For three exceptional UCLA students, volunteering is more than logging hours.
Not hindered by papers, midterms or finals, they contribute, driven by a strong humanitarian purpose.
Their hard work will be honored tonight in a private ceremony as the Center for Student Programming awards these students ““ Yecenia Olmos, Neilesh Patel and Cynthia Reasner ““ the Charles E. Young Humanitarian Award for 2008.
Organizers said the award recognizes students for outstanding work in the community and encourages future projects that addresses social needs within the community.
Yecenia Olmos, a fifth-year political science and history student, is being honored for her five-year commitment to Project Literacy, a student group aimed at eradicating illiteracy in poor communities such as Watts, Baldwin Hills and South Central Los Angeles.
For the past three years, she has served as project-liaison director for the Junipero Serra Public Library in South Central, where she grew up. Her responsibilities include focusing on kids ages 6 through 15 who have struggled with reading at grade level.
“I’m the one who makes sure that everything is running effectively,” she said. “I make sure that everyone is doing their reading assessments and I pair up our UCLA volunteers with a kid to tutor.”
With an eight- to 10-hour weekly commitment balanced with her political science and history coursework and Chicana and Chicano studies minor, she said her motivation came from her own struggle with reading and difficulties finding help in her poor neighborhood.
“A reading assessment examination in high school showed my reading to be at the fifth-grade level. … I was having difficulty reading, and it was really hard for me to find help,” she said.
Coming from an immigrant family, she said that she struggled in grasping English. Today, she strives to help those who struggle themselves.
“I want to help these kids who have Spanish-speaking parents,” she said. “They don’t have the same resources that most have.”
Neilesh Patel, a graduate student at the UCLA School of Dentistry, is being honored for the creation of a social networking Web site, HealthCare Volunteer, that connects volunteers with public health organizations around the world.
The Web site, which launched in spring 2006, provides a space in which medical practitioners can post volunteer and fundraising listings for various medical projects, Patel said.
Patel said the Web site was bred from his growing frustrations with finding volunteer positions, something he experienced abroad.
“During my first and second year of dental school, I had a trip planned to Brazil and wanted to see if I could volunteer some dental services,” Patel said. “I e-mailed various volunteer groups … but none of them contacted me.”
Finding that other students shared similar experiences, he said he found a pattern of qualified applicants being denied or ignored.
“With increasing concerns about liability and human resources, many qualified people were being rejected by volunteer organizations,” Patel said. “It was like a bureaucracy … applying to college all over again.”
Determined to break the cycle, he said he spent many “pizza nights” ““ subsisting on pizza and pulling all-nighters teaching himself how to program and build a Web site. He said he was driven by the belief that all qualified applicants should have the opportunity to volunteer.
“Everyone should have at least one experience in volunteering,” Patel said.
Cynthia Reasner, a law school student, is being honored for creating the Supportive Encounters with Emancipation Demands mentoring program, a student organization that mentors teenaged foster youth.
Working for a Los Angeles County mentoring program that assists foster kids with support services, she found that one-on-one mentoring was limited due to a lack of funding and resources.
A passionate mentor while an undergraduate at Boston University, she said she used her experiences in Boston to create a similar program at UCLA to collaborate with the county program.
She said that, as a student organization with the Graduate Student Association, the organization receives the necessary funding.
She said she mentors because she believes foster kids have difficulties in creating meaningful personal relationship while shuffling in and out of courtrooms.
“The court system is basically their parents,” she said. “Mentoring allows these youth to develop personal relationships that they otherwise wouldn’t have.”
She said she hopes to work as an attorney and social worker representing foster youth.
A committee of faculty, staff and students selected the winners, with recipients given $700 to donate to a humanitarian activity of their choice.