July 05, 2006     

Wagner Grad Receives Peace Corps' 2006 Franklin H. Williams Award
Nicole Hewitt

Eleven returned Peace Corps volunteers, including Nicole Hewitt, a recent graduate of Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, were awarded the Franklin H. Williams Award at a ceremony in Washington on June 22.

Nicole Hewitt served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Bolivia from 2000 to 2002. Hewitt's assignment was to serve as a natural resources management extensionist. She facilitated natural resources management projects and coordinated workshops for rural women on topics such as nutrition, gender equity, civic participation, self-esteem and identity, and leadership. She trained local women in non-formal education techniques so that they could continue these workshops after she left the community. Hewitt also launched a successful community- based adult literacy center for 40 students. To address the problem of domestic violence, she mobilized her community to create a committee to protect the residents from domestic violence.

In 2001, Hewitt was elected by her fellow Peace Corps volunteers to serve as the gender and development representative. In this position, she organized a 4-day national gender and development conference for rural high school students and adult community representatives. She was selected by staff to use participatory modules to train volunteers in a gender mainstream project, and designed and implemented self- esteem and identity workshops for teen mothers at a homeless shelter.

Hewitt's award recognizes how she also continues to live the principles of the Peace Corps in her professional experience. As an instructional mediator at New York University, she works one-on-one or in small groups with students at Bedford Stuyvesant Preparatory High School in biology and chemistry to prepare them for the Regents exams. In her classes, she uses stories from her Peace Corps service to provide real-world examples of the concepts that she teaches in the classroom. This gives her the opportunity to emphasize the importance of volunteerism. In this underserved community in Brooklyn, she believes that having a teacher that is a returned volunteer demonstrates to them that there are interesting career options that are also available to them.

In January, 2006, Hewitt volunteered for the grassroots organization the Common Ground Collective in New Orleans, La. She has gutted houses in the lower ninth ward, distributed food donations, and performed community outreach for returning residents to communities that were destroyed by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

Established in 1999, the Franklin H. Williams Award honors returned Peace Corps volunteers of color who continue the Peace Corps mission through their commitment to community service and who support the agency's third goal of promoting a better understanding of other peoples on the part of Americans. The award assumes the name of former Peace Corps regional director for Africa and U.S. ambassador to Ghana, Franklin H. Williams. Ambassador Williams was instrumental in assisting the first Peace Corps director, Sargent Shriver, in advancing the agency's mission across the globe. Finalists for the Franklin H. Williams Award were selected by the 11 Peace Corps regional recruiting offices across the U.S.