Student Stories: Past Award Recipients

Brianna Buhr
Madison East/Malcolm Shabazz High
2006 Scholarship Recipient
I am currently a freshman finishing up my first semester at Edgewood College in Madison. I work at the Madison Public Library and this summer I'm hoping to be a counselor at a camp for young kids with LGBT and Queer parents. Before that, I was living in Portland, Oregon and working for the Human Rights Campaign.

I was in Portland during some of the time leading up to the vote in Wisconsin regarding the ban on marriages and civil unions. While doing this work in Portland I kept talking to people about other states that were going to be voting on same sex marriage bans. Although I knew that Wisconsin would be voting soon, it took a while for it to click in my head that I was talking about my home state when I was telling people about the marriage bans. It all finally came together for me and I realized that something kind of scary was happening in the place I had grown up.

Soon after this realization, my mother sent me an article about some youth in the Madison area who were creating art (a quilt) in opposition to the ban. I think I may have gotten a little teary when I read this article...I was proud of the place that I had been raised for being so creative and active, and I also felt very connected to them in that activeness even though I was on the other side of the country. In Portland I talked to people all day about this ban, and people in Madison, Wisconsin were organizing, and talking, and making art about this ban at the same time.