Vice-Chancellor’s Social Impact Awards: Meet last year’s winners
Supported directly by the Vice-Chancellor of the University, Professor Stephen Toope, the awards were launched in 2019 for the first time to recognise exceptional commitment to, and achievement in, student social impact.
Last year, the Awards Ceremony was held at Emmanuel College in February, where we celebrated students’ hard work into making a difference!
The winners were George Rosenfeld, Matt Mahmoudi, Stephen Cole and Tiara Sahar Ataii. David Chukwuma Izuogu and Verner Viisainen received Highly Commended Awards.
Curious about their projects? Scroll down and read below!
George Rosenfeld
Alongside his undergraduate degree in Arabic and Russian at Trinity College, and several other social impact projects, George is the founder of May Week Alternative, an initiative that invites students to donate the cost of a May Ball ticket (around £150), to a set charity, and then gather together in May Week to celebrate the money raised, as well as the end of exams. Set up in January 2018, in its first year May Week Alternative reached 40 people, and with matched funding raised £12,000 for the Against Malaria Foundation, protecting over 15,000 people from malaria.
Recently, George said:
“Receiving the Vice-Chancellor’s Social Impact Award was not only an honour, but more importantly a significant catalyst for expanding and improving May Week Alternative. As well as the legitimacy which the initiative received as a result, I have gained a lot from speaking to and learning from fellow recipients, and the Vice-Chancellor and the organisers have themselves offered valuable advice and connections which have helped us drive things forward to the next level.”
He has also provided us with an update on May Week Alternative:
“14 months and 2 appeals later, and we’ve grown more than 1000% (!), having raised over £150,000, enough to protect more than 170,000 people from malaria — that’s much more than the population of Cambridge! More than 500 students have now joined, making often the biggest donations of their lives. In other news, we’ve also launched a brand new website and have recorded a talk on ‘The Positive Case for Giving’ at TEDxCambridgeUniversity. We’ve also begun to expand beyond Cambridge, starting last term in Oxford with a sister initiative called ‘Raise: A Celebration of Giving’. It’s fair to say that things have grown rather substantially, a trend which we hope will only continue!”
Matt Mahmoudi
Matt is a PhD student in Development Studies at Pembroke College. In October 2016, Matt brought together voices across Cambridge to found Declarations: The Human Rights Podcast, to help bridge the divide between academics, activists, and the general public in the conversation on human rights.
More recently, he has been working to develop and launch The State of Things, an online platform for citizenship education to be used in schools. Matt has also spearheaded important work in documenting human rights violations, beginning with his involvement as an intern and later Program Lead with The Whistle Project.
He also set up the first Amnesty International Digital Verification Corps in Cambridge, training a team to use digital tools and media to verify human rights violations; and their project on migrant labour abuse in Qatar has been used by Amnesty’s Migration team to directly support their advocacy work.
Matt’s nominator said that:
“He has spearheaded fantastic work on important but often overlooked human rights issues […] Matt has started a number of important initiatives at Cambridge that have a positive impact on the university community and beyond; increasing awareness for important social justice causes and providing advice on how to work within academia to support stronger human rights provision.”
Stephen Cole
Stephen studied Natural Sciences at St. John’s College. Alongside work with Students for Global Health and RAG, Stephen was the President of Cambridge Homeless Outreach Project, or CHOP, where he has organised projects, fundraisers, and speaker events aimed at supporting homeless people in Cambridge.
He has also organised numerous collection drives, a weekly student-run cafe at Wintercomfort, a Christmas Dinner fundraiser, volunteering projects with Cambridge Cyrenians, and panels on LGBT+ homelessness, and homelessness and mental health. His Jimmy’s Treats and CHOP Chocolate Fudge fundraisers have raised £2000 over two terms. Stephen has begun to drive long-term systemic impact by representing CHOP at the Cambridgeshire Homelessness Summit, and setting up a new Campaigns and Research subcommittee to help follow on from this, campaigning for the Living Wage and researching housing and welfare policy.
Stephen’s nominator said that:
“There is no way to truly quantify the compassion Stephen has brought to his social movements, no doubt influenced by his role as a dedicated volunteer […] Stephen’s commitment to non-profit causes is worthy of the highest commendation.”
Tiara Sahar Ataii
Tiara is an Asian and Middle Eastern Studies student at Robinson College. She is the founder of Solidaritee, an international movement which sells T-shirts to raise money for legal aid for refugees. During her time volunteering with a legal aid NGO in Greece, Tiara realised the devastating impact that a lack of access to legal aid could have on refugees seeking asylum.
