Families gathered in the Centennial Arts Center to celebrate their children’s commitment to helping others in need. The ceremony also honored the living legacy of the alum who inspired the society’s creation, Axel Bostrom ’24, who died following a car accident in June 2025.

Axel grew up volunteering. For the Bostroms, a military family, service was a shared value and a way to get to know each community they entered. Axel’s Eagle Scout project benefited Bethesda Cares, a Maryland organization that helps people experiencing homelessness. In Massachusetts, he participated annually in A Shot For Life, a basketball challenge that raises money for brain cancer research. And in his everyday interactions, he consistently took the initiative to care for others, including helping new students acclimate to CA.

Having heard an outpouring of stories of Axel’s generosity from his friends and the CA community, Robyn says that as she and her husband, Paul Bostrom P’24, considered how to honor their son’s memory, “positivity and light were the two words that came to mind.” By the end of the summer, they knew they wanted to encourage service.

In CA, whose only award is given to alums for service, Robyn saw philosophical alignment. She wanted to recognize the service CA students already engage in through clubs and weekend volunteer outings organized by the Student Life Office, provide more resources to broaden those volunteer opportunities, and make service more visible alongside academics, the arts, and athletics at CA. She hoped to create new student leadership positions and encourage additional aid to local communities by developing a resource any CA club, team, student, or faculty member could use to organize service trips. She wanted all students to have an opportunity to participate, and she hoped to give those who knew Axel a positive way to channel their grief. 

“I think of Axel like a prism,” she says. “He shined his light, and it refracted on everybody who ever met him. To me, service is like that. One person’s gift of time and attention can impact so many people.”

That’s why in May, she presented a crystal prism to each of the society’s first 20 members, who had all given 100 or more hours of service. Additional students were recognized for meeting an inaugural “Six for ’26” spring-semester challenge and for 10, 25, 50, and 75 hours of service.

At the ceremony, Grant Hightower, assistant head for student life, reflected on Axel as a standout scholar and athlete and a role model for his dedication to his communities. “To bring positivity and light requires only that you recognize those around you as worthy of receiving yours,” he said. “Light and positivity are infinite resources. When you care to use your light to illuminate your neighbor’s path, your flame does not flicker or fade. Instead, the road simply gets brighter. By choosing to serve, you aren’t just performing a task. You are refusing to let the darkness of isolation win. You are proving that when we stop trying to blend into the unseen and dare to reflect one another’s brilliance, we don’t just see the path ahead, we become the way for others to find it as well.”

The PALS Planning Committee had asked students to submit reflections on their volunteer journeys. Many attested to the profound personal impact of their service.

At CA, Lyle Waldek ’26, an inaugural PALS member, co-headed the Lawrence-Concord Action Partnership, organizing student trips to Lazarus House Ministries and outdoor cleanups in Lawrence, Mass., and ���ϳԹ� Notes of Compassion, a group that performs at senior living residences. Over time, he wrote, “I have been able to see that service of any kind is much more complex, collaborative, and beautiful than I believed it to be.”

Many other students recognized by PALS had previously spent years volunteering. With experience at Project 351, Cradles to Crayons, Rise Against Hunger, and the YMCA, among other local organizations, Melina Petropulos ’28 is a teen ambassador at her local food pantry in Newton, Mass., as well as a PALS student ambassador and one of the society’s first members. “I’ve come to think that empathy without action is incomplete,” she wrote.

For others, service was a new step. Christopher Choy ’27 recognized that, living in Boston, he’d been conditioned to view the unhoused community through the social stigma that goes unchecked in mainstream media. “I wanted to confront the stereotypes about homelessness and learn more about how the unhoused could be cared for instead of stigmatized,” he wrote. 

The personal interactions he had while volunteering at the Harvard Square Homeless Shelter in Cambridge, Mass., revealed his similarities with residents and helped him understand the complex systemic factors that contribute to homelessness and inequality. He will serve as a PALS student ambassador during the 2026–27 school year.

Gavi Miller ’27 wanted to see her fellow CA students more involved with the Concord, Mass., community. This fall, she started a reading buddies partnership with kindergarteners at Alcott Elementary School. “Now, every other week, I get to watch my vision come to life: students just starting their academic journey looking up to ones with experience,” she wrote. “They learn from us, and we learn from them.”

In the first year of PALS, CA students showed their commitment to communities in Concord and beyond. By being so motivated to serve without any graduation requirement, Robyn says, they set a “gold standard.” She’s proud to have created a pathway at CA to recognize their contributions and, just as importantly, to have opened up more opportunities for them to experience the joy of lending a helping hand.

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“Are you feeling hopeless about the state of the world?” she asked CA students. “And about your ability to do anything about it? Are you overwhelmed by how much needs to be done in order to make the American dream a reality for more people?”

Trainor paused after each question. As she did, a chorus of yeses swelled from the audience, each time a little louder.

She nodded. “Then I have a job for you,” she said.

