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>>President Kington: Good Afternoon. Welcome. Hello everyone. For those of you are returning
to campus, welcome back, great to see you. Those of you who are new: welcome! Welcome
to our community. As you may know, the opening convocation of the year is a tradition at Grinnell.
And starting last year, it took on added significance as the moment when we announce the recipients
of the Grinnell Prize, also known by the lengthy title of “The Grinnell College Young Innovator
for Social Justice Prize.” (It just rolls off the tongue)
Either way, the Prize honors individuals under the age of 40 who demonstrate leadership,
creativity, commitment, and extraordinary accomplishment in effecting positive social
change. What do we mean by social change? For my generation, “social justice” summons
visions of Civil Rights marches, antiwar protests and War on Poverty. Here at Grinnell, the
phrase “social justice” has a particular resonance. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., spoke
here in the fall of 1967, the night before he headed to Birmingham to serve his 19th
jail sentence for his role in the civil disobedience campaign for Civil Rights.
The speech he gave in Darby Gym entitled, “Remaining Awake through Revolution,”
echoed ideas he had put forth earlier during an imprisonment in Birmingham, in 1963, where
he wrote his famous Letter from a Birmingham Jail. Here are a pair of quotes in which you
can hear the common note: In the Letter he wrote: “Injustice anywhere
is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality,
tied to a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”
And then, four years later in Grinnell, he reiterated, “No individual can live alone.
No nation can live alone. We are interdependent.” I do not think it was a coincidence that his
Grinnell speech was chosen to revisit the connections he saw between a just society
and an interdependent one. One message was clear; we have an obligation to our neighbors.
Dr. King would remind us that we also have an obligation to expand the boundaries of
our neighborhood. That is why he said to the Grinnell audience that they must not only
be just but no individual can live alone, and no nation can live alone. For the students
of today and your successors, the world is your neighborhood. Community service is a
global service, service to a cause - the cause of justice for all. The principle is deeply
embedded in our history. Most of you know that Grinnell was founded by abolitionists.
We are also one of the first colleges in the country to admit women students. As the Civil
War drew male students off to war, in 1862, women actually outnumbered men on the college’s
campus, 21 to 7. The good ol’days of a truly small residential liberal arts college.
You will find Grinnellians among the founders of the social gospel movement, the New Deal,
and in fact this year we celebrate the centennial of the graduation from Grinnell of Harry Hopkins,
architect of the New Deal. Grinnellians led the resistance to McCarthyism and the war
in Vietnam. They launched the modern computer revolution and led the fight for liberation
in human rights in South Sudan. They help organize the reconstruction of New
Orleans. They teach in disadvantages communities across the country. There are even Grinnell
graduates among the leaders of the animal rights movement. This is not to even mention
the many thousands of scholars and artists, activists and business people who embody Grinnell’s
values by struggling to make the world a better place everyday through their work and their
philanthropy. We all belong to this community, or maybe I should more accurately describe
this community as a congregation with all the implications for the word when it comes
to a communion of ideas and spirit a mutual commitment. You don’t have to be Congregationalist
as our founders were, as I am not, to proudly accept your role in this congregation. You
do not have to believe I any deity. You have to believe in yourself and your obligation
to those around you. That is our common faith. The Grinnell Prize is one way we have found
to honor the tenets of that faith now almost two centuries old. Of course the other distinctive
aspect of the Grinnell is that our social justice values lead to our purpose of a learning
community. You can hear the echoes of this in or motto: Veritas et Humanitas, truth and
humanity. It signifies that we believe the education that we provide will ultimately
be evaluated in terms of your ability and drive to make the world a better place. Whether
you become a professor, a painter, a doctor, or a CEO or have a job that we don’t even
have a name for yet, you should always be recognizable as a Grinnellian by your analytic
genius, your creativity and your open mindedness but also your strong ethical sense and your
commitment to ensuring the wellbeing of all those around you. We created the prize to
make the world more aware of the people we feel embody those principles. We benefit from
our relationship with the award winners. Our students help run the symposium where they
speak, they will take short courses taught by prize recipients. They along with faculty
and staff have opportunities to intern with the winners organizations around the world
and interact one on one with these pioneers of social change. In other words, the prize
has become a way of extending the Grinnell community through our core values.
