Scholar Spotlights
Zuhairah Scott: In The Business of Doing Good
By Tom Reeder
Identify a problem, and then go to work on a solution.
That general idea motivates every Strauss Scholar, and the career of Zuhairah Scott is a notable example. “Being an empathetic person who was often confronted by poverty, crime and other social ills growing up,” she says, “I felt a need to do something about it.”
Leaving her home in Newark, New Jersey, to attend UCLA, Zuhairah was drawn to a fledgling program called SHAPE (Students Heightening Academic Performance through Education). Its objective was to increase the number of African-American students eligible to attend UC schools by providing free tutoring, peer counseling, workshops and mentoring. As a 1998 Strauss Scholar, Zuhairah worked tirelessly, encouraging 13-to-18 year-old students to participate in the program, as well as recruiting and training volunteer tutors.
SHAPE’s success, Zuhairah says, “was made possible by a dedicated group of student activists, not just me,” adding that “SHAPE simply provided a means by which they could have direct impact.”
Acknowledging what she called the Strauss Foundation’s “very generous award for financial support,” Zuhairah reports that more than a decade later, the SHAPE project is still going strong. In fact, according to a 2009 report from UCLA’s Afrikan (their spelling) Student Union, “SHAPE continues to increase the percentage of UCLA eligible minorities.”
Following her graduation with honors from UCLA, Zuhairah earned JD and MBA degrees from Harvard University. She went to work for MacFarlane Partners, a real estate firm with a unique investment philosophy that Zuhairah describes as “double bottom-line: make money and do good.” It’s business, not charity – the firm focuses on investing in areas that serve low-income communities, turning a profit for investors, while at the same time improving neighborhoods.
As an example, she cites a shopping center in the Los Angeles area. It had been neglected for many years and area residents were avoiding it because it had become unsafe. After MacFarlane Partners made a substantial investment and revitalized the shopping center, the neighbors came back – within nine years, the property generated a 30% return on the original investment.
Her business skills, combined with the passion for public service she demonstrated early on as a Strauss Scholar, have led Zuhairah into a number of current projects. “I guess you could call me an entrepreneur,” she says with a smile. And she’s not just talking about the real estate investment company, SIC Ventures, LLC, which she co-founded recently. (It focuses on multi-unit properties in the Mid-Atlantic region.) Here are some of the other irons she has in the proverbial fire these days:
Zuhairah is one of the founding members of a camp in New York called the Be Girls Camp. Its goal, Zuhairah explains, “is to create a safe space for young minority girls between the ages of 12 and 16 to have honest discussions about relationships, sex, and just being girls!” She notes that the camp was created in response to grim statistics: HIV/AIDS is the number one killer of African-American women between the ages of 24 and 35.
Another company founded by Zuhairah and some friends from Harvard, called Be Media, creates videos with an emphasis on social pressures and the personal conflicts that arise from them. The projects create content that “challenges the viewer to think about who they are, and who they really want to be.”
Zuhairah is also writing a book about the basics of personal finance, to benefit what she calls “financially clueless urbanites”. She points out that financial literacy is a subject rarely taught in schools, and she hopes that her book will enable young adults to save hundreds, if not thousands of dollars by making informed decisions about their resources.
Even with all these works-in-progress, she still took time recently to volunteer with Habitat for Humanity in India, proudly noting that her team built five houses over a two-week period.
How she manages to find enough hours in a day is anybody’s guess, but when asked why she devotes so much energy to public service, her answer is a candid self-assessment: “I am very action-oriented and results-driven. Doing-good-for-good’s sake has never really been my end goal; the goal has been to make sustainable, impactful change in the lives of others.”
Since that is essentially the Strauss Foundation’s goal, too, its partnership with Zuhairah Scott has proven to be an excellent investment.
Tom Reeder worked as a television writer for 30 years, writing for such sitcoms as "Cheers," "M*A*S*H," "Frasier," and "Barney Miller," and now blogs at http://tomreeder.wordpress.com/
Amanda Cundiff: Inspiration in a Rainforest
The Strauss scholarship has legs.
That's a quality deeply sought and remarkably demonstrated in our first ten years.
A classic example is Amanda Cundiff, who won her Strauss scholarship in 1999 and credits it today as a major catalyst and core element in a life focused on environmental science and management, currently in the U.S. Forest Service.
"I was immensely proud," she says today, "of the project I was able to complete through the Strauss scholarship. In addition to the skills I honed through the creative process and through project management, the experience has paid multiple dividends in subsequent opportunities."
The roots of Amanda's immersion in the environment were planted when she was 16-years-old in Yellowstone National Park where Amanda spent her summer vacation clearing fallen trees on a trail crew as a volunteer in the Student Conservation Association.
This deep interest accompanied her to UC Berkeley where she continued to use vacation time to explore differing ecosystems. All this activity reached an emotional climax in the summer of 2000 when Amanda spent two months in Panama doing research for a Berkeley ecology professor and nurturing her interest in the neighboring rainforest.
