Rotary International District 5170

Interview with David Silver
Ambassadorial scholar to Mexico, 2001-02

The following is an informal interview with David Silver, Ambassadorial scholar to Mexico, 2001-02, by scholarship chairwoman, Linda Ricketts.

1. David, what was the year of your scholarship and your study location?

2001-2 Cuernavaca, Mexico - Cuauhnahuac (school)

2. With so many options available to a Harvard grad, why did you choose the Rotary scholarship instead of another?

I chose Rotary because:
I wanted to have the flexibility to focus on what would best meet my personal and professional goals. Rotary provided that flexibility by allowing me to choose to go to Mexico, to focus on language and culture as well as live with a family to strengthen progress towards those goals. In addition, after my first meeting with then-president Ruben Sundeen and a long conversation with scholarship chair Linda Ricketts and others from Oakland Sunrise, I realized that Rotary had the type of people and commitment to service above self that I was proud to be associated with.

3. When did you decide to open 'Think College Now'? What need were you trying to address? Why?

THE NEED AND THE VISION: Only 1 of 20 students in Oakland Unified is eligible to go to college at UC. I was trying to close the achievement gap and work with the community to empower students from low-income (often of Mexican-American heritage) first-generation students to be able to go to college and pursue their dream.

THE EVOLUTION OF THINK COLLEGE NOW: I am attaching a timeline for you to see.

Here is some narrative too: First, when I was a teacher in Compton, CA I realized that I may not be with my 2nd grade students when it was time to go to college, and parents/students wanted to go to college, so I worked with representatives from Compton College, Cal St. Dominquez Hills, UCLA, to expose them via a college workshop. The parents were so appreciative of it that the next year in Oakland, we went to UC Berkeley. The parents and students said things like, "I had no idea that there was financial aid..." or "I see people that look like me at Berkeley, and it makes me work harder to want to be here too". I wanted to help connect these students with college because it is so integral to the goal of equity and students being able to make choices about their future. When I learned of the opportunity to apply to create a school in Oakland Unified came up during my scholarship, I realized I had to go for it. At that point, I got together with many of the family members whose extended families I visited during the rotary scholarship and we decided to apply to create the school. We had many community meetings to share our ideas of what a school with our college-focused vision would look like. We came up with a few key ideas: heavy community and family involvement, dramatic gains in student achievement, equity and an early college focus. We submitted our proposal and it got approved. And then the real work began...

4. Did the Rotary scholarship help to facilitate that effort and if so, how? Absolutely. The Rotary scholarship allowed me to:

• Learn the language and culture of most of my students to better connect with them on a personal level and during the school so we can reach our goals.
• Gave me the time to come up with the details of the school plan so I could work on my proposal without working while still learning.
• During my time on the scholarship, I was able to utilize resources to translate the documents into Spanish so our community meetings would be fully inclusive and strengthen my ability to communicate during the meetings.
• Allowed me to visit 15 of my former students extended families - some of them whose families actually helped to start TCN
• Rotary helped to donate guided reading leveled texts so our students could read at the level they needed. In addition, they have donated multicultural books and dictionaries. Finally, many of the Rotarians have served on or connected us with panelists for our Latino Heritage college-focused panel and our African-American Leaders panel the first two years of the schools existence. Rotary is considering other grants for the future.

5. How can we improve the Ambassadorial Scholarship program?

I think the program is outstanding. The support and resources were much appreciated. I think continuing to try to connect people from the programs - which I have seen this year - is a good idea. The only improvement would be to have more flexibility within the time period of the scholarship. For example, allow students who are on a 6 month scholarship to leave for a few weeks in the middle if they are going to do something that is within the spirit of the scholarship (i.e., to return for community meetings) as needed as long as they do the full 6 months.

6. How many lives/families would you estimate you have impacted as a result of your work and the time you spent on scholarship with Rotary?

We presently have 200 students and with their families and other community members and staff, probably about 500 people associated with TCN. For the reasons stated in #4, these people have been effected in part due to the scholarship. Thank you!

Thank you David. I and the entire district congratulate you on your work, take pride in your accomplishments and look forward to hearing more about THINK COLLEGE NOW at club and district meetings whenever your very busy ‘school principal’s’ schedule will allow.

Linda

Greg Francis

Greg Francis has been selected to represent our District as an Ambassadorial Scholar, and will be spending one year in Ecuador. He will be working on his Masters Degree in Education, and his long-term goal is to found an urban high school that provides scholarships to students in low-income areas, enabling them to receive a quality education.

Greg graduated from Foothill High School in Pleasanton, where he participated in baseball, football, and track. He was in the Interact Club, Commissioner of Athletics, Vice President of the Spanish Club and maintained a 4.0 GPA.

At Stanford, he was an ESL tutor, Cultural Exchange Coordinator and campus tour guide. After his sophomore year he was accepted to teach English in China, and he spent three months experiencing a place that he had only seen on maps previously. He said that while concepts of human dignity, privacy, and comfort were very different, he came to recognize the commonalties in human nature. That experience led him to teach English in Japan for a year with the JET (Japan Exchange Teaching) program. Returning to Stanford to complete his degree in International Relations, he worked on curriculum development and research. Greg authored Preventing Deadly Conflict, and when that was published, he delivered several teacher workshops on the topic. He graduated in 1998 and received a full scholarship to attend the University of Hawaii's East-West Center. While there he studied Educational Technology, with an emphasis on aiding students in resource-poor schools. He took on two projects: providing free writing tutoring to university students and creating a civic leadership program for middle schoolers.

Ecuador will afford Greg an opportunity to gain the fluency necessary to teach Spanish and communicate with Spanish-speaking families, the knowledge to teach about Latin America in world history classes, and the local-level community service experience to build upon later in his career. He has a lifelong commitment to service in general and educational reform in particular, which parallels Rotary International's objective of encouraging and fostering the ideal of service as a worthy enterprise. We in District 5170 are very proud of his accomplishments.