Four University students — Hanna Katz ’11, Karen Campion ’11, Clare Herceg ’11 and John Torrey ’11 — have been awarded Princeton ReachOut 56-81 Fellowships.
Katz was presented a Princeton ReachOut 56-81 Fellowship to support her work in a program that aids youth involved with the criminal justice system. Campion and Herceg were awarded the 1956 ReachOut International Fellowship for their proposed series of projects to serve impoverished and refugee children in the West Bank of Palestine. Torrey received the special 1956 ReachOut International Project Expansion to work on a peer-education program in Sierra Leone.
Katz will be working with the Stanley M. Isaacs Neighborhood Center, an organization that serves low-income individuals in East Harlem, the Bronx and other New York neighborhoods. She will be working specifically with the Isaacs Center’s Youth Employment and Education Program, a job-readiness training program for out-of-school and out-of-work youth between the ages of 17 and 24.
“Most of these youth are African-American or Hispanic, come from the poorest neighborhoods of East Harlem and the Bronx, have a low level of educational attainment and must overcome barriers to achievement ranging from an unstable living situation to drug abuse and teenage pregnancy,” Katz said in an e-mail.
She said she developed the project through inspiration from her work with the Isaacs Center, coursework in the University’s sociology department and her internship with the Osborne Association.
Katz’s final program involves “providing individual case-management for youth with ongoing criminal cases, incorporating relevant criminal justice issues into the YEP curriculum, connecting the Isaacs Center with the existing network of criminal justice organizations and strengthening the relationship between the Isaacs Center and its surrounding community,” she said.
Campion and Herceg will be working with Tomorrow’s Youth Organization in a childhood development program for the over 80,000 refugees living in the Nablus governate in the West Bank.
“It was clear that we could leave a significant and lasting impact by working with TYO in Nablus because TYO is a small organization with deep ties to the local community,” Campion said in an e-mail.
Their responsibilities will include focusing on TYO’s after-school program for children from refugee camps, teaching classes that “are designed to help the kids work through the trauma they experience on a day-to-day basis from the ongoing violence of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and chronic poverty inherent to the ongoing refugee program.”
They will also be working with the organization’s other programs, including parenting classes and an entrepreneurship and business development program for women.
The first recipient of a Project Expansion fellowship, Torrey will be expanding upon the teenage pregnancy peer education program that current ReachOut fellows Fatu Conteh ’10 and Katie Hsih ’10 created in secondary schools in Kono District, Sierra Leone.
Conteh and Hsih are currently working with the Global Action Foundation and The National Organization for Welbody, two related non-governmental organizations that sponsor healthcare and social entrepreneurship in the area and help to manage its operations.
Torrey, who is a candidate for a certificate in the global health and health policy program, said in an e-mail that he became interested in the GAF “upon speaking with fellow students in the global health and health policy program who had spent the summer at GAF.”
Based in the GAF clinic, Torrey will be working on evaluating the outcomes of the program, refining its methodology, adding an AIDS awareness component and bringing the program to more schools throughout the district.
“I will do what I can to ensure that this becomes a sustained program that delivers essential education to teenage girls in ways that are best adapted to the cultural, social and economic realities of their lives,” Torrey said.
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