Our prize selection committee—this committee really embodied the kind of commitment that
we hope is illustrated in the work of these awardees. Our committee includes diverse faculty,
staff, alumni, students, trustees as well as prominent leaders who are unaffiliated
with Grinnell. Before we announce the winners, I would like to recognize the committee members
for their efforts.
How many committee members do we have here today, would you raise your hand, at least
one, two, a few. I know others could not make it. Each of you did an incredible job in
applying to your task sensitivity, creativity, and passion. We thank you for your hard work
and dedication. Let me run through the prize committee members.
Our 2012 Prize committee members are: George Drake, a 1956 Grinnell alumnus, chair
of this and last year’s committee, professor of history and president emeritus of the College;
Rekha Basu, columnist for the Des Moines Register and a recipient of Grinnell’s honorary doctorate
of humane letters; Monica Chavez-Silva, the College’s director
of community engagement and enhancement; Laura Ferguson, Class of 1990, a family practitioner
in Grinnell and vice-chair of the Board of Trustees;
Emily Westergaard Hamilton, Class of 2002 and Executive Director of the Des Moines “I
Have a Dream” Foundation. Emily was recently named a finalist of the Des Moines Register
and Juice Magazine’s “Young Professional of the Year” Award;
Suku Radia, CEO and President of Bankers’ Trust. Suku is active on numerous boards and
charitable organizations; Gabe Schechter, a 2012 graduate who served
as Grinnell student body president in 2011–2012; Suzanne Siskel, Executive Vice President and
Chief Operating Officer of the Asia Foundation and former Director of Social Justice Philanthropy
at the Ford Foundation; The Honorable Marsha K. Ternus, former Chief
Justice of the Iowa Supreme Court. Marsha was recently honored with the John F. Kennedy
Profile and Courage Award for her leading role in advancing the cause of marriage equality.
We are delighted and looking forward to her teaching a short course here at Grinnell in
the spring. And of course thank you to Eliza Willis, our
own professor of political science, who will become the new chair of the committee for
2013. I would like to thank all of you for your
service. I would also like to take this opportunity to introduce the new members who are coming
on board. Chris Hunter, Grinnell professor of sociology;
Meg Jones Bair, the Director of Donor Relations; Colleen Osborne, incoming SGA President and
Grinnell class of 2013; Kristi Knous, President and COO of the Community
Foundation of Greater Des Moines; and Barry Thomas, Class of 1997, Grinnell Trustee
and Associate Professor and Faculty Director of the Strategic Innovation Academy at the
University of Iowa. Again, thank you all for your time and talents.
Introduction of Awards We received 300 nominations from across the
globe for this year’s prize. The nominees were involved in an incredible ray of social
issues, from the environment and economic justice to social entrepreneurship, business
to arts, refugee rights, immigration, education, fair housing, gay rights, restorative justice,
and global peace. In a sense, the eventual winners of the Prize stand for more than their
own causes: they represent this entire global movement of people working to improve lives
and meet urgent social needs. I am now going to introduce to you this year’s
winners. The recipients will join us here in November for a week of lectures, discussions
and informal interactions. The support that they receive is split between the individual
or the group who win and their organizations. This allows them to pass recognition forward
to fellow innovators whom they think can be best suited to help advance social justice
through their organization. So the first winner: Cristi Hegranes,
founder and executive director of Global Press Institute (GPI),
was selected for the tremendous impact her organization has had by training and empowering
women journalists in the developing world. Cristi is age 31, was moved to found the Institute
in 2006, while reporting in Nepal.She realized that members of the local community could
tell their own stories more effectively than a foreign reporter could. Beginning in Nepal
and Mexico, Cristi created an organization with two major goals: one, to empower women
by leading them through journalism training—including literacy and computer skills classes—to
employment; and two, to enable them to share their perspectives on injustices in their
communities and use journalism to address large-scale, structural social justice issues.
