when volunteering with low-income students. Austin says that she has learned a lot about herself as a person, an advocate and a community activist. She hopes that this will also inspire the participants, to also give back to their communities, building an even larger collective impact. She shares, “By providing the skill of learning to play an instrument or helping in classrooms, these students are acquiring not only the skill of playing an instrument, but also the cognitive skills that come along with it; such as a stronger attention span and the practice of discipline and hard work. It also provides mentorship to students in the program.”

While Mindtrings is currently a small program in Charlotte, she plans on taking it with her while she attends school at the University of Chicago in the fall and hopes that she will be able to expand Mindstrings. She aspires to turn Mindstrings into a non-profit organization, build a website and obtain more scholarships and donations to help her program flourish. After she is able to reach non-profit status, she will replicate herself and establish a board of directors with a Community Development staff of volunteers to continue this work locally. She feels that a strong foundation for students in low-income communities must be provided to access their potential and continue on to a higher education.

By Cynthia Boyadjian

This is part of a series of interviews with our 5 scholarship recipients for our 2018 Build A Better Future scholarship sponsored by Honors Graduation. We hope you will find their stories as inspiring as we do! This is to lead up to our 2019 program announcement on September 28.

Isaac Stone, a recent graduate from LASA High School, was challenged by his engineering teacher to create something that involved engineering. For the past 2 years he has been volunteering with the non-profit group, Texas Rowing For All, which focuses on bringing rowing and paddle sports to people with varying disabilities or impairments. Both of these factors inspired him to create the Invisible Cane, which emits sound to help blind people navigate their surroundings. His work earned him one of the $10,000 HGU scholarships this year.

Two things stood out to him most when working with those with visual impairments. For them to get into a boat meant largely relying on someone else for guidance and the obstacles that they could run into while in a boat are not within reach of a standard cane, until it’s too late to avoid a crash. The Invisible Cane doesn’t have the distance limitations of a standard physical cane, which would help people who are blind or have visual impairments become more independent on the water. A primary goal of Isaac’s is to allow the people with visual impairments the ability to independently row in places where programs such as Texas Rowing For All don’t exist. In addition, this will allow program volunteers to devote more resources to the parts of the community where visual impairments don’t apply.

When Isaac first started on his project, he created a prototype for the Invisible Cane. However, through more research and feedback from mentors and those in the blind community, he decided to develop an app for phones. Doing this will solve most of the current issues associated with cost and scaling, as he won’t be developing a physical product any longer. The majority of Isaac’s programming knowledge is self-taught and he plans to learn more to be able to be able develop the app. In the meantime, he will continue to volunteer with the Texas Rowing For All community. He hopes that as time goes on, his app will become widely accessible, easy to use, and highly functional for those in the blind community.

Throughout this process, Isaac has learned a lot about himself and how to challenge himself in different ways. He has learned that being a risk-taker can help him achieve his goals, even on a time-crunch. He also discovered that he already has a network of people to whom he can turn to for help, which has been a great resource to help him understand what this kind of process takes. Currently, he is working on getting in contact with a woman in his area that works with people who have recently lost their vision. She helps them learn to use a cane and to adjust to their new situations. He is hopeful that she will be able to help him better understand what is most important for their navigation needs. In addition, he would like to conduct navigation experiments himself without the benefit of sight to gain further understanding on how he can be more effective and understanding. Isaac says that through this process, he has been drawn to people with ambitious goals, good work ethics, and an abundance of self-awareness. He believes that this has been the most valuable and encouraging outcome of his project.

Isaac will continue his education at the College of Engineering at Washington University-St. Louis. His hope is to increase independence and power of an often-overlooked group within our society with the Invisible Cane. He wants to help these people build their capabilities and put them on par with the general population, which will allow them to integrate into society rather than remain dependent on others for companionship and aid.

By Cynthia Boyadjian

This is part of a series of interviews with our 5 scholarship recipients for our 2018 Build A Better Future scholarship sponsored by Honors Graduation. We hope you will find their stories as inspiring as we do! This is to lead up to our 2019 program announcement on September 28.

With the degree to which our lives have become online, can you imagine the hindrance of being unable to navigate technology? Inspired by her Grandparents, Lexi Showalter decided to take action in her community and that is how CyberCitizens began. Her goal was to bridge the generational gap and facilitate the younger generation to teach senior citizens technical skills. Her work earned her one of the five $10,000 HGU Build A Better Future scholarships.

Lexi noticed how often her Grandparents would come to her for their technology needs; her friends and peers were also having the same experiences. Instead of doing it all for them, Lexi wanted to help them gain both independence and confidence. In the class she hosted for her project, she was able to interact with multiple senior citizens, with overall positive feedback. Participants appreciated that she was very direct and to the point. She was able to help them feel good about themselves as they learned skills that were out of their comfort zones.