Trainor was visiting to receive the school’s only prize, the Joan Shaw Herman Award for Distinguished Service. CA presents the award annually to an alum in recognition of a lifetime of service to others. 

Introducing the award, Tara Djordjevic ’26, a student representative on the nomination committee, discussed its namesake, Joan Shaw Herman ’46, who devoted herself to improving conditions for others with disabilities after she contracted polio as a young woman. Then Betsy Green ’91, who chaired the committee, shared highlights of Trainor’s contributions through public defense, mental health advocacy, and church leadership. 

After building a career in the legal profession as an assistant federal public defender, Trainor became a fellow at the United States Supreme Court. She founded the Virginia Institutionalized Persons Project to secure humane health care for incarcerated women and investigate civil rights abuses in mental hospitals. She also created the Florida Mental Health Advocacy Coalition, bringing multiple mental health organizations together to pursue policy changes to improve the lives of people with behavioral health conditions. As an ordained Episcopal deacon, Trainor has bridged spiritual care and social justice, managing a range of programs, including securing kindergarten education guarantees and supporting women transitioning from homelessness. She’s the author of multiple books and articles on appellate practice and prisoner litigation, as well as the 2025 book Why Millennials Don’t Go to Church.

After Head of School Henry D. Fairfax presented Trainor with the award, she discussed her “efforts toward systemic change: not just changes around the edges of things, but changes to the very systems that form our social fabric,” calling for change to “any system that condones the inhumane treatment of human beings or that perpetuates unequal access to basic human needs.”

She asked students, “So how do you go about making a difference in the systems that control so much of our lives, many of which are increasingly failing to achieve the standards of basic morality?”

Trainor proposed that it takes incremental reform to transform systems that perpetuate inequality into systems that support life and dignity for all. “Sometimes you have wonderful people like Martin Luther King Jr., Bryan Stevenson, and others who are very charismatic and come forward and grab the public imagination with a larger issue, but for the rest of us, we take on the smaller issues around the edges, and we keep at it,” she said. 

Gradually, “if the smaller issues are just, and if they are humane, they have the power to affect the larger issues.” While reducing one person’s harsh sentence by 20 years might not seem to accomplish much in itself, “it matters enormously” in the context of the U.S. judicial system, which, she said, is “far more punitive than almost any other system in the world.” 

Trainor clarified that she still believes in the criminal justice system she was long part of. “It works amazingly well,” she said. “In fact, judges are overwhelmingly impartial and do a good job. Juries know which end is up. People who need counsel get counsel, generally speaking.”

But she’s distressed by growing public distrust of the courts. For her, the legal balance rests on the ability to present a strong defense. “The government has enormous resources, and in order to make the system work properly, you have to have some equal power on the other side,” she said.

For example, in the 11th circuit, the federal appellate jurisdiction encompassing Florida, Georgia, and Alabama, Trainor argued for less draconian sentencing measures, and through several cases, helped make the law more humane. “Working as an appellate lawyer, she said, “is one of the most thrilling things that you can possibly do, because you are actively changing the law every time you stand up to argue a case.”

Creating change incrementally is contributing to systemic change, Trainor said: “Each one of those small changes makes for larger changes over time, and you have to trust that.”

To help students take the first steps toward their own visions, she proposed a foundational orientation: the southern African philosophy of ubuntu. Popularized by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the term can be roughly translated as, “I am because we are.” Trainor contrasted this recognition that our individual humanity is inextricably entwined with the humanity of others with the “winner-take-all culture” of the West, an ideological descendent of René Descartes’ dualistic formulation, “I think, therefore I am.”

With ubuntu as a guiding principle instead, we can all become agents of systemic change, Trainor suggested. She shared an acrostic, DARE, that she’d devised for this occasion to help make her advice memorable: “Dream your passion. Address what is yours to do. Respect the stories. Embrace your power.”

Trainor admitted that the first step may well be the most difficult. “It’s hard to dream when the problems that we face seem resistant to change, generation after generation,” she says. “But I say, make your dream as big as the problem.” 

No effort to make a system more just can be sustained without a vision for how life could be otherwise, she explained. “For me, the dreams were a correctional system that did not further punish people by withholding medical care, and a medical system that did not discriminate against the mentally ill,” she said.

Addressing what is yours to do requires identifying steps you can take personally or with others. “Perhaps I could not compel a change of policy about the appropriate scope of medical care in prisons generally, but I could break the big problem into smaller pieces,” she said. For her, that meant requiring facilities to provide batteries for hearing aids and ensure that women receive regular mammograms. Because they are humane and just, such small causes, she said, “have power within themselves and are capable of changing a system from the ground up.”

Her next recommendation, respecting stories, involves listening to voices others don’t want to hear. Trainor started her project in Virginia with no staff and no funding, just a stack of letters from incarcerated people describing the mistreatment they had endured in prison. “Together, they added up to a pattern, which turned out to give us an opportunity to create a lawsuit,” she said.