Eventual partnerships with other non-profits helped GPI solidify its success and expand.
Today, the GPI has news desks in 25 countries and employs over 100 women. The GPI Newswire
averages 20,000 readers per month, and through it the women’s stories are carried on UPI,
Reuters, NPR, BBC, the Huffington Post, Women’s e-News, and All-Africa News, among many other
outlets worldwide. Meanwhile, GPI coverage has led to real social change on topics ranging
from civil rights in Nepal and Zimbabwe to maternal health in Mexico. The women producing
these groundbreaking stories have not only developed their skills and found rewarding,
stable careers; they are also gaining respect in their communities, improving their own
lives and the lives of their families. Now we will have a short video introducing this
winner. Cristi Hegranes: I went to Nepal to do the
job that I always wanted to do. I always wanted to be a foreign correspondent and to cover
stories internationally. While I was working my tail off and trying my best, I realized
I wasn’t the right person to be telling the stories.
>> Voice-over: Cristi Hegranes is a highly trained journalist, studying at the prestigious
Poynter Institute for Media Studies before getting her masters in journalism at New York
University.
>> Hegranes: I didn’t speak the language. I didn’t have the trust of the local people,
because I was an outsider. After spending time in Nepal trying to convince locals to
open up and tell their stories, she realized that despite all her training, in the end
she was and always would be the outsider, and that would be a difficult obstacle
to overcome. >> Hegranes: Oh, you're so sweet. I’m so
happy to see you!!!
>> VO: Which is why she decided to go to work with insiders.
>> Hegranes: All of the indicators from World Health Organization and the United Nations
tell us that when you invest in local women, they reinvest in their community. So that’s
really the first agent of change for us — is employing and investing in these local women.
>> VO: Cristi started recruiting women she could teach to become journalists to work
for her new organization called the Global Press Institute, GPI.
>> Hegranes: We want our stories to be different and better than every other story coming out
of Nepal. So anyone who takes our training program and completes it for six months gets
a job offer from GPI. We offer for them long-term employment so they can put the skills that
they’ve just learned to practical use. The training curriculum at GPI focuses on really
traditional, rich, ethical investigative reporting. So it’s not blogging, it’s not more citizen-journalism
kind of style, it’s really rich, traditional, ethical storytelling. And you guys alone can
show the world a different side of Nepal – both good and bad.
>> VO: Cristi looks for women who are willing to work hard, to learn, and most importantly
who have a desire to better themselves. One of her prize reporters is Tara Bhattarai.
>> Tara Bhattarai: Myself, I like to write stories about women related issues.
>> VO: Tara saw an advertisement for GPI back in 2007. The job offered an opportunity she
and many other women in Nepal couldn’t have dreamed existed.
>> Bhattarai: When I was a child, at that time for the ladies, not allowed to go to school.
So I struggle to go to school. I was also at that time parentless.
>> VO: After [Tara was] working as a reporter for five years, Cristi promoted Tara to editor
of the GPI news desk in Nepal.
>> Hegranes: You know that our mission is to do three things for women around the world
– educate, employ and empower them using journalism. We strive for innovation in the
stories we tell and we want our stories to be different from any other media’s stories.
These women, Tara in particular...in so many ways I consider her almost like the co-founder
of GPI, because she has demonstrated that it works.
>>VO: On this day Tara’s assignment is to interview a woman who is the victim of domestic
violence and has been kicked out of the house by her husband. The interview starts slowly;
Tara does most of the talking. But as she continues her conversation the woman gradually
becomes more comfortable and is soon opening up about the hardship she has faced.
After 90 minutes – Tara has enough for her article. As soon as she completes this story,
she will move on to the next, and the next, focusing on women’s issues that are overlooked in Nepal's media.
>> Bhattarai: GPI is very important because Nepal is a very poor country and there’s
lots of problems here.
>> VO: She walks through the streets, a strong confident woman. Nothing like the girl Cristi
first met.
