United Academics Announces Brace Award Winners for 2007-2008
United Academics (AAUP/AFT), the faculty union at the University of Vermont, has awarded the fourth annual scholarship for students at UVM in honor of an early 19th-century Black Vermonter, Jeffrey Brace. Each year the United Academics Jeffrey Brace Book Award provides $500 awards to be used for books and supplies by students who exemplify not only academic excellence but also an active commitment to achieving social justice. The United Academics Jeffrey Brace Book Award for 2007-2008 goes to five exceptional students: Lindsey Bryan, a senior Sociology major from Maine; Daniel Lim, a junior Natural Resources major from Brooklyn, New York; John MacDonald, a History major from Dutchess County, New York; Emily Nicolosi, a senior Studio Art major from Rockland County, New York; and Leah Sohotra, a senior Women and Gender Studies major from Middlebury, Vermont.
"This year we had more applicants than ever before, and they really were an exceptional group," notes Prof. Stephanie Kaza, chair of the scholarship committee for United Academics. "We're pleased not only that more students are aware of the award, but that the UVM student body is becoming more actively involved in working for social and economic justice."
Jeffrey Brace was born Boyrereau Brinch in West Africa. In 1758, he was captured by slave traders and eventually sold as a slave in Connecticut. Brace enlisted in the Revolutionary Army in 1777 and fought for American liberty for five years before being honorably discharged and, only then, manumitted. Following the war, like many veterans, Brace and his wife moved to the new State of Vermont to take up farming. Virulent racism drove him and his family from their first homestead in Poultney to St. Albans where Brace established a new farm. Brace's struggles for personal and social justice are detailed in one of the earliest biographies of a Black American still in existence. The Special Collections of the University of Vermont contains one of the few copies of this important and rare book, The Blind African Slave. Jeffrey Brace did not seek out struggles for social justice but neither did he fear them. Although stolen from Africa, he fought for national independence. Although a veteran, a farmer, and a Vermonter, Brace had to continually fight for his rights as a citizen in the country he had helped create. He fought this fight in words, using the courts and the press. It is in memory of this important early Vermonter that United Academics seeks to facilitate the pursuit of academic excellence and social justice by the students of the University of Vermont which is exemplified by Lim, Bryan, MacDonald, Nicolosi, and Sohotra.
Lindsey Bryan didn't realize how profoundly her experiences at UVM would shape her vision of the world and her commitment to social justice. Attending a campus presentation by three Bangladeshi women speaking out about sweatshops, she committed to becoming more aware and involved. Nationally, she organized groups of students to attend the World Social Forum in Brazil and Venezuela. Locally, she became an active member of the Student Labor Action Project, fighting for livable wages and workers' rights at UVM and interning at the Burlington's Peace & Justice Center for the Livable Wage Campaign. Becoming involved in Oxfam America's CHANGE initiative transformed her from an activist to a leader, and she launched a Fair Trade campaign at UVM. According to Bryan, the success of the campaign has meant that "the amount of Fair Trade coffee offered on campus has increased from 10% to 90%, and Fair Trade bananas and tea are now offered" in an increasing number of locations. Bryan's belief that fair trade policies "hold a great deal of potential to promote social and economic justice internationally and domestically" spurred her to work toward future agricultural reform on the national level through an internship with Senator Patrick Leahy's office and a senior thesis project that will focus on the impact of the US Farm Bill on Vermont farmers and food systems.
Daniel Lim was not content in making a name for himself as an outstanding student in UVM's Honors College. From his very first year on campus, he led a movement to improve equity in access, representation, and community for ALANA (African, Latino/a, Asian, Native American) students at UVM by co-founding the Honors College DiversiTeam, an effective activist group for promoting diversity and equity. Neither was his vision of a more inclusive UVM limited to academics. When he became involved with the UVM Outing Club, he started a strong movement for organizational and cultural change which has made the club more accessible and accommodating to ALANA students. In his role as an RA in the GreenHouse Program at UVM during his sophomore year, Daniel found himself drawing on the lessons he learned as a participant in UVM's Next Step Social Justice Retreat. He explains that it helped him develop the skills to promote "an appreciation for the connection between social justice and environmental protection" among other environmental majors. He is proud of the impact he has had on the UVM community, and he touts UVM's commitment to equity and diversity when he helps recruit new students as a participant in Admissions phone-a-thons and tours.