Finally, she advised embracing the power we each have by becoming experts in our particular passions, then teaching others to become experts of their own stories. “This is called organizing,” she said. “But what it really means is helping people tell their own personal stories to the right people at the right time.”

She recalled a Florida mother’s testimony at a committee hearing about her daughter’s difficulties navigating the mental health system. As she spoke about what it was like to be the parent of a child dealing with mental illness, Trainor recounted, the room went silent. Then, one by one, committee members began recounting stories of their own relatives. The legislation Trainor sought that day was passed, but what happened in that room, she said, was just as important.

“Ubuntu means that we cannot do other than to see ourselves in each other’s stories, and ubuntu is calling us in the name of our common humanity to dare to confront systems that would treat us as anything less than human,” she said.

After her formal remarks, Trainor then took a seat next to Fairfax on the P.A.C. stage to answer questions from him and students, in turn. Several took shape around what it takes to overcome the inertia that keeps us from pursuing systemic change. Sharing CA’s community life theme, “Building the We,” Fairfax asked Trainor how, in her experience, people move from issues that most directly affect them to taking action for the collective good.

“I think it has to do with shared suffering,” Trainor replied. “Oddly enough, suffering brings tremendous power if it’s shared … it becomes something positive, which is quite a miracle, if  you think about it.”

She added, “Faith is always about addressing the problem of human suffering, and what draws people together and motivates people to work together is a sense that suffering is held in common.” The motivation to organize has this same underpinning, she said—ubuntu.

When a student asked how she kept herself from feeling numb from the scale of what so many people are struggling with today, Trainor acknowledged this physiological state as a signal: “Numbness comes from not being in touch with your own feelings. So if you feel yourself becoming numb, it means that, as we say in the ministerial profession, you’re suffering from compassion fatigue, and you need to pull back into yourself and give yourself whatever resources you need to be able to bring your passion back. It’s a process that occurs again and again throughout your life if you do lead a life in which you’re speaking for others.”

Asked about specific reforms, Trainor said her foremost wish for the criminal justice system is not to require prison time for a whole range of low-level offenses. “We can do a much better job of discerning whether a particular individual might prosper under a different set of circumstances,” she said. She hopes to see more “people who are good security risks” be released from prison, and she’d like the felony murder law—a law allowing a first-degree murder charge for someone who aided a felony without intent to kill or directly cause harm—to be overturned.

As for mental health, she said, “we simply won’t move forward unless talking about mental health becomes a normative part of discourse.”

“I’ll be gone by the time those changes occur,” she added, “but they’re in the offing.”

Trainor said, “If you approach life as a vocation, you’re being called and drawn in some direction or another. It’s your responsibility to find out where your passion lies. That passion has a power in and of itself to draw you where you’re going.” 

Having followed her calling to orient herself toward service, she reflected on her life with satisfaction. In hindsight, she said, “I can look back and see all the pieces were there. I didn’t know it at the time, but I had enough courage, I guess, to wait for all those pieces to be put into place. I do see the perfection of a plan there, and it’s brought me a tremendous amount of peace in my older age—and joy.”

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Whether it’s a rollable kiosk that expands from a road case or a sturdy but lightweight bench that folds like origami, each type of pop-up Street Lab produces is custom-built, stylish, easily packable, modular for ease of repair, and durable. They all get used again and again. “Architects sometimes focus on making installations that are quite big but then get torn down or thrown away, and that breaks my heart,” Sam told the class. “We prefer designs that can be reused and improved over time. We’ve stuck with some designs for more than 10 years, and even as we keep changing them, nothing really gets thrown away—physically, or an idea.”

The neighbor-to-neighbor scale of their pop-ups means Street Lab can act quickly to try out new ideas. Leslie said, “We often put prototypes on the street right away, so people can help test it, and also benefit from it.” She gave an example of an obstacle course they designed with mesh barriers for kids to jump over. “The first day we brought it out, it was so beautiful and we thought we had designed it for wind, but it all blew over with the first gust.” The version now in use has wooden frames with circular cutouts.

As they shared with the class, they’re intentionally focused on intergenerational appeal. “Our play streets make space and seating for adults—seniors, in particular, who often are caregivers of the children,” Sam said. “As you get older, getting out of a chair is different, so we consider the heights, the backs, stuff like that.” Street Lab also offers a misting river to cool off in during the summer—an offering more accessible to a variety of ages, unlike the dog days tradition of opening fire hydrants for kids to beat the heat.

Leslie said that considering the needs of different stakeholders is fundamental to their approach: As they respond to community requests, they also try to align their programming with existing government priorities. “It opens the door to solving permitting issues, and you can get connected to different kinds of resources like shared trucking, for example,” she said. “Those kinds of relationships are crucial if you want to do something with public space.”

At the assembly, Fairfax introduced the Davols and spoke about the Joan Shaw Herman Award. “As a community that usually eschews prizes and honors in favor of celebrating individuality, creativity, and collaboration,” he said, the school’s annual tradition of honoring alums who inspire by example testifies to the “shared value of service to others that we as CA members uphold.”

