CEC Awards 2024 Scholarships
The Citizens Environmental Council (CEC) has presented scholarships to Olivia Johnson and Coraline Haggarty, who are both graduating seniors at Burlingame High School. These exceptional young women were honored for their past efforts and future promise in helping maintain a sustainable and livable planet.
Olivia Johnson participated in the county-wide Youth Climate Ambassadors leadership training program as a sophomore. This program culminated in a Community Impact Project for which Olivia and her partners dug out a section of water-wasting turf on campus and replaced it with succulents and California native plants. She served in a summer internship with the Stanford Environmental Engineering Department, and she also worked during one summer in Costa Rica with a sea turtle conservation and environmental restoration program. On campus she supported the Burlingame Environmental Club and was very active in drama, appearing in 13 productions in four years. Olivia will enroll at Barnard College, where she plans to major in Environmental Science. She is especially interested in human rights and environmental justice.
Cora Haggarty was the cofounder and president of Cascade Climate Action, a community nonprofit that encourages youth to take environmental action. In 2022 she was a summer research intern with Sustainable San Mateo County, where she researched public policy issues related to the environment, social equity and the economy. In middle school she and her partners submitted two short environmental films to CEC’s annual Student Film Fest. She participated in many student activities, competing at an elite level in track, soccer and cross-country and serving as student body president. She will enroll in the Honors Program of the College of Literature, Science and the Arts at the University of Michigan, and she will run with the Michigan track team. Her career aspiration is to become an attorney working in the field of public health.
This is the ninth year that CEC has presented scholarships to graduates of BHS. Both of these students have excellent academic records and extensive volunteer service, and they exemplify the values and service that CEC honors with these scholarships.
The CEC Scholarship program has been largely underwritten by the Morris S. Smith Foundation, Sterling Franklin, Trustee.
CEC Scholarship Recipients Check In
In 2019 we decided to ask scholarship recipients what they’ve been doing in college, and we’ve been impressed and encouraged by their responses. It’s exciting to see youth whom we thought had promise already beginning to realize their potential and making a difference while still in college.
We granted one of our first scholarships in 2016 to Maarten Thomas-Bosum, who planned to major in physics and work on alternative energy sources. In 2020 he was a senior at Boston College, about to complete a major in Physics and a minor in Math. He was active in the campus Ecopledge and Climate Justice Clubs and was working as a research assistant in a campus physics lab on a new solar energy technology and on a CO2 capture and sequestration project.
Isabella Acenas (BHS 2017) kept us informed during her first two incredibly productive years at New York University. She served as an American delegate to the U.N. Climate Meeting in Abu Dhabi, and she designed a research project in Dubai to study sea level rise in South Pacific island nations. She majored in Environmental Studies and has aspirations to work for the United Nations and the U.S. Agency for International Development.
In 2018 we interviewed Andrew Barrows, who was already an experienced diver and had observed firsthand the decline of coral reefs due to climate change. In early 2020 he was at the University of Hawaii studying marine biology. He had an internship at the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology, where he was studying methods to raise or farm reef-building coral, which could someday aid in restoring the world’s reefs.
In early 2020 Keala Uchoa (BHS 2018) had completed her first year at Northwestern University. She hoped to become an attorney and work on environmental and social justice issues from a legal and public policy platform. Her coursework so far had included the ocean, atmosphere and climate; environmental law and policy: and Latinx resistance to environmental racism. As president of Fossil Free Northwestern and an undergraduate representative to the Committee on Investment Responsibility, she was pressing the university to divest its fossil fuel investments and reinvest in renewable energy. She also interned during the summer of 2019 at the Westside Justice Center, a Chicago legal aid clinic.
Orla Lynagh-Shannon (BHS 2019) is currently home, successfully taking UCLA classes remotely. Orla’s plan is to major in Environmental Science and Business/Economics. In 2019, Orla took a seminar called “Women and Minorities in Geoscience.” The final project for that class was interviewing Dr. Stephanie Pincetl, a scientist and the director of the UCLA Center for Sustainable Urban Systems, with whom she is hoping to conduct research. In early 2020, Orla was running for a Director of Sustainability position on the On Campus Housing Council, but with the dorms closed the election has been postponed. Over the summer 2020, Orla attended a coffee chat with Google’s Sustainability Team, and as a result, started researching the Master’s Program at the Yale School of the Environment.
CEC Scholarship Honorees
2024
Olivia Johnson (Barnard College, New York, NY)
Coraline Haggarty (University of Michigan)
2023
Adrian Zhang (Reed College, Portland, OR)
2022
Becca Jeremias (College of San Mateo)
Journey Steinberg (CSU, Sacramento)
Hrudhai Umashankar (University of Washington)
2021
Sydney Roncal (Cal Poly U, San Luis Obispo)
Gemma Rice (CSU, Chico)
Vanessa Teo (UC Berkeley)
2020
Jeffery Chen (Princeton University)
Verona Teo (UC Berkeley)
2019
Orla Lynagh-Shannon (UCLA)
Carmen Lavilla (CSU Monterrey Bay)
2018
Keala Uchoa (Northwestern University)
Ian Aweeka (UC San Diego)
Andrew Barrows (University of Hawaii)
Madeline Tragoutsis (Santa Clara University)
2017
Isabella Acenas (New York University)
Alexander Vina (CSU, Chico)
2016
Maarten Thomas-Bosum (Boston College)
Tessa Filipczyk (UC Davis)