Students earn humanitarian award for funding peers’ ambitions to affect lives abroad
Ajwang Rading, left, and Madhu Narasimhan, right, received the Charles E. Young Humanitarian award for their UCLA Global Citizens Fellowship.
By Yael Levin
May 16, 2013 1:01 a.m.
They have raised $37,000 for community service trips abroad in the past year, but the money isn’t for them.
Madhu Narasimhan and Ajwang Rading raised the money for their fellow UCLA students to see their peers’ own visions come true.
“I feel very fortunate for all I have received, and I feel a responsibility to give back to the community,” said Narasimhan, a fourth-year political science student.
Narasimhan and Rading, who is a third-year political science student, are the co-founders of the UCLA Global Citizens Fellowship, an organization that provides two UCLA students the funding to execute a project of their own design in a community abroad this summer.
“We do anything from mentoring fellows to planning (service trip) logistics,” Rading said.
For their dedication to the fellowship, the pair won this year’s Charles E. Young Humanitarian Award, an annual award given to select UCLA students involved in community service that comes with a $1,000 donation to a public service organization of their choice.
The two fellows this year are Rebecca Sadwick, a third-year political science student and David Joseph, a second-year neuroscience student.
Rading and Narasimhan started discussing the idea of the fellowship in January of 2012. Students who want to join the fellowship must go through a competitive application process, which includes an interview.
The fellowship currently has $37,000 in funds, comprised of $12,000 from the Student Affairs Office and $25,000 from a private donor, said UCLA spokesman Ricardo Vazquez.
Rading said the sponsored projects are chosen based on whether they will make a long-term impact on the community.
Joseph is traveling to Uganda this summer to install call boxes for the residents of isolated communities. During his previous visit to Uganda, he said he noticed the citizens had many unanswered questions about their healthcare. The call boxes would help provide emergency response to citizens’ health care questions.
“At UCLA, we have access to (fairly high) standards of health care,” Joseph said. “In Uganda, they don’t have the same kind of access, which is not right.”
Rading and Narasimhan said receiving the award was humbling. They plan to use the award to sponsor future fellows.
“(The award) is an honor, but I think being a humanitarian in itself is a reward,” Narasimhan said.
