Olshin, whose bar mitzvah project consisted of organizing people to prepare soups and deliver them regularly to those living in homeless shelters or on the streets, has been interested in homelessness for some time.Īs a high school sophomore, Olshin accompanied his father to a community of tiny houses aimed at helping recently homeless people. “Before Diller, I hadn’t really realized why I was doing these projects, and that really codified and solidified in my mind that a big part of my drive was coming from my experience as an American Jew.” “I had the opportunity to develop some really close friendships with people from all different backgrounds - socioeconomically, ethnically - all related to the Jewish community,” Olshin said of his experience at the Shabbat retreat. “The award’s emphasis on tikkun olam helped me better understand that it is our job to repair the world before we move on to anything else.”Īnother Diller award winner was Solomon Olshin of Portland, Oregon, who spearheaded a project to help people transitioning out of homelessness. “The Diller experience was transformative for me because it allowed me to connect with so many other teens who wanted to make a deep impact in the world the same way that I do,” Forman said. The prize is given annually to a select group of Jewish teenagers who demonstrate outstanding leadership in the Jewish value of tikkun olam, repairing the world, and comes with $36,000 to help further their initiative or pay for their education.ĭiller also organizes a Shabbat retreat for all the winners. In 2019, Forman was awarded a Diller Teen Tikkun Olam Award for her efforts. Meanwhile, other students at her high school have kept Forman’s initiative running there. “When you see a girl who will not talk at all on the first day of class and by the end is raising her hand and is so excited,” Forman said, “that gives me goosebumps.”įorman is now a freshman at Brown University, and she is working on developing a similar program with local elementary schools in Providence, Rhode Island. The mentors helped the students build roller coasters, model lungs and atoms, learn coding, and study interactions among the brain, nose and taste buds. Eight mentors worked with 20-30 students at each school. “But so many girls don’t have that, and so I created this program in order to bridge the gender gap.”įorman began with an eight-week program at two predominantly African-American and Hispanic elementary schools. “Luckily I had amazing female mentors who helped me out with this and encouraged me,” Forman said. Forman said her goal was to build a “kehillah” - a supportive community - for these girls and the mentors. The summer before 11 th grade, she launched Girls in STEM, a weekly afterschool program in which students from her high school visited third- through fifth-grade girls at low-income schools in an effort to spur their interest in science and technology. Once Forman became aware of the larger problem, she decided she wanted to do something to about it. “A female student taking a math test experiences an extra cognitive and emotional burden of worry related to the stereotype that women are not good at math,” Catherine Hill, a former vice president for research at the American Association of University Women, wrote in a recent report for the association. “ Stereotype threat ,” according to one prominent researcher.
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college graduates, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, they earn only about 35 percent of the undergraduate degrees in the STEM subjects: science, technology, engineering and mathematics. While women comprise nearly 60 percent of U.S. What Forman didn’t realize is that the issue is also a national concern. “You can’t help but feel that you don’t belong when you’re not like everyone else in the class, when people don’t think that you have the right answers to questions, when they look at you weirdly if you participate,” the 18-year-old said.
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physics and chemistry.įorman often found she was the only female in those classes.
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Growing up in Los Angeles, Elyse Forman always tried to take the highest-level science courses she could, like A.P.