It was there she created a character she named Rhonda who shared Amanda's passion and became her alter ego in a play Amanda wrote called "Rhonda in the Rainforest."
That play became the centerpiece in Amanda's Strauss scholarship proposal called The Children's Environmental Education Project.
Amanda finished writing a draft of the play early in her senior year, then returned to the rainforest for two weeks over Christmas break with her professor and three assistants. They were all given parts in the play for readings in the evening while Amanda listened and rewrote.
Back home, she cast the play with student actors, sketched ideas for costumes and sets, and registered the "Children's Environmental Theater Troupe" as an official group so she could hold rehearsals on campus. Then she was ready to put the show on the road. It turned out to be a tough sell with school principals who feared a lack of interest. Ecology was seen as less than a burning issue in those days. But when a group of teachers at a single school got behind it, word-of-mouth did the rest.
Within the next few months, Amanda's play was performed at 17 different schools in Oakland and Berkeley before more than 3000 children. Every performance was rich in audience participation that reinforced the environmental ideas learned during the play. And although Amanda graduated and moved on, the experience of writing her play went before her, paving the way.
"I wrote an essay about my Strauss project," she says, "that I submitted as my application for a Fulbright Fellowship. I would not have received the Fulbright without that story. And it served the same purpose in my acceptance by Green Corps--the premier field school for environment organizing."
These achievements, in turn, took her to an advanced degree in Environmental Science and Management at UC Santa Barbara and her post with the U.S. Forest Service, where she is currently involved in research on the impact of climate change on private forest land. Looking back, Amanda says: "The Strauss has opened a lot of doors for me. It taught me how to write proposals and then see a project through.
"But most of all, it added greatly to the values I
have today that have enabled me to use the Strauss
experience in so many productive ways."
Vivek Mehta: Concern About Obesity Propels Him From Strauss Project To Neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Med School
By Joseph N. Bell,
It's hard to believe that Vivek Mehta ever lacked confidence.
His remarkable academic record landed him on USA Today's 2005 College Academic First Team, regarded as the top 20 undergraduate scholars in the nation. Vivek was the only California student to be chosen for this honor.
It is typical of this modest young man that his first thought was to express gratitude "to all of my mentors who have helped me throughout my undergraduate career."
But that's just a start on Vivek's résumé. By way of balance, he captained his high school football team to two conference championship games in a row.
And in his spare time, he won a coveted award as the most outstanding first year undergraduate student at UC Irvine, devoted hundreds of hours to a local free medical clinic, and traveled to Mexico every five weeks as a volunteer with a group of doctors who provided medical help to people who had none.
Still, despite these achievements, Vivek points to his Strauss Foundation Scholarship award in his junior year at UC Irvine as "the first time I ever had an opportunity to impact my community. And it does so much for one's confidence. What you are doing is very real. You see problems, and you do something about them."
The problem that most attracted Vivek when he sought a project for his Strauss application was obesity, especially in children where the rate of obesity has doubled in the past two decades and has now reached 15% --a problem to which Mexican-American children are disproportionately vulnerable.
That was especially clear to Vivek in his volunteer work at a non-profit, comprehensive medical facility in Costa Mesa called Share Our Selves (SOS). So Vivek set out to do something about it--and won a Strauss scholarship in the process.
His project was called "Estoy Bien" ("I Am Well"), and the target participants were SOS patients who suffered from diseases especially impacted by obesity. Helping these patients led Vivek directly to the people he wanted most to help--the children.
"While adults were receiving outstanding medical care for a variety of chronic illnesses," he says, "the children were almost ignored." So Vivek set up a series of seminars on nutrition that reached out directly to children.
Interactive props that turned nutrition into fun and games proved remarkably effective. Participants lost an average of four pounds in the five-week session, and some lost as many as 11 pounds.
Vivek carried this success with him when he graduated from UC Irvine. "The Strauss project gave me confidence to work in areas not normally accessible to students, and it helps me now to take advantage of the tremendous opportunities offered to me. The level of these opportunities doesn't matter. The Strauss experience covers them all."
Vivek has been finding multiple ways to put the Strauss experience to work since his graduation from Irvine. His first post-graduate year was spent in India doing research on premature births. Then, in 2007, he enrolled in Johns Hopkins Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland, once again carrying his Strauss experience with him to the department of neurosurgery "where I'm working on the outcome of surgery, how to make it safer."
He is also "exploring the question of how obesity affects the outcome of surgery" and is already suspicious that "it can be very dangerous coming into surgery obese."
So all those hours of promoting proper nutrition in Costa Mesa on his Strauss scholarship is now bearing fruit in one of the most distinguished medical schools in the world.
And from that place, Vivek wants it known that "maybe the best continuing result of a Strauss scholarship is the wonderful network it offers us to share ideas with past and present winners."