>> Hegranes: Someone like Tara who 6 years ago was a very different person in a very
different place and today she walks into a room and people want to shake her hand. And
she can get interviews in any government ministry and she’s powerful. She’s powerful and
people read and recognize her stories and that’s really great to watch.
>> Paige Stoyer: Everything that’s in that frame, the viewer sees, and sometimes something
might be distracting.
VO: The women who are hired as reporters for GPI receive professional training If they
can produce good reports on important issues, it can mean worldwide exposure through syndication
for themselves and GPI.
>> Stoyer: And when you take a photo the shutter of the camera opens and closes to let in light
to make the photograph. As I told the women during the training, there are photographs
that have changed history, that have changed the course of a war, or changed a civil rights
or social movement.
>> VO: But the focus at GPI is not just producing news content.
>> Stoyer: After they go through this training they understand the power they have – with
their words and now with their photographs. As one of the girls said last night, "my stories
are all around the world," –- with this sense of pride. And you’re talking, too,
about women who often didn’t have much of a voice before.
>> VO: And with their new voices, these young reporters are focused on giving others like
them their own chance to be heard.
>> Yam Kumari Kandel: I have to raise the voiceless people’s voice that I'm really
happy because I have a tool, a skill to raise the issues of the voiceless people.
>> VO: You can sense the emotion in Yam Kumari Kandel’s words – her work as a reporter
is important. In fact, she feels her reports on climate change and health issues in Nepal
are the most important thing she has done in her entire life.
>> Kandel: I’m really very happy to work with my team and with the GPI team. I’m
really, really very happy – I don’t have any words to express my happiness really!!
>> VO: Each of the GPI reporters is equally impressed at the life changing opportunity
offered to them.
>> Usha K.C.: I never thought that I would become a journalist one day and my voice would
be a global voice one day. It's amazing thing. It's amazing, it’s amazing.
>> VO: Offered to them by Cristi Hegranes.
>> Hegranes: We are now in 25 countries, in virtually every region of the world. We employ
more than 120 women. The opportunity means so much to these women, and it's been really
truly extraordinary to watch them use this opportunity to not only change their own lives
and their families' lives but literally the lives of millions of people. In the hands
of women journalism can be a change maker for the entire community.
>> VO: Grinnell College proudly recognizes Cristi Hegranes, founder of the Global Press
Institute with a 2012 Grinnell Prize for her work in international journalism and women's
economic empowerment.
The Prize honors young innovators and leaders while acknowledging the College's history
of social change. Congratulations to founder Cristi Hegranes and the Global Press Institute.
>>President Kington: Thank you. Winner 2: Jacob Wood and William McNulty, Team Rubicon.
Our next pair of winners, Jacob Wood and William McNulty, were jointly nominated for their
work creating and running Team Rubicon, which is a veteran service and disaster response
organization. Team Rubicon was created in 2010 in response to the earthquake in Haiti.
Watching the news coverage of that human tragedy, Jake, an Iowa native, realized that the skills
he had accumulated in the Marines were well-suited to disaster relief. After a few short days
of fundraising and planning, Jake along with his fellow Marine William and a few other
friends and colleagues set off for Haiti. Upon their arrival they realized that traditional
aid organizations, although effective at relief work, were not well-equipped for immediate
post-disaster response, when circumstances were most unstable and dangerous. Team Rubicon
“bridges the gap” by deploying small, rapid-response teams of veterans to help in
the immediate aftermath of a disaster, until the arrival of traditional aid organizations.
But for Jake and William it was not enough to create a highly effective disaster response
team. They also wanted to help veterans, and Team Rubicon evolved accordingly. As they
describe the charge, “Team Rubicon began as a Disaster Response Organization that used
Veteran Service,” but evolved to become “a Veteran Service Organization that uses
Disaster Response.” They recognized that many veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan
struggle with the aftermath of physical injuries, with post-traumatic stress disorder, unemployment
and a loss of community and purpose. They designed Team Rubicon to recreate a positive
sense of community and purpose by providing veterans with a way to continue their service.
