From Handcycles to Mentoring

Scott Porter ’80 and Laura Ruth Johnson ’92 are the winners of this year’s Joseph F. Wall ’41 Sesquicentennial Service Awards, which honor Grinnell’s commitment to social responsibility and public service.

Scott Porter, Adaptive Sports Clinics and Equipment-Lending

Johnson’s proposed project, Proyecto Atabey, will mentor and support young Latina and African-American mothers through an intergenerational mentoring program in Chicago. The program will be based at an alternative high school that serves the largely Puerto Rican community of Humboldt Park.

Adolescent parents who are enrolled in this school and attend the Family Learning Center, a specialized initiative for parents, will be targeted for the mentorship program. The project will recruit graduates from the program, and other mothers in the community who were teen parents, to provide presentations to current learning center participants. In addition to these regular sessions, some current students will be paired with a mentor who can provide them with more individualized support.

The Wall Service Awards

The Wall Service Awards were established during the College’s 1996 sesquicentennial celebration to honor Grinnell’s commitment to social responsibility and public service. They are named in honor of the Wall, who was a professor of history at Grinnell who inspired an ideal of social responsibility in his Grinnell students. The College typically gives awards of $25,000 each to two graduates to carry out a service project that is of tangible benefit to others. Projects may be original or supplement existing projects or programs; they may be local, regional, national or international in scope; and may be carried out domestically or internationally.