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The Cape Ann Forum seeks to engage the public in conversations about the rapidly changing social and political environment in which we live and what we can do to make it a better, safer place. We present free, public forums that bring experience and perspectives not often represented in the mainstream media and that give voice to citizens whose concerns, hopes and fears are too often lost or ignored.
FORUM ANNOUNCES ANNUAL HIGH SCHOOL AWARDS
The Cape Ann Forum took the occasion of its fifth and final forum of the 2008/2009 season on Sunday, May 3, to announce its annual International Awareness Award to a graduating Gloucester High School senior who has made an outstanding contribution to increasing awareness of international issues and events to her/ his peers. Only this year, there were four awardees.
Normally the award is $500 for one recipient, but since GHS teachers had recommended four exceptional candidates this year, who had worked as a team on a wide range of social issues since middle school, the Forum decided to increase the award and share it among them. As a result, each received $200. The award winners were Britta Akerly, Emily Castro, Isabel Pett, and Chloe Rideout for their unstinting volunteer work in the school’s Amnesty International chapter, the Model UN, the Environmental Club, and more.
Over the past four years, Cape Ann Forum organizers have been developing a relationship with the Gloucester High School out of a concern that the next generation develop the tools and the conceptual framework to grasp what’s going on in the world they will inherit, why that’s important, and what they can do to improve on what we’re leaving them. Forum chair Dan Connell, who teaches journalism and African politics at Simmons College in Boston, has done several assemblies at the high school on his experiences abroad, and the organization is assembling an archive of recordings of previous forums to donate to the school.
The Forum, founded in 2001, has been setting aside funds to endow the International Awareness award in perpetuity. This is the fourth year it has been given to GHS students, who are selected with the help of GHS social studies teachers.