Students making worldly changes

JOSEPH N. BELL

I spent the weekend with 58 college students. Only 14 were in person.

The rest I met through their writings. Although, as in any segment

this large, there were peaks and valleys, but the total impact was to

marvel at the depth, determination and passion of our young people --

at least in this group -- to address social, educational and public

service problems with remarkable creative energy.

All this came about because I was invited several months ago to

fill a vacancy on the board of trustees of the Donald A. Strauss

Scholarship Foundation. It was a very special opportunity to me

because Don Strauss became my first, longest and best friend after I

moved my family to Newport Beach in 1959. He died in 1995 after a

lifetime of public service to this community as a longtime member --

just for starters -- of the Newport-Mesa school board and the Newport

Beach City Council, including a term as mayor.

There is a local myth that Newport Beach has never had a Democrat

mayor. Don Strauss was both a Democrat and a mayor. He was also an

executive at Beckman Instruments in Fullerton for more than 30 years,

the father of two sons and a daughter, and the stronger half of a

doubles team with me in local tennis tournaments in which we

inevitably expired early but with our pride intact.

Don Strauss began early on to put his wealth where his convictions

were by funding summer internships and college scholarships for needy

students -- seven of them still ongoing -- always with the strong

support and input of his wife, Dorothy, whose passion and spirited

opinions complemented exactly her husband’s pragmatism and quiet

assurance. The culmination of this team effort was the scholarship

founded in the family name by Dorothy two years after her husband

died -- and only months before her own death. It was designed to

carry on the vision and ideals Don Strauss expressed in his lifetime

of public service. And that’s what I saw reflected last weekend.

The Strauss scholarships -- usually 15 of them annually, each for

$10,000 -- are unique because they are structured around proposals

the applicants must present to the board of trustees that reflect an

innovative approach to a current public issue. The foundation is

looking for students with leadership potential and a passion for

public service who have demonstrated an ability to carry out their

proposals.

Last weekend was devoted to two such groups. On Friday, last

year’s Strauss-scholarship recipients reported how well they achieved

the goals they had set out a year earlier. And on Saturday, trustees

convened to choose this year’s winners -- selected from 36 proposals

submitted by the 15 California colleges and universities currently

participating in the Strauss program. I was an interested observer on

Friday and an active participant on Saturday. In the process, I got

acquainted with some impressive young people.

Among last year’s recipients, we heard from a UC Santa Cruz

student who brought together a symposium of farm workers, owners,

union and governmental representatives and academics to explore

policy changes and statewide initiatives that could lead to social

and environmental justice for the farm worker. A UC Berkeley student

created a street outreach project in which student volunteers

distribute food, hygiene supplies and service referrals to the

homeless -- a program he hopes to take to New York City next year

when he enrolls in Columbia University. A Stanford student mounted an

effort to educate South Asian immigrants -- especially in the urban

areas of New York -- about their special susceptibility to heart

disease and how to prevent it.

Closer to home, two UC Irvine students offered programs: one to

provide SAT counseling to high school students who couldn’t afford

private mentoring, the other -- called “Technology Tutors” -- to

teach underprivileged high school students how to assemble discarded

parts into functional computers and use them to help achieve a

college education or a job in a technology-related field.

On Saturday, we faced great piles of applications to select the

group we would be hearing a year hence. We’d done our homework, made

our choices, and were prepared to defend them as we discussed each

group of applicants. There are no bad decisions. Only -- hopefully --

better ones. Somewhere late in the process, I wrote in my notes: “So

here we are. Trying to choose between feeding the kids in a Mexican

orphanage and giving them hope for a life or trying to save the world

from AIDS. The small focused vision or the grandiose -- that just

might work?”

Some examples from the new batch of applicants include a Loyola

Marymount student offering a program to provide peer mentoring,

career-development support and community outreach that would help

kids released from juvenile detention centers to avoid going down the

wrong path.

A Berkeley student would create a program for educating diabetics,

a staggering problem in and around Bethlehem, where he proposes

forming a series of micro-clinics composed of small groups of

diabetics who could share the prohibitive cost of a glucose

monitoring device and serve as a model for the rest of the world. A

UC Davis student has a plan in which UC campus student associations

would work with the secretary of state and local elections offices to

establish an online voter registration process in which long-term

voter registration of college students would hopefully greatly

increase the present abysmal percentage of student voters.

These examples only skim the surface of the prospects we discussed

Saturday and are offered as typical. It is personally sobering to

read them since they leave me trying rather desperately to recall any

specific selfless example -- beyond military service -- of civic or

social virtue I can point to. Maybe serving as a Strauss trustee will

enhance that dismal record at least slightly.

One of our current candidates caught the spirit of the whole

weekend when he ended his proposal by writing: “I truly believe that

even one person, with one voice, can make all the difference in the

world.”

* JOSEPH N. BELL is a resident of Santa Ana Heights. His column

appears Thursdays.