Today, their organization is growing and thriving. More than 350 Team Rubicon veteran volunteers
have been deployed to disaster sites in Chile, Burma, Pakistan, Sudan and across the United
States. Jake and William have over 3,500 total veterans in their database, and their goal
is to engage at least 10,000 in their mission of providing more effective disaster response
while helping servicemen and women successfully transition back into civilian life.
Now a short video about their organization and their work
>> Voice-Over: On January 12, 2010, the nation of Haiti was devastated by a 7.0 earthquake.
It was also the day that Team Rubicon was born and called into action.
>> Jacob Wood: We reacted. We went. We didn't think about it because the problem was so grim
>> Volunteer Medic: It was just one horrible
thing after another. It was very intense.
It's a disaster here. It's horrible injuries. And no supplies in the hospital.
This is the biggest in Port-au-Prince, and there are no supplies.
>> Wood: Everybody was expecting chaos, everybody was expecting destruction. But we didn't know
what the danger level would be.
>> Volunteer: So let's get our gauzes, let's get our chlorohex, let's get our satchel full
of silver sulfadiazine.
>> Wood: After going to Katrina 5 years ago, I saw how bad the establishment was at responding
rapidly. And so when I saw this hit Haiti you know, I knew the status quo was going
to be this lumbering response And I said, well why can't I fix that?
>> William McNulty: This is what? 8 days after the quake? 8 days right? Eight days after
the quake and we're the first responders.
>> There's no central government, no one is handing out this type of aid at this point.
These people are starving. So it's really kind of a pandemonium out there.
>> VO: Team Rubicon doesn't cut through red tape, they arrive before the red tape.
>> Wood: It just like a well-oiled machine from start to finish. We want to be able to
deploy these autonomous teams in the regions that have been struck and devastated and bridge
that gap between when that devastation happens and the large aid organizations can respond.
>> McNulty: Team Rubicon is a non-profit veteran services organization that repurposes the
skills of military veterans and pairs them with medical professionals in the immediate
aftermath of natural disasters.
>> VO: Team Rubicon's fast-moving, highly trained volunteer teams arrived after severe
storms ripped through Dallas.
>> Wood: Team Rubicon has recruited over 2500 volunteers, deployed over 100 veterans in
10 disaster areas around the country.
>> Volunteer: Glad you all were safe!
>> Survivor: Appreciate it!
>> VO: They were on the ground in Chile after the devastating earthquake. Over 500 people
were killed and thousands were in need of medical help.
>> Necesita medicos?
>> VO: Team members had to travel through desolate, and dangerous areas to find victims,
just as they did after deadly flooding in Pakistan, an earthquake in Burma. Team Rubicon
even entered a war zone in South Sudan to bring medical supplies and equipment to help
open hospital clinics.
>> Our purpose in being here is to use a health care bridge towards peace.
>> VO: Doing whatever is needed to help those who need it the most. Going wherever they
can make a difference, immediately.
>> McNulty: The whole idea of using small, fleet-footed 8 to 10 man teams very similar
to what we were doing in the military – it just made a lot of sense and we could insert
these teams very quickly and treat the acutely injured with what we could carry on our backs.
>> VO: Team Rubicon is earning more and more respect around the world.
>> Michelle Obama: One group of veterans even runs an organization called Team Rubicon.
>> VO: It's impossible to count the number of people saved by these emergency response
volunteers, but any list of those helped by Team Rubicon has to include the military veterans
themselves.
>> Volunteer: Being part of Team Rubicon has allowed me to find that focus again and move
forward in a positive direction and continue to help others.
>> Volunteer: It's important for us to help our neighbors out when they're knocked down;
it's just the right thing to do.
>> Volunteer: I think a lot of people too after we left the military had a feeling that
we wanted to do something that was constructive rather than destructive.
>> Volunteer: It's a way to continue serving even though you're no longer a part of the
military. Just because you're out of uniform and your contract ended with the military
doesn't mean your service has to end to your country.
>> VO: Grinnell College proudly recognizes Jacob Wood and William McNulty, co-founders
of Team Rubicon, with a 2012 Grinnell Prize for their work to unite the skills and talents
of military veterans with medical first response teams in disaster areas.
