The Napier Initiative at Pilgrim Place recently held its annual celebration and presentation of awards, marking its 15th year by saluting 10 new Napier Fellows.

The group of seniors from the Claremont Colleges included Pomona College’s Shakinar Mutulili and Pitzer College’s Natasha Yen, each of whom earned Paul M. Minus Awards of $20,000 to support their projects. Pomona’s Cecilia Ransburg received the newly created $1,000 Barbara Troxell Prize. The remaining seven Napier Fellows each received awards of $500 in recognition of their work, focusing on Napier values of peace, justice, and care of the earth.

“There are no winners and no losers,” said Napier Council Chair Mary Elizabeth Moore. “All our fellows presented worthy proposals which we hope they will be able to achieve.”

Mutulili will use her $20,000 award to strengthen the Freedom Within Kenya Project, which she co-founded. The project will seek to improve conditions for children who are born in prison. Kenyan law places children with their mothers in prison during their first four years. She will partner with the local Rotary Club and other organizations to provide immediate needs and develop sustainable long-term improvements in two rural prisons.

Yen plans to implement a youth empowerment and leadership program at Little Rose Center in Soweto, South Africa. She will teach young people to identify local needs and create projects that will successfully address those needs.

Ransburg will teach taekwondo and leadership to high school students in Pomona schools, with the promise that they will in turn help to teach elementary and middle school students. She said she hopes this training to do for them what it has done for her: build skills and boost confidence through active movement and attention to safety.

Some 300 attendees at the event learned about new college courses sponsored jointly by Napier and the Claremont Colleges, and about enrolling elders and college students in unique intergenerational sharing of interests.

Past Napier Fellows include Takako Mino (2011), who today is the founder of Musizi University in Kampala, Uganda; Romarilyn Ralston, the Senior Director of the Claremont Justice Education Center at Pitzer College; Kenny Butler (2022), who is devoted to helping incarcerated people find successful ways to transition back into society; and guest speaker Michelle Muturi (2023), who developed an “eco-brick” construction project in Kenya that involved hundreds of elementary schoolchildren who collected used bottles, filled them with sand, and used them in building benches and a wall that brought beauty and pride to their schools.

Moore said all of these achievements are made possible by donor support.

“Nearly all of you here tonight are donors, and we greatly thank you,” she said.