In January 2017, Tiara bought 600 t-shirts to sell to friends and family, delivering them around Cambridge by bike. SolidariTee has since grown rapidly and now operates in 30 universities, raising over £50,000 in total for legal aid for refugees. Tiara now manages over 450 students with the national team, and is registering with the Charity Commission to keep up with her growth, as SolidariTee is projected to raise over £200,000 this year.
Alongside launching three social media campaigns to inform the public about the crisis, her next focus will be on providing grants to British students and graduates looking to volunteer long-term in legal aid, aiming to provide sustainable solutions to the refugee crisis.
The judges unanimously described her work as humbling and “incredibly inspiring”. They saw the project as having made a profound impact on the lives of refugees through practical, financial support. They noted especially that though now a huge operation, Solidaritee remains rooted in community need and empathy with beneficiaries.
David Izuogu
David is a Chemistry PhD student at Wolfson College. As the International Officer of the Graduate Union, he has headed and piloted the first ever Graduate Buddy programme to help new graduate students settle into Cambridge. He has campaigned for graduate rights and mental health provision, and worked with the Careers Service to increase its visibility to students. He is the founder of the Africa of our Dream Initiative, a foundation aiming to provide access to quality education and Medicare in sub-Saharan Africa, as well as empowering women and young people.
In this role, he has organised a Cambridge-Nigeria Outreach Programme in three different Nigerian universities, started a Science Festival and a ‘Code your way out of poverty’ project, forged research links between Cambridge and Africa, and used his own savings to provide bursaries and pay application fees for talented Nigerian students to come to Cambridge.
David’s nominator said that:
“These initiatives are very important, precisely because, for many African students, there is a myth constructed around Cambridge that makes the university unreachable to them.”
Verner Viisainen
Verner is an Engineering PhD student at Pembroke College. Verner established Meat Free Mondays at Pembroke during his time as the MCR’s Environmental Officer, and in May 2017 he founded Pembroke College Gardening Society, recruiting 40 students to grow food in a college allotment, and holding talks on gardening and permaculture approaches to help students learn how to grow their own food.
Following his participation in Cambridge Hub’s Engage for Change programme, Verner set up CamBridge2Environment with two others, a 7 week project to connect students with local environmental groups through different hands-on volunteering sessions and discussion groups. For this project Verner collaborated with Cambridge Carbon Footprint, Transition Cambridge, FoodCycle, CamCycle and the University’s Environment & Energy Section.
Recently, Verner has said that:
“I was delighted to have been Highly Commended for the Vice Chancellor’s Social Impact Award in 2019.The recognition was hugely beneficial because it provided an opportunity to reflect on what I had been working on and feel proud of what I had achieved up to that point through the various initiatives I had been working on. I also very much enjoyed the Awards ceremony event. It was especially great that the head of my department (Engineering) had been invited to it to the awards ceremony and I was able to have a long chat with him about things that the department could do to improve its day to day sustainability, some which have now been implemented. However, the best thing about the award was definitely being surrounded by and meeting all the other award winners who are such awe-inspiring people and making amazing things possible in Cambridge. We even met up after the ceremony and hearing from them really inspired me to try harder to push for further positive changes in our society.”
He has also provided us with an update on his projects:
“Since last year, I have been active on several fronts in trying to bring about change across the city and the University. In my role as Sustainability Officer for the Pembroke May Ball, I pushed for unprecedented changes to the way that the event was run, leading to the event achieving a 97% sustainability accreditation from an independent auditor (Sustain-a-Ball) and (likely) the most sustainable May Ball in history. On the back of this, I became the Head of Sustain-a-Ball in an attempt to inspire and help the wider University to bring sustainability to the forefront of their May Week events, with the hope that this will continue many years into the future. However, COVID-19 has unfortunately put a stop to further event planning for this year.
Within my role as Graduate Parlour President at Pembroke College, I have also been actively trying to better incorporate the College within the City in which it exists. I helped set up a partnership between Pembroke and Cambridge Food Hub to deliver locally sourced food items to the College while removing waste products. And now during the pandemic, I am actually working with fellow Award recipient, Matt, to try and push the College to provide temporary accommodation for some of the city’s homeless for whom the impacts of the pandemic are likely to be much more devastating.”
This year we have received a large number of impressive nominations for the second edition of the Vice-Chancellor’s Social Impact Awards. The winners will be announced next week - stay tuned!
