Student From Wendell Phillips Academy Receives Youth Change Maker Award

Michelle Morales, CEO of Mikva Challenge IL (left) and Trevon Walker (right) with his 2019 Youth Change Maker Award. Photo Credit: Mikva Challenge
Michelle Morales, CEO of Mikva Challenge IL (left) and Trevon Walker (right) with his 2019 Youth Change Maker Award. Photo Credit: Mikva Challenge

Student From Wendell Phillips Academy Receives Youth Change Maker Award

BY KATHERINE NEWMAN

Mikva Challenge, a nonprofit youth development organization, recently hosted their 20 Year Anniversary Fundraiser where three young people were honored with a 2019 Youth Change Maker Award for their work and leadership in health, justice and equity, and peace and public safety initiatives.

Trevon Walker, a senior at Wendell Phillips Academy in Bronzeville, was one of those winners and was recognized for co-founding Teens and Cops Together in Chicago Successfully (TACTICS) which works to build positive relationships between police officers and young people in Bronzeville.

Mikva Challenge was founded in 1998 and is a non-partisan, nonprofit organization guided by the notion that the best way to learn democracy is to do democracy. The mission of Mikva Challenge is to develop youth to be empowered, informed, and active citizens who will promote fairness and equity in their communities, according to information provided by Mikva Challenge.

“Mikva Challenge was founded 20 years ago by Judge Abner Mikva and his wife. It was a way for them to bring voices to the table that were not usually invited and this meant high school aged young people. It started as an elections program and eventually grew into what we are today,” said Karla Castilla, program director of the Democracy in Action program for Mikva Challenge.

While participating in a Mikva Challenge program at his school, Walker and his classmates identified that there was a problem with the relationship between young people and the police in their community. Together, the class had been working on finding ways to improve the relationships between cops and students not just in their school but in their community as well.

“Trevon’s class was participating in the Issues to Actions Program which is where young people get to select an issue in their community and then go through a process of figuring out how they could fix that problem or create change within that problem,” said Castilla. They focused on creating a curriculum to help police know how to interact better with young people because they saw that as an issue.”

During the in-class activities, Walker showed great leadership in coming up with solutions to the problem they had identified as a class. He then went on to continue the work himself outside of school and that is what led him to be named a 2019 Youth Change Maker.

“Trevon went on his own and kept working on this issue which is why he was awarded the Youth Change Maker Award because he took it upon himself to continue the work that he started in the classroom,” said Castilla.

In addition to giving three Youth Change Maker Awards, Jack Marco received a Legacy Award for being at the forefront of founding Mikva Challenge. Berto Aguayo, a Back of the Yards native and former gang member, received an alumnus award for his work as a community organizer and civic engagement strategist.

For more information visit www.mikvachallenge.org.

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