2013-2014: Andrew Jhu, Junior

Peace is a highly personal and emotional issue for Andrew Jhu. He is a spokesperson for a Fairfax-based organization, Voices of Divided Korean Families, and a co-author of the book, Echoes of Rupture; Six Decades of Separation. This is a compilation of first-hand stories about the ongoing pain endured by 23 Korean-American families who were split apart by the partition of Korea in 1953 following years of bitter war.

Andrew’s grandfather escaped from Hungnam to Pusan in 1951, leaving behind his mother, father, and all of his siblings. By documenting the human toll of family separation, Andrew seeks to personalize the cost of war by humanizing its victims. He hopes that by exposing the emotional pain experienced on both sides of the Demilitarized Zone, he can influence leaders to seek a diplomatic solution to Korean unification.

Andrew points out that many people, Koreans and Americans, view North Korea with suspicion. This suspicion is caused by a variety of factors including a mistrust of Communism, a low regard for the economic potential of unification, and the ongoing legacy of a distant war. Andrew hopes to overcome these old feelings by sharing family stories and memories of being together.

Andrew’s work has taken him all over the United States to conduct dozens of in-person interviews with immigrants and war veterans. He also travels regularly to South Korea and has interviewed people there.

Andrew summarizes his beliefs by saying, “Koreans should be as one nation because we are called ‘Koreans’, and there is so much loss, so many families divided, so much tension. With all the military bases, there is always an imminent threat of war. This causes great stress for Korea and for the world.”

2017-2018: Stran Kurdi, Senior

Stran Kurdi worked with her parents as they mobilized family and friends to found Kurdish AID (KAID), a registered 501(c)(3) Non-Governmental Organization devoted to supporting Iraqi Kurds displaced by war.  KAID has now raised approximately $10,000 for Kurdish refugees through several fundraising campaigns.  Stran formed a KAID club at Fairfax HS to help motivate people to volunteer and to share insights about Kurdistan, refugees, and other pressing international affairs. She also leads Fairfax High School’s Model United Nations and is the president of her school’s Book Club.

2018-2019: Lara Demir, Senior

After experiencing the loss of friends to suicide and seeing the suffering endured by immigrants in this country and around the world, Lara Demir decided to use her interest in psychology and her Turkish roots to make a difference.

Lara helped found a local chapter of Fairfax Minds Matter, a mental health organization that seeks to reduce the stigma around mental illness, increase help-seeking and coping skills, and promote positivity and social connectedness for teenagers.

Last summer, Lara travelled to Turkey where she volunteered more than 30 hours each week with a non-governmental organization called Small Projects Istanbul (SPI). SPI operates a community center serving more than 200 displaced Syrian families trying to rebuild their lives in Turkey. While immigrant parents took classes to learn new skills, Lara (who is bilingual in English and Turkish) played with their children and participated in a Conversation Exchange program to help the children communicate in Turkish and transition into Turkish culture.

Applying her language fluency outside the Center, Lara also went from business to business in local Istanbul neighborhoods to collect donations for school supplies. Lara plans to continue to help local communities while she pursues her interest in psychology as a college freshman next year.

2019-2020: Renee Ritchey, Senior

Renee Ritchey has been actively engaged in diverse peace-building activities since the age of 10. Encouraged by her family and her congregation, and supported by the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism (RAC) in Washington, DC, Renee has taken it upon herself to become educated about climate change, immigration, and gun violence.

The Parkland High School shooting spurred Renee to focus her most intense efforts on gun violence prevention. Soon after the shooting, she joined RAC to lobby several members of Congress to convince Tim Kaine to co-sponsor Senate Bill 2095, the Assault Weapons Ban of 2017.

The following year, Renee was selected as one of seven high school delegates to the four-day, 1,200-person RAC Consultation on Conscience convention dedicated to social action. As part of the conference delegation, Renee went to Capitol Hill to lobby for renewal of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program and for gun violence prevention.

In the summer of her junior year, Renee was selected to take part in Social Action Leaders Training in Washington, DC, a week-long conference organized by RAC and devoted to brainstorming and planning social action activities. In the fall, Renee participated in another RAC program, the Gun Violence Prevention Fellowship. This group meets twice a month on a video call to discuss action and to learn about community organization skills. As a group, they participated in a day of justice and wrote articles on the topic of gun violence which were published across the country.

One of Renee’s fundamental motivations in working for peace is an abiding commitment to perform acts of ‘tzedakah’, the Hebrew word for ‘charity’. Her dream is that all students in America can go to school without fear of being killed by semi-automatic weapons, that people can walk down the street at night safe from attack, and that the number of gun-assisted suicides will be greatly reduced.