Princeton University

May 9, 2012

The Class of 1995 Summer Service Fund is pleased to announce six 2012 grant recipients:  Courtney Balgobin ’15, Jeremy Blair ’13, Leora Friedman ’14, Thomas Ledford ’13, Emmiliese von Clemm ’14, and Caresse Yan ’15.  Four of the students will receive $1,000 from the ’95 Summer Service Fund to support their summer community involvement work.  One student will receive $3,600 and another will receive $500.

Courtney Balgobin ’15, a freshman who intends to major in Molecular Biology, will travel to Tegucigalpa, Honduras to work at Unite for Sight.  Unite for Sight brings eye care to the poor in developing nations.  While in Honduras, Courtney will assist doctors with patient care and will also research global health issues.  Courtney is a board member of the South Asian Students Association and, prior to attending Princeton, was a member of the Nassau County, New York, Youth Board.

Jeremy Blair ’13, an Engineering major, will return to Ashaiman, Ghana to assess the structural integrity of a community library he and other members of Princeton’s chapter of Engineers Without Borders constructed last summer.  Jeremy will also optimize a set of over four dozen laptop computers that Engineers Without Borders donated to the community library for educational use.  Jeremy has dedicated a significant amount of his extracurricular time at Princeton to Engineers Without Borders.  He is also an Outdoor Action Leader.

Leora Friedman ’14, a sophomore from Maryland, will spend the summer volunteering for Ashoka, a nonprofit organization that works to train people to apply entrepreneurial skills to solve social problems, in Washington, DC.  Leora founded Music is Medicine, a nonprofit organization that integrates music into the treatment of pediatric patients.  Leora will assist Ashoka in developing its fellowship program and will also help produce youth events in New York City.  At the same time, Ashoka staff will help Leora further develop Music is Medicine.  Leora is a member of Koleinu, an a cappella group at Princeton, and was the Tzedek (Charity) Co-Chair at Princeton’s Center for Jewish Life.

Thomas Ledford ’13, a Near Eastern Studies major from Chicago, Illinois, will spend the summer in Baku, Azerbaijan.  In Baku, Thomas will volunteer for Ümid, a social development organization, through which he will teach English to youth displaced by conflict in Nagorno-Karabagh.  Thomas is the Editor-in-Chief of the Nassau Weekly and teaches English to Latin American immigrants in Trenton. 

Emmiliese von Clemm ’14, an intended Ecology and Evolutionary Biology major from Palo Alto, California, will travel to Mexico City to work for SalaUno, an organization that seeks to reduce blindness in Mexico by making high-quality cataract surgery available to those in need.  Emmiliese will help SalaUno evaluate its work, and will also launch an outreach project to determine how SalaUno can reach more patients.  Emmiliese is the Director of Skills Workshops and Keynote Speakers for the Princeton Social Entrepreneurship Initiative. 

Caresse Yan ’15, who hails from New Jersey, will spend the summer in Moshi, Tanzania.  In Tanzania, Caresse will teach English and other skills at an orphanage.  Caresse will also assist the orphanage in administrative and fundraising work, along with day-to-day management of the orphanage.  At Princeton, Caresse is the Associate Director of On-Campus Events for the Global China Connection.  She also tutors math to inmates through the Trenton Rescue Mission.

The 1995 Summer Service Fund is sponsored by the Class of ’95, a 501(c)(3) organization.  The Fund provides financial support to Princeton undergraduates pursuing public or community service endeavors, in the United States or abroad.  Hundreds of members of the Class of 1995 have contributed to the Fund since its inception in 1995, when the Class became the youngest ever to create such a fund.  The Class of 1969 has provided guidance and financial support to the Fund.  As of 2012, 49 undergrads have received awards since the Fund began supporting students in the summer of 2000.