CyberCitizens isn’t just focused on teaching tech skills to senior citizens. One of her other big goals is to to encourage the younger generation to take on leadership roles by teaching these classes. Lexi plans to target millenials who tend to know more about technology, giving them the opportunity to gain life experiences and learn to lead others by teaching these classes. She feels like this is a great way to better connect her community and hopes to be able to recruit both college and high school students. Creating this has helped Lexi to be more outgoing and she knows this can help her peers do the same. Lexi has also been able to get family members involved with teaching their grandparents and parents to interact with them in a different way. She feels like this has been one of the most positive outcomes of her program.

Lexi’s biggest hope for CyberCitizens is for her students to really pick up on the information that they are being taught and to make them more independent. She feels strongly that this can help with their overall quality of life, not only because of the skills themselves, but because of the way learning new skills helps curtail brain decline. Taking these classes will also help the social isolation issues that our aging population frequently faces. She hopes that one day, she will be able to teach classes at nursing homes where residents have little to no contact with the outside world. These classes could help them to interact with more people and to also learn ways that they can connect with their families with things such as Facetime and Skype.

Ultimately, Lexi plans to do extensive work in taking CyberCitizens from what it is now to a non-profit business where multiple classes are offered. In these classes, she would like to focus on topics such as photo sharing, communication, online safety, and social media. She hopes that she will be able to trademark the flip-books she created for CyberCitizens, and develop more flip-books that are focused on the different classes being taught. Lexi recently graduation from Normal Community High School in Illinois. She will be attending Illinois State University in the fall, where she hopes to connect with more people to join her in CyberCitizens. Since her new school is in the town she is from, she will continue to grow CyberCitizens as she goes to college.

By Cynthia Boyadjian

This is part of a series of interviews with our 5 scholarship recipients for our 2018 Build A Better Future scholarship sponsored by Honors Graduation. We hope you will find their stories as inspiring as we do! This is to lead up to our 2019 program announcement on September 28.

William Rand has a great passion for physical, emotional and mental health and felt concerned about the current student wellness climate at his high school. After hearing interest from fellow students and teachers, as well as having past experience with wellness groups in his community, he was inspired to create OHBreathe at Ottawa Hills High School. The goal with this organization is to promote student wellness, and in doing so, he earned one of the $10,000 2018 HGU Build A Better Future scholarships.

OHBreathe has been fortunate enough to receive support from the school community as a whole. While the program this year performed with great success under a small budget, the dream is to expand the reach as well as the resources. The local school foundation has already pledged to support ventures to bring in wellness speakers high in their fields and to do so, William will be writing a grant later this year to ask for specific funds to be set aside for this purpose. OH21, an organization that promotes family wellness in his community gave their support to OHBreathe this year by purchasing t-shirts for the entire school and are already on board to make to the same donation for next year. OHSPAA, the school’s parent association, has also pledged to provide additional support TBD. However, William’s personal goal is to gain their support of the wellness day by helping to bring in local youth empowerment specialist Jon Schoonmaker to do a fully immersive wellness experience with all of the students at the school.

William’s biggest hope is that this will be less of an institutional program and more of a culture shift over time. He also hopes that they will reach enough people to be able to implement OHBreathe into more schools in the community. The community support thus far has been overwhelming. It has become clear to William that his community craves more immersive, in-depth experiences which has inspired him to gather all possible resources.

Through OHBreathe, William organized student-teacher workshops such as yoga, meditation, cooking, team building exercises, hiking, knitting, and gardening. William has sensed an overall positive impact on the participants and on the school as a whole. He hopes to gain a larger physical presence by placing posters and artifacts from each session around the school in hopes of having more meaningful symbols to remind students what it means to live in wellness every day.

William has developed several new skills over this process, including organizational skills, budgeting skills (within major financial constraints), and communication skills. He also learned to gain the attention of an entire auditorium by playing the emcee for OHBreathe assemblies. Most importantly, he learned how to remain calm and collected under the pressure of organizing hundreds of people. William uses music and meditation to release any trapped emotions, which helped him function when problems arose on the days of OHBreathe sessions. For William, as personal as the entire project became, he discovered that he can maintain a healthy internal separation from the drama of project management and learned to be okay regardless of the success or failure of the initiative.

Now that William has graduated from Ottawa Hills High School, he is confident that with the students taking over for next year, OHBreathe will continue to grow and inspire students along the way. He will be attending St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota in the fall. The college has a wide selection of student run organizations and William is excited to see what is available. He hopes to implement something similar to OHBreathe to promote wellness, culture and a sense of community.