By Costanza Alarcon-Cordon
alarconc1@grinnell.edu
The College announced the winners of the second Young Innovator for Social Justice Prize Wednesday, honoring activists involved in empowering women through journalism, responding to disasters around the world and providing low-cost infant warmers.
Cristi Hegranes won as the founder and contributor of the Global Press Institute, a foundation that employs female journalists around the world. The GPI provides high-quality journalism training sessions to women in developing countries who seek to address issues of structural social justice through locally produced international journalism.
Jacob Wood and William McNulty were also winners with Team Rubicon, an organization that uses former military members’ special skills in order to respond with immediacy to disasters across the world. Team Rubicon not only helps veterans reintegrate into civilian life, but they offer victims of global disaster quick and effective relief. Wood and McNulty have travelled across continents, including countries in North and South America and Africa.
The third prize winners, Jane Chen and Linus Liang, created the Embrace infant warmer. What started as a school project for both of them evolved into a low-cost infant warmer marketed to the developing world. While their product has been marketed mostly in India they seek to globalize Embrace and reach across the entire developing globe. Chen and Liang seek to continue creating other products that are low-cost and can be widely exported.
The prize “honors individuals under the age of 40 who have demonstrated leadership in their fields and show creativity, commitment, and extraordinary accomplishment in effecting positive social change,” according to the College’s website.
The winners were selected out of a pool of 300 nominees from around the world by a committee of students, faculty, staff and community members. The winners each receive $100,000, $50,000 for themselves and $50,000 to an organization of their choice. All three organizations and their members will be on campus for the Young Innovator for Social Justice Symposium during the week of November 12.
Jay • Sep 13, 2012 at 8:36 am
Is it against PC Grinnell to point out the emporer has no clothes?
Two years of prizes, plus two staff for two years, plus all of that paid national advertising the first year, plus all of the production costs of the videos, plus all of the general support costs for the committee and the cost of office operation. Easily over half-a-million dollars a year and now well over a million overall.
What has this prize brought us other than the echo-chamber of self-adulation that detracts from the more pressing and mission-critical reality that we are an ever-declining educational institution (#22 and falling…).