Pilgrim Place will hold its third annual Napier Awards ceremony on Saturday, February 9. Anne Napier Caffery, the daughter of the Napiers, who were longtime residents at Pilgrim Place, will serve as keynote speaker for the reception and banquet.

Each year, 2 local students who have been working on projects promoting social justice and world peace assisted by residents/mentors at Pilgrim Place, are awarded $10,000 Napier Fellowships.

The 2013 nominees include 8 Claremont College students working to make a difference in an array of areas, including: LaThelma Armstrong (Scripps College), who proposes to host summer workshops for African-American teens challenging negative representations of black girls in the media; Jared Calvert (Pitzer College), who hopes to work with Inland Congregations United for Change to increase minority voting and student power in educational policy; Rachel Conrad, who hopes to continue research in Ecuador to help inform the development of a sustainable water-management plan that is just to local farmers; and Ivette Guadarrama (Pomona College), who proposes to implement a year-long program in Chicago where young women of color can be empowered through artistic expression and a sense of community.

Also in the running for a Napier Award are Tiffany Yi-mei Liu (Harvey Mudd College), who hopes to travel to Kenya, leading a small team of college students to design and build a water-filtration system for a boarding school in Ngomano; Erikan Obotefukudo (Claremont McKenna College), who plans to travel to Brazil, working in partnership with health organizations to organize group workshops and community outreach endeavors engaging men on the issues of masculinity, men’s health, self-care and gender equality; Erika Parks (Pomona College), who proposes to continue work with Crossroads, a residential program for women released from prison, in order to develop a support network of Crossroads alumna for the purposes of empowerment and mentorship; Caitlin Watkins (Pitzer College), who hopes to continue to implement a program she has developed for Crossroads called Fallen Fruit from Rising Women, in which the clients create and sell food products from donated produce; and Lucas Wrench (Pomona College), a studio arts major who hopes to purchase a van that can serve as  Mobile Repair Unit. It would be used to take Earn-A-Bike classes to 2 Ontario high schools, where students would learn to build and repair bikes from donated recycled parts, and to distribute and repair bikes at day-laborer centers.

With this year’s awards, Pilgrim Place will have donated about $75,000 to students involved in philanthropic social projects.