Aurora Hao ’25, who served as a student rep on the Joan Shaw Herman Award selection committee, reflected on Joan Shaw Herman ’46, the award’s namesake. Herman contracted polio the summer after her graduation. Though she was confined to an iron lung, she worked devotedly to improve the lives of others with disabilities. “Joan Shaw Herman Award recipients embody the ���ϳԹ� ideals of empathy, integrity, and responsibility as they personally strive to build a more just and sustainable future for all,” Aurora said.

During their presentation, the Davols first delivered a well-honed pitch: a visually engaging tour of the kinds of neighborhood-building experiences Street Lab brings to life. They deploy 15 types of pop-ups that make a place for learning, play, and community, 500 times a year, citywide, 95% of them in low-income areas. They also work with more than 30 community groups every year to close streets temporarily to traffic and create space for people to gather in areas where public safety and a lack of open space have been long-standing challenges. To make this all possible, they design and fabricate pop-up infrastructure, and they send their designs to other cities around the world that want to copy their model.

The pop-ups and street programming are ephemeral by nature, lasting only an afternoon. But their impact lasts far longer. As Leslie said during the pitch, “One teen recently showed me a picture on his phone of himself from 10 years before, sitting and reading a book at one of our first pop-up reading rooms. This is pop-up that changes lives.”

The relationships Street Lab cultivates have also paved the way for more lasting changes in some neighborhoods. Occasionally, that’s a pedestrianized plaza, but more often it’s seeing partners empowered to continue Street Lab’s mission in their own ways. “We get community groups working side by side with city agencies, building trust, solving problems together,” Sam said. “I think this might be the most significant result of some of our work: showing a way that New Yorkers can work together alongside government to make the city better today.”

For the second part of the assembly, the Davols then shared their personal story. They structured it around four challenging moments when things didn’t turn out as they had expected. As Sam said, “Everyone I’ve ever met out there who’s trying to do something in the world, to make a difference, struggles, often deeply sometimes.”

First came 9/11. After graduating from CA, Leslie had studied art history, completed a master’s in American studies, and worked at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and other museums. Sam had studied social anthropology, earned a law degree, and was working as an attorney in the Legal Aid Society’s civil division. On the day of the terrorist attacks in 2001, they were raising a young daughter, and Leslie was pregnant with their son. They were apart at the time; later they safely reunited, but the events of that day shifted everything. “Our neighborhood, our city, and our lives had been changed,” Leslie said. “In a way, everything that Sam and I have done in cities and public space is an attempt to create what we wanted on September 12 and the days that followed.”

Leslie was working in a new role, helping to rebuild the World Trade Center site, when their daughter stopped speaking in school. To help her, they quit their jobs and moved to the Boston area to be near family. It was there, in Chinatown, where their apartment faced a littered empty lot, that they had the idea to host a Chinese language outdoor film festival. It was the first thing they’d ever produced together, and they were nervous, but the event was a success. Films at the Gate is now approaching its 20th anniversary.

Their neighborhood also didn’t have a library. The Davols wanted to see the values of learning and literacy reflected on the street, so they sourced donations of 5,000 books and transformed a vacant shop into a storefront library, which operated from 2009 through 2010. There they developed the sorts of programming that eventually became their pop-up approach. They even experimented with a writer-in-residence: Jared Green ’88, P’22 ’28.

Ultimately, though, the storefront model didn’t prove viable. As they faced that reality, the Davols decided to create a portable version they could bring to the streets—and to launch it back in New York City, where it could scale and grow. As self-described “urbanists,” they saw New York’s potential for more efficient living with “smaller private spaces, more public spaces, fewer cars, more public transportation, more interdependence, and a shared belief in looking out for each other when the moment called for it.” 

Funding their project through Kickstarter, they partnered with architects to create a portable library, but the large design, though eye-catching, was cumbersome to transport. For nearly 40 years, Sam has toured as a cellist as a member of the band The Magnetic Fields (along with Claudia Gonson ’86), and among his touring road cases the Davols found the idea for their second approach. 

On the P.A.C. stage, Sam wheeled out a box that in a single movement unfolded into a mobile book display. “The lighter our footprint, the more impact we could have,” Leslie said. 

In less than two years, Street Lab tripled in size. Everything seemed to be going well until in 2020 they faced their third major hurdle: the COVID pandemic. Again, they found the setback opened up new opportunities. Suddenly in the time of social distancing, they were flooded with requests for outdoor pop-ups, and collaborated with architects on new pandemic-appropriate designs. On the same day public restrictions were lifted in New York City, Street Lab set out a no-touch obstacle course. The city began closing streets to cars to make space for public gatherings. As Sam said, the Davols saw a once-in-a-lifetime chance to “unseat the dominance of the car in city streets.”

