Student Stories: Past Award Recipients

Sol Kelley-Jones
Malcolm Shabazz City High School
2005 Scholarship Recipient
I have just completed my sophomore year at Hampshire College in Amherst MA where I fuse heart, art, and activism through my self-designed major: Performing Resistance: Re-imaging Justice-making. My academic studies in social movements, critical race and queer theory, urban, cultural, and gender studies, and the performing arts have been rigorous and invigorating. I am especially looking forward to my year of field work beginning the second semester of next year taking me from the West Bank in Israel/Palestine to the borderland of U.S and Mexico, and finally, to New York City for, hopefully, an internship with Queers for Economic Justice.

In all that I do, I continue the work of claiming our collective power to dismantle systems that oppress and to envision and create a transformed society with love and justice at its core.

This spring, I felt the great gift of standing on the shoulders of my dear friends at GSA for Safe Schools as I delivered the keynote address at the annual GLSEN Boston conference. Madison's GSA for Safe Schools is a launching ground for today's justice workers, offering extraordinary leadership in empowering youth and adult change agents. My voice and leadership skills were rooted and nourished in your fertile ground - for that I am forever thankful.