The Prize honors young innovators and leaders while acknowledging the College's history
of social change. Congratulations to co-founders Jacob Wood and William McNulty and Team Rubicon.
>>President Kington: And finally our third set of winners, Jane Chen and Linus Liang
from Embrace. Jane Chen and Linus Liang were selected for their accomplishments with their
organization Embrace, which produces and distributes a low-cost infant incubator for use by families
in developing countries. Founded in 2008, Embrace actually grew out of a class
project. Jane and Linus were enrolled in a Stanford class titled “Entrepreneurial Experiences
in Extreme Affordability,” (I don’t think we have that class here, but we may ) and
were assigned the task of designing an extremely low-cost incubator to be used in rural conditions
across the globe. Not only did they meet the challenge, they decided to take their invention,
an infant warmer costing just one percent of a traditional incubator, into the real
world. Jane has a background in management consulting
and business, and Linus had expertise in computer science and tech startups. So they were able
to draw on their complementary skills to found and lead the organization they had created.
Their spirit of interdisciplinarity even extends to their business model: Jane and Linus recently
co-founded a for-profit partner organization, called Embrace Innovations, with Jane serving as
the CEO. The for-profit arm enables them to raise venture
capital to sustain their work, so that they can continue providing infant warmers to parents
in need and develop other affordable health products for poor communities. Currently,
Embrace widely distributes their infant warmers in India, where they have already saved the
lives of hundred of premature babies. They have also begun distributing the warmers in
China and Somalia. Through their own work and their partnerships
with healthcare providers, Linus and Jane developed a low-income community intervention
and address an enormous problem of infant mortality and maternal health. Now the final
video of the last winners of the prize of 2012.
>> Linus Liang: My name is Linus Liang and I help save babies lives.
>> VO: Linus Liang is not bragging – he’s simply stating a fact that he and the rest
of the team at Embrace are indeed saving lives. And they are doing so thanks to an assignment
they received in a Stanford classroom five years ago.
>> Jane Chen: … and the challenge posed to us was to build a baby incubator that would
cost less than one percent of the cost of a traditional incubator which is $20,000.
>> VO: Jane Chen is now CEO of Embrace Innovations – but she was just a Stanford business student
when she took on this unusual assignment.
>> Chen: 20 million low-birthweight and premature babies are born every year around the world.
One of the biggest problems they face is staying warm.
>> Liang: It’s a big issue and it’s one issue that hasn’t really made much progress
in the last 20 years.
>> Chen: Incubators are not only expensive, they require a constant supply of electricity,
they’re difficult to operate, so you’re not going to find them in rural areas where
many of these babies are dying.
>> Liang: We decided to make a solution just catered toward basically stabilizing the baby’s
temperature. We actually started with all these crazy ideas.
We actually had hot water underneath the baby. You basically boiled the hot water and pour
it underneath the baby. The idea was to warm up the baby and stabilize the temperature
that way but we realized that putting hot water near a baby is never a really a good
idea.
>> VO: The team went through many different ideas and designs before settling on an idea
that proved to be a winner.
>> Chen: So we developed the embrace infant warmer, which looks like a little sleeping
bag for the baby.
>> Liang: It consists of an electric heater that we have that heats up a pouch. You can
think of it as a plastic bag, filled with this chemical.
>> VO: That chemical is a wax-like substance engineered to hold a constant temperature
of 37 degrees Celsius, about the same as the human body temperature.
With their product in place, the students made the decision to move their assignment
to the next level, which meant moving to India where 40 percent of all premature babies are
born. It was there that they started manufacturing their product, and where they saw the Embrace
Infant Warmer in use for the first time.
>> Chen: They really attributed the health of the baby to Embrace, so we went into that
village and they had told all the other villagers about the product and the grandmother was
talking about it, and it was just so rewarding to see we played a role in saving that baby’s
life.
>> Liang: You can see that immediate result. You can see the baby’s temperature stabilize.
You can see them actually getting better and surviving, and that’s very, very rewarding.