With their varieties of pop-ups growing, the Davols secured a larger warehouse and hired an urban planner and a community organizer. Just when they had established a thriving, expanding ecosystem for their work, following the November 2024 elections, new funding cuts eliminated nearly half of their budget. 

“There’s an active dismantling of all kinds of service going on right now, as you know, not just Street Lab,” Leslie said. “This is the current chapter of our story. It’s not the last. We will survive this, and we’re figuring out new ways to move forward.” 

Amid a new intensive focus on fundraising, they’ve noticed more and more young people have been reaching out to work with them. “There’s an energy, determination, and urgency in their voices that reminds us of us, the reasons we embarked on this journey, and the core of what service means to us,” Leslie said. In turn, they’ve inspired her and Sam to start a youth program to bring New York public high school students into all aspects of Street Lab’s work. 

They had some advice for CA students: “If you’re unafraid to start small, caring for the places right around you, your neighborhood, your block, things have a way of unfolding and growing from there,” Sam said. “So if you want a career in service, maybe don’t wait—just start serving right where you are now.”

Before they departed, the couple reflected on their visit, and on CA’s school culture. Besides being the place he learned to write (“that is increasingly rare, unfortunately”), Sam said, “One of CA’s strengths is making a space where everyone feels like they’re connected.” He drew a connection to what Street Lab does today: creating spaces where people who may not know each other feel comfortable engaging together.

Empowering others is their priority. “If this is going to spread, it’s not just me and Leslie; it’s not just Street Lab, even,” Sam said. “It’s how we’re making it possible for other people to do this type of work.”

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“The fact that so many newspapers are going out of business is beyond alarming,” Read says. “It’s hard to watch, and it’s a threat to democracy.”

During Read’s 40-year newspaper career, he reported from all seven continents and more than 60 countries. He won two Pulitzer Prizes that speak to the impact a reporter can have: one for explaining Asia’s 1990s financial crisis by following a container of french fries from a Northwest farm to a Singapore McDonald’s, and the other for exposing abuses by U.S. immigration officials.

It was for his “dedication to responsible journalism and journalistic integrity” that Betsy Green ’91, chair of the selection committee, presented Read the award on May 10. 

Speaking to CA students in the Performing Arts Center, Read shared how he got his start as a reporter when he was their age. CA’s student newspaper, The Centipede, was founded in 1962. When Read arrived, it had no faculty advisor. He showed a photo of a 1970 edition that announced, “Trustees Vote to Admit Boys”; the article was squeezed without fanfare into the far-right corner of the front page. Read called it “the understatement of the century” and said he and a cartoonist friend, George Perkins ’75, P’13, vowed to “stir up The Centipede in our generation.”

They first took as their model the Old Mole, a radical underground newspaper published in Cambridge, Mass., where they both lived. What they created, The Old Rabbit, was hand-drawn and handwritten, mimeographed for distribution, often lampooning The Centipede. After critiquing the school newspaper from the outside, he says, they signed onto the Centipede staff, determined to make it “a little more edgy.” 

Read drew analogies between our current era and the late ’60s and early ’70s, a tumultuous time of war, protest, counterculture, and political upheaval. His generation’s heroes, he says, “spoke truth to power”: they included musicians Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and Pete Seeger, and journalists Anthony Lewis P’76, Seymour Hersh, Bob Woodward, and Carl Bernstein.

To give today’s students a sense of the appeal of investigative journalism during his student days, Read played a clip from All the President’s Men, a film that dramatized how Woodward and Bernstein broke the story of the Watergate scandal that ended Richard Nixon’s presidency. “These were the kind of journalists we were trying to model ourselves on,” Read said.

He recounted how his friend David Duffy ’75 “landed a major scoop” for The Centipede that detailed financial mismanagement attributed to a school trustee, and resulting faculty layoffs. Duffy’s story, and an outspoken editorial written by Read, caused controversy on campus. “The headmaster was furious,” he said, but “to the school’s credit”—and with a quiet nudge of the administration by Lewis, a New York Times columnist—“they let us keep going.” Read praised “the way Concord prides itself on freedom of discussion and agreement to disagree.” 

Read majored in English at Amherst College, and after graduating sent 100 letters to newspapers around the country; the effort earned him 40 rejections and three job offers. Portland, Ore., was the most attractive location, and working for The Oregonian became pivotal in his career.

He learned to “report fast and write faster” on an IBM Selectric typewriter, without the luxury of a delete button in the pre-computer age. In the heyday of regional newspapers, Read said, there were plenty of resources to send reporters on location in private jets. His first front-page story was about a massive explosion at a plywood mill. He also covered science and began doing investigative journalism, exposing a plea bargain that resulted in a minimal prison sentence for a man who fatally assaulted his girlfriend, a Black woman in a low-income neighborhood of Portland. 

But Read had always dreamed of being a foreign correspondent. 

