Emily Adelman '05
Our 2005 JFK Award Winner Works for Universal Literacy
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.
Update: August, 2009: "Alumna receives prestigious graduate scholarship".