We have been inspired to hear about your human rights work and your open heart from the devoted colleagues who have nominated you for this award,
It is crystal clear that you share with Sullivan Ballou a total commitment to a cause without any thought of personal reward or self-serving agenda.
Your accomplishments are truly remarkable for an undergraduate. You provided essential research support in the publication of the highly regarded Handbook of Ethnic Conflict: International Perspectives in 2011. You continued your interest in human rights research in the summer of 2011 as a research assistant at the South African Media and Gender Institute. While in Cape Town you facilitated empowerment workshops in women’s prisons. Your senior paper, “Public Opinion and the Impact of Transitional Justice: Lessons from Serbia”, was recently presented with great success at the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. Your interest and ability in human rights research led to a research conference you helped organize where undergraduates could share their work.
You have provided invaluable support for many human rights activities in your current role as an employee of the University of Minnesota Human Rights Program—helping students and connecting them with faculty, planning many events (often involving art), organizing presentations by knowledgeable human right activists or victims of human rights abuses, and operating the department’s communications center and creating its e-newsletter.
And all this has been done in a pure spirit of compassion and helpfulness. As one colleague has said of you, “ Whitney, despite her undeniable intellect and sincerely profound goodness, is incredibly humble—yet only another sign of her purely wonderful heart.” This is exactly the spirit the Sullivan Ballou awards are intended to recognize and affirm, and we are honored to be able to acknowledge you in this small way. Thank you for what you are doing and for who you are.Congratulations!
Elissa and Bruce Peterson, Founding Members