He forged an unusual path to become one, securing a Henry Luce Foundation fellowship that sent 15 Americans abroad each year to work in their professions in Asia. In Bangkok, he wrote for The Nation, an English-language newspaper, took a crash course in Thai, and learned the basics of war reporting. Then he moved to Tokyo, where he freelanced until convincing The Oregonian to open a bureau. 

As a Tokyo-based foreign correspondent, Rich reported from North Korea, the strangest place he’d ever been—a “country as a cult,” he called it—where he witnessed eerily synchronized mass performances by school children in honor of then-President Kim Il Sung, the “Great Leader.” 

He also covered the war in Cambodia and chronicled the economic opening of Russia and Vietnam. His favorite interview was with the Dalai Lama at his home-in-exile in Dharmsala, India. His work with three other reporters investigating the U.S. immigration agency won The Oregonian the gold-medal Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, journalism’s highest honor.  

Read finished his career as The Los Angeles Times bureau chief in Seattle, covering protests and riots there and in Portland, and the rise of the Proud Boys and other far-right organizations. During the pandemic, he broke the story of a superspreader event among choral singers that helped convince U.S. health officials that COVID-19 is transmitted through the air. 

He retired in 2021 and continues as a freelance writer, also working on documentary films.

“I was really lucky,” he told CA students. “Somehow I discovered my passion early and stuck with it.” He advised aspiring journalists to stay out in the field and always have a half-dozen story ideas to develop. 

When asked about stories that had taken an emotional toll on him, he said that reporting on natural disasters, such as the tsunamis he covered in Japan and the Indian Ocean, were the most wrenching assignments. Rather than trying to convey the “mass scale of destruction,” he said, he would focus on an individual family, getting to know them as best he could and “telling their story up close” so that readers could feel the human impact. 

During his visit to CA, Read attended a senior chapel, an environmental science class, and a club meeting of The Centipede staff, with whom he reflected on the state of the media today. In their heyday, regional papers flourished, funded by advertising. When Craigslist came on the scene in the mid-90s, The Oregonian lost $6 million in annual classified-ad revenues. It was the beginning of the end. “We’re working in a business model that’s broken,” he told the student reporters.

But he cited reasons for hope at both ends of the spectrum—from global leader publications such as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, which have adapted most successfully to a digital format, and from hyper-local newspapers, where businesses still advertise alongside high school sports scores. He also pointed to promising new models in independent nonprofits such as ProPublica and The Marshall Project, which are funded primarily by foundations and private donors. 

Even with the increasing adoption of artificial intelligence, he said he finds reason for optimism. For example, he appreciates AI as a tool for compiling information in seconds, such as graphs that previously required a laborious collaborative process with the newsroom art department. 

Read doesn’t see journalists being replaced anytime soon: “We will always need a person on the ground out there, observing, interviewing, trying to get facts.”

Established in 1976 in honor of Joan Shaw Herman ’46, an artist and advocate for people with disabilities, the Joan Shaw Herman Award for Distinguished Service is the only prize ���ϳԹ� bestows. It’s given not to a student but to an alum, and not in recognition of personal achievement but for service to others. The variety of volunteer and professional work of Joan Shaw Herman Award recipients testifies to the global impact of CA’s mission.

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Kate Rea Schmitt ’62 is chair of the selection committee for the award and honored Rosenberg for his lifelong commitment to the transformative power of education. His career as a teacher and principal in under-resourced public schools exemplifies the power of education—and the ways in which social justice is fundamental in helping students thrive.

Rosenberg told the community about his work as a teacher and principal. “Our world [is challenging],” he said. “I want to build people up. I landed on education as a vehicle for change.”

Rosenberg talked about setting up one of the first family resource centers in his school community. He shared a recent thank-you note from a former student—now a teacher—who said that he inspired her life path: “Thank you for being one of the educational figures that stuck out, that found space to allow us as young students to grow, persevere, and find joy. Thank you for being exactly who you were. At the time, which is exactly what I needed to fall in love with school.”

Rosenberg, however, did not leave out the hardest aspects of working with young people in neighborhoods with gun violence: He spoke, he said, at the funeral of one of his former students. “I have spoken in front of a lot of crowds during my lifetime, but speaking at Derrick’s funeral shook me. … When you work in the service of others, you hope to contribute in some positive way to their lives, and it is gut-wrenching to speak at a young man’s funeral and know that you were unable to do anything to stop this terrible outcome.”

Following his graduation from CA, Rosenberg attended the University of Chicago, where he majored in history, with a focus on African American history. After college, he moved to New York City and taught history at JFK High School in the Bronx. He was also a teacher and recruiter for Teach for America before moving to California to teach grades 5 through 8 in Oakland and San Francisco. For more than 16 years, he served as the principal at several San Francisco public schools, focusing on supporting underserved students seeking pathways to academic success. Rosenberg recently returned to the Boston area to be closer to family.

Rosenberg was nominated for the award by his friend George “Jody” Cushing ’86, who said that Rosenberg thinks of education as a form of political activism.