John MacDonald's awareness of social inequalities in the United States began long before he joined the UVM community. In high school, he and his friends were determined to educate and organize their peers as the US entered into war with Iraq with a series of "truth kits" they wrote, published, and distributed in an attempt to counter the distortions and fabrications they encountered in the national media. MacDonald brought that high level of anti-war energy to the UVM campus, promptly joining a number of student clubs that focused on social and economic justice and then swinging into action to get students to anti-war demonstrations in Washington, D.C., to bring national leaders to campus to educate UVM students, and to travel as an invited speaker to a counter recruitment conference in Berkeley, California. But his commitment to social justice is not limited to anti-war activism. In the immediate wake of Hurricane Katrina, MacDonald spent his Thanksgiving Break gutting and rebuilding homes in the devastated ninth ward of New Orleans along with the Common Grounds Collective, which, MacDonald notes, was at the time "the only group — government or non — then at work in the historically black and poor neighborhood, despite the fact that it was easily the hardest hit section of the city." He has also been an active participant in the student led Livable Wages campaign at UVM and the movement for Immigrant Rights.
Emily Nicolosi traveled to Belize two years ago to help construct a community center in a small refugee village. "While I entered the program with the goal of helping this community, I returned with a sense that I learned more than I had given, especially regarding what life is like in poverty," she says. She applied those lessons when she entered college and became deeply involved with social and economic justice not just as an academic issue but on a personal and moral level. In the summer of 2006, as an intern with Hudson Riverkeeper, she worked with ethnic communities to make the literature for the campaign to close Indian Point Nuclear Power Plant accessible. More importantly, she researched the relationship between nuclear power and indigenous people and published the results in Waterkeeper. At UVM, Nicolosi took on the co-Presidency of Students for Peace and Global Justice and worked to build campus awareness around Fair Trade products, workers rights issues, and the abuses of the Coca-Cola company. She brought national social justice speakers to campus for the annual Oxfam Hunger Banquet and worked on the campaign for local workers rights as a member of the Student Labor Action Project. She will carry this commitment into her future as she travels abroad in the Fall 2006 to Mexico, India, and New Zealand with the "Indigenous Perspectives" program in the International Honors Program at UVM. "I hope to use this experience as a step toward understanding how I might continue to fight for these issues after college," reports Nicolosi.
Leah Sohotra has taken as much advantage of the education she received about gender discrimination as a low wage worker as she has from her courses and internships as a Women and Gender Studies major at UVM. Her zeal as an agent for social change comes from her life experience, but she credits her education for arming her "with the proper language and necessary arguments." As a first generation college student, Sohotra has excelled in the classroom, but more importantly, she has effectively connected the ideas she is absorbing to her understanding of the need to address sexism, racism, and classism in the classroom as well as in the world. She has been an active volunteer fundraiser and outreach coordinator for the Women's Rape Crisis Center, a effective volunteer communicator with Burlington's Committee on Temporary Shelter (COTS), and a voice for underrepresented students at UVM by drawing attention to discriminatory language in the College of Arts and Sciences. On campus she developed original ideas for the Women's Center campaigns for Sexual Violence Awareness Month and she launched the "Women Taking Up Space" campaign to build women's self esteem. "Although I live in a society that dictates that as a woman of color raised from poverty I should not be where I am, I have pushed very hard and continue to flourish in my surroundings," says Sohotra.
The University of Vermont is lucky that each of these students is flourishing in the community. United Academics salutes all five Brace Award winners. They demonstrate an awareness of the power and privilege of education and have already made strides to use this power to fight the issues of social justice for which Vermonter Jeffrey Brace — former slave, Revolutionary War Veteran, farmer, and memoirist — fought.
Click here to return to UA's main Brace Awards page.
Last updated March 25, 2008