Peltz ’15, O'Neil ’15 receive ReachOut fellowships

Bina Peltz ’15 and Cody O’Neil ’15 were awarded the 2015 fellowships from ReachOut 56-81-06, which each includes a $30,000 stipend funded by alumni that supports year-long public service projects after graduation.

Peltz, a politics concentrator from Bala Cynwyd, Pa., and recipient of the ReachOut Domestic Fellowship, will be working with the Harlem Community Justice Center in New York. O’Neil, the recipient of the ReachOut International Fellowship and a German major from West Kelowna, Canada, will be working with the National Research Centre for Truth and Reconciliation in Winnipeg, Canada, to look into the effectiveness of reconciliation between Canadian Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal communities.

Applicants for the fellowship must submit a five- to 10-page proposal and budget for their project. Fellowship founder and committee co-chair James Freund ’56 explained that the committee evaluates both the projects, which must be innovative, useful, feasible and able to be continued after the year is up, and the applicants, whose evaluation includes the amount of time they have devoted to public service causes and the passion they are able to demonstrate. He noted that the applicants themselves come up with the projects.

Peltz explained that she will use her fellowship to implement the Youth Peacemaking Project and the Harlem Youth Community Action Project. The Youth Peacemaking Project will use Native American peacemaking techniques, where the victims, offenders and those affected come together informally to resolve crimes, including low-level offenses. The Youth Community Action Project has youth from the community take leadership positions in service projects where participants include other youth assigned community service work by the justice system.

“Just like negative peer influences lead to crime, by putting [youth] with positive peers and reinforcing ties to the community, the idea is to focus on what their strengths can be through the justice system rather than their deficiencies,” she said.

Peltz said that she was influenced in her pursuit of this project by the nine-week internship she did with the Harlem Community Justice Center. She noted that her academic work has looked at how alternate forms or conceptions of justice can interact with traditional forms of justice, such as Sharia law, and that she is interested in how courts can act to recognize unique communities.

After the fellowship is over, Peltz said, she plans to attend law school where she will study public interest law.

O’Neil explained that the National Research Centre opens in June, after the closing of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which had been gathering information on the Aboriginal residential school system that ran from 1867 to 1996.

The school system took Aboriginal kids away from their parents and forced them to attend boarding schools where they could not speak their native languages.

He noted that while the report will not give an answer right away, it will provide the Centre with a sustainable tool to recognize if reconciliation is being achieved.

“The historical injustice was inter-generational, and so the reconciliation process will be as well,” he said.

O’Neil said his interest in the relationship between Aboriginals and non-Aboriginals came from a Canadian literature class he took, which made him aware of the residential school system. He added that he was surprised that even though he grew up in Canada he had never heard of this school system before.

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Freund noted that the major difference between the international fellowship and the domestic fellowship is that domestic fellowship applicants, unlike international fellowship applicants, must have a specific organization with which they intend to work. Other than that, he said, there is no real difference in how the candidates are judged.

Freund said that although the fellowships had a great applicant pool this year, Peltz and O’Neil distinguished themselves through the unique passion they were able to show.

“They differentiated themselves through their interviews, where they made us realize they were the ones we wanted to have,” he said.