“It is hard to know which path you should take through life,” Rosenberg said. “There are so many worthwhile pursuits and ways to contribute to the world which have merit and value. Spending your time serving others is challenging, tiring, and often frustrating. It is hard to measure your success, and oftentimes you have to admit you failed and the consequences of those failures are quite high. But the rewards are also tremendous [and] I also know that those people I have served have changed me and helped me become a better human being.”

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A CA student co-authored the first article in a peer-reviewed journal to examine state-level racial disparities in COVID-19 vaccination rates. In summer 2021,��Joanne Oh ’23��interned with Michael Siegel, a professor at the Tufts University School of Medicine. Their rigorous statistical research demonstrates that COVID vaccination disparities across the United States correlate with measures of structural racism. The paper, published in October 2021 in the��Journal of Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities, recommends interventions that go beyond targeting individual behavior.

“Until she did the research, people talked about this relationship, but no one ever looked at it—Joanne actually proved it,” Siegel told CA’s Medical Club last May on campus. “Her research shows that we are framing a structural problem as an individual-level problem, because most interventions have been aimed at eliminating ‘vaccine hesitancy.”

That phrase took hold during the pandemic, Siegel explained. But describing the problem in those terms shifts blame from systems that limit access to health care onto the individuals experiencing harm.

Both researcher and advocate, Siegel routinely shares his findings with legislators. “Only if you understand structural racism as a contributor can you pinpoint an effective approach to reducing racial disparities,” he said at CA. “Joanne’s research made a difference. It’s an amazing accomplishment.”

Joanne participated remotely in Siegel’s research, analyzing data collected state by state. The other team members were graduate students already trained in writing scientific papers. “It was a bit intimidating at first, especially on Zoom,” Joanne says, “but I was really glad I had that experience of breaking out of my shell, challenging myself, and asking questions—even the ones that felt obvious or dumb. It helped me grow.”

She enjoyed it so much that in June 2022, she collected additional data. Building on their previous research, Siegel’s team has now assembled a structural racism index—tracking incarceration, educational attainment, racial segregation, employment, and economic status—for every U.S. state, county, and city. Joanne was in charge of the incarceration index, and she has co-authored a new paper that will soon be published.

“It’s really important to have this data out there,” she says. “Now other teams can use it to research any other health disparities to more effectively promote health policies at all levels, especially locally—that’s where a lot of policies are made.”

Joanne says joining a research team was “eye-opening.” If she could give her earlier self advice, “it would be that I’ll learn, and next time, I’ll be a better researcher,” she says. “That mindset really helped me this year.”

This fall, the Medical Club, which Joanne co-heads, began supporting COVID vaccination drives in Metro Boston areas with low vaccination rates. They set up raffles to encourage people to get vaccinated.

Prior to her research experience, Joanne’s medical interests were clinical. Now she’s less certain about that path. “What I know for sure right now,” she says, “is that I’m really interested in public health.”

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On April 22, 2022—���ϳԹ�’s 100th birthday—the CA community bestowed on Dr. Adnan Zubcevic ’75 the Centennial Joan Shaw Herman Distinguished Service Award for his lifetime of advocacy for immigrants and refugees and care for their mental health.��This award was first given to Joan Shaw Herman ’46 herself, posthumously, in 1976, when the Alum Association established her as an inspiring figure for generations to come.

Herman, who was paralyzed after contracting polio the summer after her graduation from CA, continued to express herself artistically and worked to improve the lives of other individuals with physical disabilities. Her story speaks to the power that resilience, generosity, and an enduring desire to make life better for others can have, and why this award is so important at ���ϳԹ�. Each year this award is presented, the CA community holds up a new example of what it means to honor CA’s mission as we each cultivate empathy, integrity, and responsibility within ourselves to build a more just and sustainable future.

Joan Shaw Herman’s Story

Who was Joan Shaw Herman ’46? When this young woman graduated from ���ϳԹ�, her greatest talents were writing and painting, and she had a promising future. She had been accepted at Wellesley College and was looking forward to first spending the summer working at an American Friends Service Committee Camp. And she did that wholeheartedly, throwing herself into digging ditches and cutting down trees. Never wanting to waste a minute of living on sleep, Joan stayed up late each night, talking with her fellow workers, and, unfortunately, swimming in a contaminated river. Despite her youth and bountiful energy, she wasn’t immune to disease; by the end of the summer, polio had left Herman paralyzed from the neck down.��

Instead of matriculating at Wellesley, she entered the New Britain Memorial Hospital for the Chronically Ill in Connecticut. There she lived for most of her life thereafter, confined within an iron lung, a full-body-encasing tank respirator that was necessary to support her breathing. But Herman used her confinement for religious study. What she might have viewed as the end of her life prompted her to discover new adaptations as well as to turn her attention to improving the lives of others. As she said, she believed that “selfishness and self-indulgence are our only true limitations and prisons.”

