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Emily
Adelman, 2005 winner of our John F. Kennedy Award, works
in Washington, D.C. for a not-for-profit organization that teaches local
Latino residents how start their own businesses. Emily has thus begun to
make her dream career of combining her interest in adult education and
literacy with a focus on inclusion and community development.
Emily’s outstanding
personal characteristics are her warmth and gentle enthusiasm. Her eyes
light up when she describes her chosen work, “the intersection of
community-based organizations, government, businesses, and families as
they work together to promote literacy.” Her great delight in and love of
helping people first manifested itself at Cornell, where she was
involved in numerous extracurricular activities.
A founding member of
Cornell’s Sustainable
Enterprise Association, which provides education,
resources, and practical opportunities to undergraduates interested in the
practice of sustainable enterprise, Emily created the organization’s
website and oversaw the development of its infrastructure, providing
contacts with Cornell Cooperative Extension of Tompkins County. She worked
with the Community Learning and Service Partnership (CLASP)
at Cornell, tutoring an adult service worker in GED test preparation, and
was a Translator Interpreter in the TIP program for community and
government agencies in Tompkins County. Emily was regularly called upon to
translate for the Red Cross of Tompkins County.
Emily’s interest in
literacy in Latin America led her to become an active member of
CUSLAR, the Committee
on U.S.-Latin American Relations, where she performed a variety of tasks:
editing the newsletter, publicizing events, arranging donations of food,
and coordinating relationships with other groups such as the donation of
shoes to villages in Ecuador through Cornell’s “Dump
and Run” program.
Another of Emily’s
projects was her work-study position at the
New York Campus Compact, as
the publications and communications associate, where she compiled and
designed the annual report. Through this organization Cornell and its peer
institutions have maintained statewide leadership in supporting and
increasing student involvement in academic and co-curricular based public
service and democratic participation.
A creative soul at
heart, Emily found time to be an active member of the Spanish Theatre
Workshop at Cornell. She served at different points in time as the
Teatrotaller
treasurer, publicist, set designer, and appeared as a character in the
troupe’s performances for students and the Ithaca community. She was also
part of the first board of the
CUTonight
Commission, which provided funding for late-night cultural and social
events for Cornell students on campus. She was then elected as the second
Chair of CUTonight, working closely with the Student Activities Office and
a wide range of student organizations.
Her studies did not
suffer from her strong involvement in extracurricular activities:
during her four years at Cornell, Emily maintained a 4.06 cumulative grade
point average.
However, the most deeply
life-changing moments of her four years at Cornell occurred off campus.
Emily describes her months in Spain and Argentina as
the most influential experiences of her college career. Sponsored
by a grant from the Dean’s Scholars’ Program to study adult literacy,
Emily traveled to Buenos Aires to research and write her honors thesis
about a piquetero social movement,
Barrios de Pie, in Argentina. Observing the unemployed
worker movement in South America taught Emily the “power of the media, the
importance of leadership, and how “subtle, socialized fear of poor
neighborhoods and outspoken political organizations can be dispelled by
talking to people individually.” She arrived in Spain for her semester
abroad a few weeks before the “11-M” bombings in Madrid. Both Spain and
Argentina were sites of political unrest during her visits there. The
experiences she had in Salamanca and Buenos Aires, which she describes as
involving “great emotional risks,” helped Emily develop what she calls her
“unruly sense of idealism.” During this time she realized that “if
one simply takes the step to make that phone call or to write that email,
one can start a process of change” organizing a “point of
convergence of a thousand good wills, visions for the future, and hands
working together.” Emily left Cornell curious and returned to college “a
politically-engaged citizen with a public consciousness”.
Emily Adelman is truly
an extraordinary young woman, who, as her faculty adviser observes, “is
without a doubt the most intelligent, articulate, sensitive, and
compassionate individual I have met in any position […] at Cornell.” She
has already “represented Cornell with both honor and dignity” and no doubt
will continue to do so on into the future as she realizes her career goals
and great potential.
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Several '64 alumni
gathered on campus on May 25, 2005 to present the 2005 JFK Award to Emily
Adelman '05.
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From left: Carolyn Chauncey Neuman (Cornell Trustee), Joan Melville (VP,
JFK Award), Emily Adelman '05 and Mike Newman (former VP, JFK Award).
