Apoorva Vallampati was First Runner-Up in last year’s Stop the Hate®: Youth Speak Out. The $15,000 scholarship winner recently shared her thoughts on the impact of the annual contest with the Maltz Museum Board of Trustees. Here’s a little of what she had to say.
It truly has been an honor to represent the Maltz Museum of Jewish Heritage as a recipient of the Stop the Hate® award.
Not many people know this, but my 2015 essay was not the first that I had entered in the Stop the Hate contest. It was my third. I wrote an essay as a 7th grader and didn’t win. I entered again as a 9th grader and got third place (not bad). Finally, as an 11th grader in high school [I won a scholarship]. Three rigorous and tiresome courses of brainstorming, writing, editing, analyzing and, in some cases, completely scrapping my essay—that’s how much Stop the Hate means to me.
There are multitudes of essay contests all across Northeast Ohio, some with impressive scholarships as wonderful incentive. Why did I choose try my luck at this particular contest, not one, not two, but THREE times? It wasn’t the Stop the Hate essay contest itself that drew me back year after year. Rather, it was the creativity and innovation that the essay prompt inspired. The ideas that I wrote about in my essay could not have, I assure you, formed so fully and given me the motivation that I needed to spark a flame in the world if I was not challenged to sit down, think and write. Unfortunately, those ideas, although full of energy and breakthrough, might have just settled into the back of my mind. I might not have even given them a second thought. The Stop the Hate essay contest proved to be my catalyst, provoking in me an understanding of the magnitude of change I could set into motion just by touching pen to paper.
It is simply awe-inspiring to me how many other young adults (and even some kids as young as 10 years old) tell me that when they heard my story of heartbreak and fear turn into a story of success that it roused them to not only stand up for those who were being marginalized before their eyes, but also write for the Stop the Hate contest, as a channel for sharing ideas, exciting others for the cause and delivering hope when life seems bleak.
As I stated in last year’s essay, “Action must continue.” This beacon of hope that the Maltz Museum has gifted to the community takes us, not as a nation, but as the human race, one step further to finally finding an eternity of peace, acceptance and love.
—Jeffery Allen, Director, Education & Public Programs