After she was hospitalized, Herman began taking a correspondence course in journalism and creative writing. Using a stick held between her teeth, she learned to type her own essays, poetry, and letters to friends on an electric typewriter. She similarly resumed painting, holding the brush in her mouth.

Herman left a lasting influence through her work on behalf of others with disabilities. In 1995, she founded New Horizons, a fellowship of individuals with physical disabilities, who were nevertheless devoted to adventuresome living. She later became the vice president of its board and editor of its publications. Herman and her colleagues created a program to assist fellow individuals with disabilities in leading challenging, productive, and dynamic lives—a program that eventually grew into the residential community in Unionville, Conn., which continues to support the independence of its residents in self-directed, apartment-style living.

Herman kept in touch with ���ϳԹ� throughout her life and often invited CA students to visit Memorial Hospital. CA also published her poems in its bulletins and magazine on several occasions, and her essays “Quiet Places” and “We Must Look Around Us in Awareness” reflect her insight and equanimity.

“Christmastide” was painted by Joan Shaw Herman ’46 and copied from a color photo taken by Elizabeth Wheeler. It was painted with a brush held in her teeth and was begun March 1959 and finished October 1960.

The Establishment of the Award

After Herman passed away in 1975, the Executive Committee of the Alum Association found a way for Herman, and her inspiring example, to live on at CA. When they established the award the following year, they specified that it would not be given for service to ���ϳԹ�; all other criteria were left undefined. Thus, many have received the distinction for their professional work, others for volunteer service, in a variety of fields.

The Joan Shaw Herman Award testifies to a common value shared by the ���ϳԹ� community. The alum who have received the award since Herman herself did serve as inspirations for leading lives that benefit others.

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In Service of Sustainability

Since ���ϳԹ� first honored Herman with this award, 41 individuals have been given this distinction. Each have their own remarkable life stories—stories of service to others, and, in many cases, of service to our earth. Indeed, care for people, especially underprivileged populations, and the pursuit of environmental justice are often intertwined.��

As ���ϳԹ� celebrated its 100th birthday with a focus on service and sustainability, we also recognized several alums who have received the Joan Shaw Herman Award for their work to protect and sustain our natural environment. These individuals include:

In 2000, attorney Deborah Ham ’55 received the award posthumously for her efforts to save Pinto Creek in Arizona, joining with the Sierra Club, the Audubon Society, America Rivers, and a band of concerned citizens to preserve it from copper mining, up to the hour of her sudden death in 1998.

In 2006, Victoria Post Ranney ’56 was honored for developing a planned community, Prairie Crossing in Grayslake, Ill., that actively promotes the principles of environmental protection, energy conservation, and racial and economic diversity.��

In 2007, Katharine Muller Bullitt ’42 received the award for her lifelong dedication to social activism. In her work as a volunteer and a board member, she addressed a wide range of issues including civil rights, quality integrated education, women’s rights, peace and international understanding, and environmental protection of the Pacific Northwest.��

In 2014, the award was given to Robin Alden ’69 in recognition of a successful new model for managing near-shore fisheries, which aligned community organizing with the latest scientific research. She observed that fishing is the “perfect meeting of environment and economics: If it is done right, it can sustain communities forever.”

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To that end, the co-heads have focused on educating themselves about a variety of issues their members bring to meetings and have prioritized connecting with local organizations to confirm that what they are doing to help is beneficial. Among their many projects, CASA students have placed particular focus on addressing food insecurity. During the fall semester, building on the particular interest of a club member in this area, they made time for discussions about root causes with the hopes of acting rooted in awareness of their own privilege. Then they took action, working with organizations such as  and , with the latter on its “Pie in the Sky” annual Thanksgiving bake sale fundraiser.

“CASA is the place where we first felt inspired to get involved, and we stay active because there’s always something more we can be doing to help,” the co-heads say. “We also have such meaningful connections with the organizations we work with and have been able to see the impact of our work.”

“Since the beginning of the pandemic, volunteering locally in person has been challenging,” says science teacher Susan Flink P’13, who has long been the faculty advisor to CASA. But, she adds, CASA adapted. Last year, instead of making blankets for Brookview House, an organization serving women, children, and youth experiencing homelessness, they made blanket kits for families to assemble. This year, they happily resumed this annual project together in person in CA Labs.

This spring, CASA has played a major role in facilitating collaboration across the school to plan service activities for the campus celebration of CA Centennial Days of Service and Sustainability on April 22. “Together, we ensured that our day will be spent doing meaningful workshops that are impactful to the greater community and are truly making a positive difference, rather than partaking in performative activism,” the co-heads say. “We are so excited to celebrate CA’s birthday and hope the CA community finds the work on this day as meaningful as we do.”

The CASA co-heads encourage all students to share ideas for service with them. “CASA is such a big organization that we have the ability to take on multiple projects at once,” the co-heads say. “We love when people come to us with ideas, and we do our best to make them happen.” After April 22, CASA’s plans are to help relief efforts in Ukraine and collect art supplies to donate to Sri Lanka.

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