>> VO: Embrace Infant Warmers have been already used on hundreds of premature and low-weight
babies in India. But the Embrace team members want this classroom assignment turned medical
breakthrough to continue expanding around the world.
>> Chen: China, Somalia, and pretty soon Afghanistan, Zambia, Uganda — so we’re really trying
to go global with this product.
>> Liang: We're really trying to scale it out and get it to the people who really need
it. So what we want to do is affect the lives and impact the lives of hundreds of thousands
of babies in the next couple of years.
>> VO: Most students take their grade and move on to the next class. It’s not an exaggeration
to say hundreds of thousands of families around the world may some day be thankful this group
of Stanford students did not stop working when their assignment was completed.
>> Chen: Our hope is to create a whole line of affordable health care technologies for
these communities, so the infant warmer is just the beginning of that vision.
>> VO: Grinnell College proudly recognizes Jane Chen and Linus Liang, co-founders of
Embrace and Embrace Innovations, with the 2012 Grinnell Prize for work to improve maternal
and child health. The Prize honors young innovators and leaders while acknowledging the College's
history of social change. Congratulations to co-founders Jane Chen and Linus Liang and
Embrace and Embrace Innovations.
>>President Kington: I hope that you will agree with me that this is an extraordinary
group of young people who are working to change the world in a positive way.
We look forward to them joining us during the week of November 12 for the Grinnell Prize
Symposium and awards ceremony. During the Symposium you will be able to meet the honorees
and learn more about their work and philosophies of social justice. Each of them will deliver
a public lecture and participate in panel discussions and small group meetings with
the Grinnell community. There will also be events held on campus between now and November
to learn more about them and the Prize. The College will also offer further opportunities
for interaction over the coming year. We will keep you informed about these as they develop.
I am also delighted to announce that the keynote speaker at the 2012 Symposium will be Jerry
Greenfield, co-founder of Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream.
Though obviously known for its ice cream, Ben & Jerry’s was also a founder of the
socially committed business movement, dedicated to “a sustainable corporate concept of linked
prosperity,” and companies that “seek to meet human needs and eliminate injustice.
I urge you to come and hear Jerry, he is a great speaker as well as a parent of a recent
Grinnell alum, and I hope you will participate in as many Symposium events as you can. Not
that you need further incentives, but I understand Jerry also plans to give out free ice cream
during his keynote, as he does at many of his speaking engagements.
Nominations for 2013 - As we look forward to meeting our outstanding 2012 winners, we
also are beginning the year long process of seeking and reviewing nominations for the
2013 Prize. I encourage you to nominate the young innovators for social justice who inspire
you. It is a wonderful way to earn recognition for the causes you care about, and to possibly
help them win a significant monetary prize to support their work. I urge you to visit
the Grinnell Prize webpage at www.grinnell.edu/socialjusticeprize and submit your nominations at any time starting
today through November 5. While you are there, please also volunteer to get involved in future
Prize efforts. We especially need students, faculty and staff and alumni to help review
nomination essays. Before we leave, I want to take one more minute
to appreciate our fellow Grinnellians who worked so hard to make this year’s Prize
a great success. Please join me in thanking the following people:
Morgan Bober ’12; Doug Cutchins ’93; Deanna Shorb; Grinnell Prize student workers Cory
Keeler ‘12, Sami Rebein ’14, and Anna Bosak ’12; the faculty, staff, alumni, and
student volunteers who reviewed nominations; the public relations firm of Cooper Katz;
the Grinnell Communications Office; and the many other offices across campus that helped
make this Prize and today’s announcement a success.
I especially want to single out Rachel Bly ’93 and the Conference Operations and Events
office; And last, but certainly not least, Melisa Chan and her assistant Caroline Saxton
for coordinating the Prize Program; and Sarah Purcell ’92 and her Program Associate Laureen
Van Wyk from the Rosenfield Program in Public Affairs, International Relations, and Human
Rights, who organize the November symposium. Again, thank you all for coming, and I look
forward to seeing you at the Prize events in November.